Skip to main content

White-collar Crime

 The term "white-collar crime" refers to financially motivated, nonviolent or non directly violent crime committed by individuals, businesses and government professionals. It was first defined by the sociologist Edwin Sutherland in 1939 as "a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of their occupation." Typical white-collar crime includes wage theft, fraud, bribery, Ponzi scheme, inside trading, labor racketeering, embezzlement, cybercrime, copyright infringement, money laundering, identity theft, and forgery. White-collar crime overlaps with corporate crime.


Modern criminology prefers to classify the type of crime and the topic:
  • By the type of offense, e.g., property crime, economic crime, and other corporate crimes like environmental and health, and safety law violations. Some crime is only possible because of the identity of the offender, e.g., transnational money laundering requires the participation of senior officers employed in banks. But the FBI has adapted a narrow approach, defining white-collar crime as "those illegal acts which are characterized by deceit, concealment, or violation of trust and which are not dependent upon the application or threat of physicial force or violence" (1989, 3). While the true extent and cost of white-collar crime are unknown, the FBI and the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners estimate the annual cost to the United States to fall between $300 to $660 billion.
  • By the type of offender, e.g., by social class or high socioeconomic status, the occupation of positions of trust or profession, or academic qualification, researching the motivations for criminal behavior, e.g., greed or fear of loss of face if economic difficulties become obvious. Shover and Wright point to the essential neutrality of a crime as enacted in a statute. It almost inevitably describes conduct in the abstract, not by reference to the character of the persons performing it. Thus, the only way that one crime differs from another is in the backgrounds and characteristics of its perpetrators.
  • By organizational culture rather than the offender or offense which overlaps with corporate crime. Appelbaum and Chambliss offer a two fold definition: (a) Occupational crime which occurs when crimes are committed to promote personal interests, say, by altering records and overcharging, or by the cheating of clients by professionals; (b) Organizational or corporate crime which occurs when corporate executives commit criminal acts to benefit their company by overcharging, or price fixing, false advertising, etc. 
In the United States, sentences for white-collar crimes may include a combination of imprisonment, fines, restitution, community service, disgorgement, probation, or other alternative punishment. These punishments grew harsher after the Jeffrey Skilling and Enron scandal, when the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was passed by the US Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush, defining new crimes and increasing the penalties for crimes such as mail and wire fraud. Sometimes, punishment for these crimes could be hard to determine due to the fact that convincing the courts that what the offender has done is challenging within itself. In other countries, such as China, white-collar criminals can be given the death penalty under aggravating circumstances, yet some countries have a maximum of 10 to 25 years of imprisonment. Certain countries like Canada consider the relationship between the parties to be a significant feature on sentence when there is breach of trust component involved. Questions about sentencing disparity in white-collar crime continue to be debated. The FBI, concerned with identifying the type of offense, collects annual statistical information on only three categories: fraud, counterfeiting/forgery,  and embezzlement. All other types of white-collar crimes are listed in a "miscellaneous" category.

x---------x

This Chapter is sponsored by Cartier Men's Watch.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Upclose and Personal: Satan

Satan, also known as the Devil, is an entity in the Abrahamic religions that seduces humans into sin or falsehood. In Christianity and Islam, he is usually seen as either a fallen angel or a genie, who used to possess great piety and beauty, but rebelled against God, who nevertheless allows him temporary power over the fallen world and a host of demons. In Judaism, Satan is typically regarded as a metaphor for the yetzer hara or "evil inclination", or as an agent subservient to God. A figure known as "the satan" first appears in the Tanakh as a heavenly prosecutor, a member of the sons of God subordinate to Yahweh, who prosecutes the nation of Judah in the heavenly court and tests the loyalty of Yahweh's followers by forcing them to suffer. During the intertestamental period, possibly due to influence from the Zoroastrian figure of Angra Mainyu, the satan developed into a malevolent entity with abhorrent qualities in dualistic opposition to God. In the apocrypha...
Post a Comment
Read more

Crusades

 The Crusades were a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and sometimes directed by the Christian Latin Church in the medieval period. The best known of these military expeditions are those to the Holy Land in the period between 1095 and 1291 that were intended to conquer Jerusalem and its surrounding areas from Muslim rule. Beginning with the First Crusade, which resulted in the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, dozens of military campaigns were organized, providing a focal point of European history for centuries. Crusading declined rapidly after the 15th century. In 1095, Pope Urban II proclaimed the first expedition at the Council of Clermont. He encouraged military support for Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos and called for an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Across all social strata in western Europe there was an enthusiastic response. Participants came from all over Europe and had a variety of motivations, including religious salvation, satisfying feudal obligations,...
Post a Comment
Read more

Abnormal Psychology

Abnormal psychology is the branch of psychology that studies unusual patterns of behavior, emotion, and thought, which may or may not be understood as precipitating a mental disorder. Although many behaviors could be considered as abnormal, this branch of psychology typically deals with behavior in a clinical context. There is a long history of attempts to understand and control behavior deemed to be aberrant or deviant (statistically, functionally, morally or in some other sense), and there is often cultural variation in the approach taken. The field of abnormal psychology identifies multiple causes for different conditions, employing diverse theories from the general field of psychology and elsewhere, and much still hinges on what exactly is meant by "abnormal." There has traditionally been a divide between psychological and biological explanations, reflecting philosophical dualism in regard to the mind-body problem. There have also been different approaches in trying to ...
Post a Comment
Read more