White Collar Crime Flashcards
Who defined white collar crime?
Sutherland
Who does Sutherland says commits white collar crime?
‘Crime committed by a person of high social status in the course of their occupation’
Who challenged white collar crime and what do they say?
Croall says not all activity is criminal
What two types can white collar crime be broken into?
Occupational and corporate crime
What is occupational crime?
Crime committed by employees in the course of their jobs
What is corporate crime?
Crime carried out by business often motivated by the desire to increase profits
What is the third type of crime that is sometimes considered?
State crime (e.g., war or genocide)
How could white collar crime being under-represented in statistics be explained?
It is very difficult to investigate as people in powerful positions are able to use their financial and political power to escape arrest and conviction
Box (Marxist view)
Says that the way society defines crime is focusing on working class, so what we see as ‘theft’ would be more likely to involve a shoplifter rather than a company or bank charging high prices
White collar crime does more harm to society, but is ignored
Tombs (Marxist view)
Analysed deaths at work and found that the scale of unlawful workplace deaths outweighed the number of recorded homicides, showing many people died in the workplace, but this seems to be ignored
Goldstraw-White
Found that those who were convicted of white-collar crimes often do not see themselves as criminals
By doing semi-structured interviews, she found that many did not accept what they were doing as wrong, justifying what they had done
They said they did not ‘hurt’ anyone, meaning they should not be labelled a criminal
Friedrichs
Believes risk plays a large part in white-collar crime
This activity involves a gamble, which could be part of the appeal
He also states that big businesses make their decisions for cost-benefit
For example, they may take the risk to cut corners on health and safety as they want to make additional profits elsewhere
How can white collar crime be criticised?
Marxists can be accused of over emphasising the importance of white-collar crime, rather than accepting the fact that most criminals are working class
Personality based approaches
Psychologists argue that certain personality types can be linked to success in business, but they may also be linked to criminality
For example, successful people are likely to be ambitious, but also possibly dishonest and prepared to tread on others to reach the top
Differential association (Sutherland)
Sutherland’s theory of differential association relates to how frequently someone is exposed to deviant behaviour, which can affect an individual to follow a deviant path
Criminal practices may become the cultural norm amongst people in some businesses, so the white-collar criminal might not actually see themselves as deviant at all, but see the behaviour as appropriate in the particular workplace culture
