White-Collar Crime,Legal Sanctions,and Social Control

Abstract

Recent literature on the control of white-collar crime has often glossed over the sociolegal effect of the attitudes held by persons charged with the responsibility of determining criminal guilt. In many cases, the factually guilty white-collar offender is not regarded by trial jurors as an offender. Contemporary legal sanctions are utilized only in those cases in which the public senses a real threat to its collective security. The crime problem is seen essentially as consisting of violent interpersonal offenses; the criminal law, predictably, has reacted to this form of deviance with its commonplace sanctions. On the other hand, crimes subsumed under the white-collar heading are often only lightly sanctioned even when brought to the attention of prosecuting authorities. The reason for this state of affairs is largely a unidimensional theory of crime causation- that crime qua crime is a problem peculiar to the lower socio-economic strata of society. White-collar offenders, coming as they generally do from the more affluent sector, are not perceived as "criminals" in the classic sense by the triers of fact. The "received opinion" of most lay jurors militates against their using criminal sanctions for the white-collar offender. They perceive crime as directly associated with a societal stratum that does not include those individuals who commit the majority of white-collar offenses. Hence juries are reluctant to convict white-collar criminals even when the law has been clearly violated.