The term “white-collar crime” has come to mean many things since Edwin Sutherland coined it more than fifty years ago. Many scholars, including Sutherland himself, referred to embezzlement as a white-collar crime. Upon close examination, however, this theft-after-trust offense is probably not a white-collar one in the original sense of the term. This article addresses the problems of data interpretation and behavioral explanation in the study of trust violation, especially in light of scholars' focus on it as a white-collar offense.
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References
1.
1. Jerome Hall, Theft, Law, and Society (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952), p. 36.
2.
2. Ibid., pp. 1-40.
3.
idem , White Collar Crime: The Uncut Version (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 9, 153, 154, 237-238.
4.
idem , “Criminological Research and the Definition of Crimes,”American Journal of Sociology, 56:546-551 (May 1951).
5.
5. Sutherland, White Collar Crime, p. 9.
6.
idem , “Crime and Business.”
7.
7. Cressey, Other People's Money, p. 184, n. 9.
8.
8. Dorothy Zeitz, Women Who Embezzle or Defraud (New York: Praeger, 1981).
9.
James W. Coleman , The Criminal Elite (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), p. 5; Albert Biderman and Albert Reiss, Jr., Data Sources on White-Collar Law-Breaking (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1980), p. xxviii. The Biderman and Reiss monograph is the truest to Sutherland's original focus.
10.
Stanton Wheeler , David Weisburd, and Nancy Bode, “Sentencing the White-Collar Offender: Rhetoric and Reality,”American Sociological Review, vol. 47 (Oct. 1982). It should be noted that Wheeler et al. purposely used a definition of white-collar crime that did not contain social prestige in order to use prestige to explain sanctioning.
11.
Using the same data set as Daly, Weisburd et al. could classify only 47—23.4 percent—of the 201 embezzlers as white-collar criminals using Sutherland's two criteria of social respectability and occupational role. See David Weisburdet al., Crimes of the Middle Classes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 178.
12.
12. Sutherland, White Collar Crime, chap. 13.
13.
13. Ibid., p. 220.
14.
14. Ibid.
15.
15. Ibid., p. 221.
16.
16. Ibid., p. 219.
17.
17. Daly, “Gender and Varieties of White-Collar Crime,” p. 783.
18.
18. Hall, Theft, Law, and Society, pp. 14-33.
19.
19. Sutherland, White Collar Crime, p. 231.
20.
20. See, for example, U.S., Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1990). In the UCR, conversion offenses and embezzlement offenses share the same uniform offense code range, 2701-99.
21.
These writers have similarly been faulted for using UCR data on fraud and forgery arrestees as measures of white-collar criminals because those categories also contain mundane offenses, such as writing bad checks and credit card fraud. See Darrell Steffensmeier, “On the Causes of `White-Collar' Crime,”Criminology, 27:345-358 (May 1989).
22.
22. Thorsten Sellin, “The Significance of Records of Crime,”Law Quarterly Review, 67:490 (1951).
23.
23. An exception is national bank embezzlement arrestees, who probably do reflect national bank embezzlers. Although they are not routinely included in the UCR, regular required audits will expose them, and, furthermore, it is a crime not to report them to the authorities—nonreporting is considered abetting the offense.
24.
In today's world, one would hope that these authors would be aware that these are sexist comments; in truth, of course, it is not the women who are responsible for the embezzlement but the men who chase them. Regarding the term “embezzlement,” Bloch and Geis trace it to the French bezzle, which means “drink to excess, gluttonage, revel, waste in riot and plunder.” Ibid.
25.
25. John Laub, “Interview with Donald Cressey,” in Criminology in the Making, ed. John Laub (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983), p. 139.
26.
see also idem, “Criminal Violation of Financial Trust.”
27.
27. Karl Schuessler, “Review [of Other People's Money],”American Journal of Sociology, 49:604 (May 1954).
28.
28. Cressey, Other People's Money, p. 156.
29.
Benson , “Denying the Guilty Mind,” p. 595.
30.
30. Zeitz, Women Who Embezzle or Defraud, chap. 6.
31.
31. Daly, “Gender and Varieties of White-Collar Crime,” p. 785.
32.
32. Laub, “Interview with Donald Cressey,” p. 138.
33.
33. Benson, “Denying the Guilty Mind,” p. 595.
34.
34. Zeitz, Women Who Embezzle or Defraud, chap. 6.
35.
See Carl B. Klockars, The Professional Fence (New York: Free Press, 1974), pp. 151-161.
36.
36. See Edwin H. Sutherland and Donald R. Cressey, Principles of Criminology, 9th ed. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1974), chap. 4, or any other edition of this textbook.
37.
37. Donald R. Cressey, “Foreword,” in Sutherland, White Collar Crime, p. xii.
38.
idem , White Collar Crime, chap. 14.
39.
39. Cressey, Other People's Money, pp. 147-151.
40.
40. Zeitz, Women Who Embezzle or Defraud, pp. 71-72.
41.
41. Gottfredson and Hirschi, General Theory of Crime, chap. 5.
42.
Hirschi and Gottfredson, “Causes of White-Collar Crime.”
43.
43. See Steffensmeier, “On the Causes of `White-Collar' Crime.” Steffensmeier's major criticism is that, contrary to the arguments by Hirschi and Gottfredson, the distribution of embezzlers according to race, gender, and age does not parallel those distributions for other crimes. For a rejoinder, see Travis Hirschi and Michael Gottfredson, “The Significance of White-Collar Crime for a General Theory of Crime,”Criminology, 27:359-371 (May 1989).
44.
44. Gottfredson and Hirschi, General Theory of Crime, p. 40.
45.
45. Gary S. Green, “An Analysis of Embezzlers' Arrest Records” (Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, San Francisco, Nov. 1991).
46.
46. For a more detailed discussion of the benefits of treating occupations as simply opportunities for crime, see Gary S. Green, Occupational Crime (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1990), chap. 1.
