White Collar CrimePolitical Crime

The Other White Meat

Defining White Collar Crime

• Sutherland (coined the term)– Respectable/High Social Status– In the course of occupation

• Later– Occupational Crime– Organizational/Corporate Crime

Occupational Crime

• Employee Theft– Pilferage and Embezzling– “Collective Embezzlement”

• Fraud in the Professions– Medical Industry

• Financial Fraud– Insider trading

Organizational/Corporate Crime

• Financial Crimes– Fraud, cheating, corruption…– Price fixing, price gouging, trade restraint – False Advertising

• Bait and Switch

• Violent Crimes– Unsafe work conditions– Unsafe products– Environmental Pollution

Comparing the Harm

• Property loss– “Street Crimes” (FBI data) = 15 billion– W.C.C. (from several sources) = 400 billion

• Death– Street crimes = 17,000 homicides – W.C.C.

• 30,000 deaths from unsafe products• 20,000 deaths from environmental pollution• 12,000 deaths from unneeded surgery

Explaining White Collar Crime

• Some mainstream theories don’t work– Merton’s “modes of adaptation”– Poverty, inequality, etc. – Low Self-Control ??

• Some can still work– Sutherland (corporate culture, neutralizations)– Merton/Messner&Rosenfeld/Durkheim

• “Industrial Prosperity”

W.C.C. and Deterrence Theory

• Swift, Certain, Severe punishment will reduce crime– Must assume “rational calculator”– More applicable for street or w.c.c.? – The Irony

• Some call for “self-regulation”

Political Crime

• Barkan, “...any illegal or socially injurious act aimed at preserving or changing the existing political and social order”’

• Crimes of the Government

• Crimes against the Government

Crimes by the Government

• Genocide

• Torture/Assassination

• Surveillance/Infiltration

• Legal Repression

• Illegal Experiments

• State-Corporate Crime

• Political Corruption

Crimes Against the Government

• Mass Political Violence– Rebellion– Riots– Terrorism– Assassinations

• Civil Disobedience

• Espionage/Treason

Explaining Political Crime

• Political Crime as heterogeneous

• Much P.C. revolves around Power– Totalitarian vs. Democratic governments