WHITE COLLAR CRIME

White Collar Crime

White Collar Crime

The term white-collar crime only dates back to 1939. Professor Edwin Hardin Sutherland was the first to coin the term, and hypothesize white-collar criminals attributed different characteristics and motives than typical street criminals. Mr. Sutherland originally presented his theory in an address to the American Sociological Society in attempt to study two fields, crime and high society, which had no previous empirical correlation. He defined his idea as "crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation" (Sutherland, 1949). Many denote the invention of Sutherland's idiom to the explosion of U.S business in the years following the Great Depression. Sutherland noted that in his time, "less than two percent of the persons committed to prisons in a year belong to the upper-class." His goal was to prove a relation between money, social status, and likelihood of going to jail for a white-collar crime, compared to more visible, typical crimes. Although the percentage is a bit higher today, numbers still show a large majority of those in jail are poor, "blue-collar" criminals, despite efforts to crack down on corporate crime.

The white-collar crime includes corruption, financial frauds, and government crimes where the nature, breadth, as well as the difficulty of white-collar crime is as varied as impacting the government, individual citizens, business and industry (Coleman, 2002). However, unchecked, white-collar crime can have a more damaging effect on the Nation's public welfare as well as economic well-being. The following are the main white-collar crime problems as identified by the FBI, the national response towards their eradication on priority basis. (Geis, 1994)

Antitrust Violations

The antitrust violations include conspiracies among competitors that fix prices, rig bids, or assign markets or customers and affect most industries including transportation, manufacturing, distribution, service and marketing.

Computer Crime

The advancement in the field of computer technologies along with the maturation of the Internet as a virtual community has given criminals and rivals with new opportunities (Coleman, 2002). These crimes include computer hacking and theft of technology to online child pornography, online investment fraud schemes and Internet gambling due to which the role of FBI in investigating computer-related crimes in all crime program areas has been increased dramatically. (Coleman, 2002)

Environmental Crimes

The crimes regarding environment threaten the public health and natural resources of U.S. However, the environmental laws are now becoming more restrictive and authorized disposal sites are closing, and there are now more costs of legitimate disposal (Androphy, 2001). As result, the financial incentive to illegally dispose of dangerous waste continues to grow. In response, however, the FBI contributes in many environmental task forces throughout the country along with numerous federal and state regulatory agencies addressing this crime problem. (Coleman, 2002)

Bankruptcy Fraud

The filings for bankruptcy have rose to a high record of approximately 1.4 million filings in the year 1997 (Reiman, 1998). However, according to some sources estimation, almost ten percent of bankruptcy filings contain fraud. These includes schemes for instance the attorney fraud, concealment ...