To determine whether different conceptions (Populist, Patrician) and operationalizations of “white-collar crime” produce different substantive conclusions, using the applied case of sentencing in federal criminal court.
Method:
Federal Justice Statistics Program data are used to identify white-collar and comparable crimes referred for prosecution in 2009 to 2011 that were also sentenced through 2013. Five different operational strategies are used to identify “white-collar crime” and are employed in separate hurdle regressions jointly capturing incarceration and sentence length. Differences in model coefficients and case composition are discussed across definitions.
Results:
There are differences in the relationship between “white-collar crime” and incarceration both between and within Populist and Patrician conceptions. These differences are most pronounced at the in/out decision but are also present for sentence length.
Conclusions:
Contradictory findings from past research are largely able to be replicated within a single sample simply by changing the conception and operationalization of white-collar crime used. This demonstrates that debating what is “truly” white-collar crime is not just an exercise in semantics—it is a conceptual and methodological choice that can have dramatic consequences on what (we think) we know about the treatment of white-collar crime in the criminal justice system.
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