I. Introduction
There is a common belief within our society that white-collar criminals commit crimes and never suffer consequences for their actions. The public’s understanding of white-collar crime can often be attributed to the media’s portrayal of white-collar crimes. A basic definition of white-collar crime is “nonviolent crime committed by individuals or corporations to obtain personal or professional advantages.” White-collar crime is a part of the property crime category and it is in the subcategory of fraudulent crimes. Crimes that fall under white-collar crime include embezzlement, fraud, bribery, and insider trading. The federal government tends to prosecute most white-collar cases, therefore they can shed light on the true
Is the public’s perception correct? It turns out that common people are concerned about the wrong aspect of the justice system with regards to white-collar crime. White-collar crime is prosecuted about the same way that all other fraudulent crimes are; however, the majority of modern sentences for white-collar crime are extremely lenient.
II. Background
The prosecution and sentencing of white-collar crime has been drastically affected by the creation of and changes to the sentencing guidelines. In the 1970’s Yale performed a survey in order to determine how judges felt about white-collar crime. The study found that “Most judges share[d] a widespread belief that the suffering experienced by the white-collar person as a result of apprehension, public indictment and conviction, and the collateral disabilities incident to conviction—loss of job, professional licenses, and status in the community—completely satisfies the need to punish the individual.” This feeling among judges seems to have resulted in more lenient sentences for white-collar criminals. Legislators believed that judicial discretion in sentencing
These cases stated that judges’ obligation to sentence according to the guidelines violated the sixth amendment. The sixth amendment guarantees the right to speedy and public trial by jury, jurisdiction, right to a defense attorney, right to know the accusations against you and the right to face your accuser. In the first case, the United States v. Booker, Booker claimed that his sentence was unconstitutional, because the guidelines required the judge to sentence "based on additional facts that the sentencing judge found by a preponderance of the evidence," rather than the facts considered by the jury. In the district court, Freddie Booker was found guilty of possession of with intent to distribute more than 50 grams of “crack.” He was caught with 92.5 grams of crack cocaine in his possession. At sentencing, the district court judge sentenced Booker to 30 years in prison. He appealed the sentence and the court of appeals for the seventh circuit held that the sentence violated the sixth amendment, because the guidelines required the judge to “impose a sentence not solely based on facts reflected in the jury verdict or admitted by the defendant." In the next appeal, the Supreme Court concurred, stating “The court applied the Blakely v. Washington case they had ruled on a year prior and ‘concluded that Booker 's sentence violated the Sixth Amendment’ the Supreme Court vacated the judgment of the District Court, and
The news article that I decided to do my assignment on is about a bank manager, Debra Anne Chapin, that embezzled 2 million dollars from a bank. The news article’s title is, “Former manager jailed for cheating bank out of $2M; Woman used cash to pay bills, gamble and feed her cocaine habit.” The crime took place in Calgary between June 1, 2006 and June, 30 2008. This embezzlement is a classic case of white collar crime and demonstrates numerous criminological theories.
Schanzenbach, Max; Yaeger, Michael L., (2006). Prison time, fines, and federal white-collar criminals: The anatomy of a racial disparity. Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, 96(2), p757-793. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
Richman, D. (2013). Federal White Collar Sentencing in the United States: A Work In Progress.
White collar crime is a term created by Edwin Sutherland in 1939 that refers to crimes committed by people of higher social status, companies, and the government according to the book “White-Collar Crime in a Nutshell” by Ellen Podgor and Jerold Israel. White collar crimes are usually non-violent crimes committed in order to have a financial-gain (Podgor and Israel 3). A very well known white collar crime that has even been taught in many history classes is the Watergate scandal. This is a white collar crime that was committed by government authorities. Watergate was a crime that shocked the nation.
White-collar crime is the financially motivated illegal acts that are committed by the middle and upper class through their legitimate business or government activities. This form of crime was first coined by Edwin Sutherland in 1939 as “a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation.” (Linden, 2016). Crime has often been associated with the lower class due to economic reasons. However, Sutherland stressed that the Criminal Justice System needed to acknowledge illegal business activity as crime due to the repercussions they caused and the damage they can cause to society (Linden, 2016). Crime was prevalently thought to only be
The installment of new security could even be a problem, for people who operate these new security systems could also be a potential thief. There is an approach among many enterprises that it is simpler to easily excuse the employee who committed the offense, instead of dealing with the law and the officers; and follow through with the money and time by prosecuting in order to seek restitution. Sometimes the firm does not to acquire the negative publicity that has to do with the internal offense, especially when their reputation is predominant to their company model. White-collar crime is often categorized as a crime without a victim, damaging only large, objective corporations. Recent news broadcasts portray nothing could be farther from the absolute truth.
