Unit 4: White Collar Crime
4.1 Definition and Concept of White Collar Crime
Sutherland’s definition (1939, refined 1949): “a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation.” The concept’s evolution: the occupational core (the professional’s abuse) → the corporate face (the business entity’s crime) → the governmental-and-institutional faces (the state’s own wrongs) → the modern umbrella (the economic crime with the trust’s abuse at the centre). The definitional debates: the offender’s status (can the lowly clerk commit WCC?) vs the modus (the deception through the occupational role — the modern preference); the civil-vs-criminal treatment (the regulatory sanctions’ adequacy debate).
4.2 Evolution of White Collar Crime
- The early faces — the fraud’s-and-embezzlement’s long history (the trusted clerk’s lore).
- The industrial-and-corporate era — the trusts-and-abuses (the monopolies’ wrongs); the railway-and-banking scandals of the 1800s.
- Sutherland’s intervention (1939) — the concept’s birth (the criminology’s challenge: the criminaloid — the respectable offender invisible to the criminal statistics-and-theory).
- The regulatory era — the securities-and-banking statutes (the US New Deal’s machinery — the SEC’s 1934 world); the consumer-and-environmental regimes.
- The globalised era’s scandals — the Savings-and-Loan, the Enron-and-WorldCom (the audit’s failure century), the 2008 financial crisis’ faces (the too-big-to-jail debates), the LIBOR-and-Volkswagen worlds, the modern corruption’s mega-cases (the Odebrecht’s breadth).
- The South Asian faces — the banking scams’ era (the loan frauds, the capital-market manipulations); the corporate governance’s reforms’ wake.
4.3 Nature and Characteristics of White Collar Crime
- The respectability-and-trust — the offender’s position as the crime’s instrument.
- The deception’s modus — the concealment (no gun — the ledger).
- The diffuse victim — the consumers, investors, treasury (the harm’s statistics).
- The magnitude — the scale’s enormity (the street crime’s dwarfing).
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