white-collar crime” (Shapiro, S. P.). It is no surprise to anyone that positions of trust regularly decentralize to corporations, occupations, and “white-collar” individuals. Nevertheless, the concept of “white-collar crime” involves a false relationship between role-specific norms and the characteristics of those who typically occupy these roles. Most of the time, it is the offender that is looked at more than the crime itself and assumptions about the individuals automatically come into play. It has be to acknowledged that “ class or organizational position are consequential and play a more complex role in creating opportunities for wrongdoing and in shaping and frustrating the social control process than traditional stereotypes have allowed” (Shapiro, S. P.). The opportunities to partake in white-collar crime and violate the trust in which ones position carries are more dependent upon the individuals place in society, not just the work place. The ways in which white-collar criminals establish and exploit trust are an important factor in truly exploring and defining the concept of white-collar crime.
Today, worldwide, there are several thousands of crimes being committed. Some don’t necessarily require a lethal weapon but are associated with various types of sophisticated fraud, this also known as a white-collar crime. These crimes involve a few different methods that take place within a business setting. While ethical business practices add money to the bottom line, unethical practices are ultimately leading to business failure and impacting the U.S. financially.
White collar and corporate crimes are crimes that many people do not associate with criminal activity. Yet the cost to the country due to corporate and white collar crime far exceeds that of “street” crime and benefit fraud. White collar and corporate crimes refer to crimes that take place within a business or institution and include everything from Tax fraud to health and safety breaches.
For instance, any financial crime can leave individuals without shelter, money, or any reasonable quality of life due to the white collar offense. Therefore, white collar crime may not involve force, they still may affect people physically. As a matter of fact, white collar crime may result in a greater impact than street crimes. Nevertheless, we continue to operate on a dichotomy of beliefs regarding violent and non-violent crimes. In this paper, we will explore white collar crime as a non-violent crime. Those crimes under discussion are blackmail, bribery, embezzlement, and forgery. In addition, we will discuss violent crimes such as first degree, second degree, and manslaughter (Verstein,
White collar crime can be a very complicated topic because of how fairly new it is. Edwin H. Sutherland helped coin the term white collar crime in December 1939, during his presidential address “The White Collar Criminal” (Friedrichs, 2010). Although white collar crimes had been happening throughout most of history, they didn’t get as much attention until more recently. Since white collar crime is still so new, all definitions have been under a lot of scrutiny. The definition that is currently most acknowledged comes from a group of criminologists that got together in a group, to come up with a definition for white collar crime and that would be accepted by the majority. This group defines white collar crimes as:
Shover, N, & Hochstetler, A. (2006). Choosing white-collar crime. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
This case illustrated that there were real consequences to white collar crime. In addition to paying the fifty million dollar fine, he relinquished another fifty million dollars of his illegal trading profits. (He still had millions remaining, however, from his illegal gains.) His actual prison sentence was three years, yet he served only twenty-two months in the federal prison at Lompoc, California, which was known to have a “country-club” atmosphere.
White-collar crimes and organizational structure are related because white collar-crimes thrive in organizations that have weak structures. According to Price and Norris (2009), the elites who commit white collar-crimes usually exploit weaknesses in organizational structure and formulate rules and regulations that favor their crimes. Makansi (2010) examines case studies to prove that white-collar crime is dependent on organizational structure. For example, the financial crisis that Merchant Energy Business faced in 2001-2002 occurred due to the liberal Financial Accounting Board, which failed to provide a standard model of valuing natural gas and fuel. Moreover, a financial crisis that rocked the securitization market in 2008 was due to fraudulence in the pricing of securitization products. These examples ...
This statement is a myth. White collar crimes not only affect the corporation or organization that is a victim of the crime, but often times these crimes are committed by the organizations cause financial instability or concerns for the citizens it provides services to. When the reach of financial instability impacts the lives of the citizens, the unstable income can cause more crime of many different types to be committed out of necessity. When an individual has a family to support, and the white-collar crime took away their means of support, the individual will do anything to ensure their families survival. The myth that white-collar crimes do not harm an individual is so hard to abandon because of the definition of white-collar crime itself. White-collar crimes focus on the “key institutions in which those crimes take place and normally who benefits from the crime” (TV, 2010). The idea that no one is hurt from white-collar crime is also not widely advertised, it is not a popular crime to report. These crimes are something from the “movies” that seem to be nearly impossible to accomplish, and therefore are not likely to be thought about as often as street