Trivializing White-Collar Crime: Theoretical, Empirical, and Policy Implications of Alternative Definitions

• In Event: White-Collar Crime at 75: Elite Offenders, Fraud Victims, and Alternative Definitions

Abstract

Building upon a theme introduced by the Harvard sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan that U.S. society has come to tolerate extreme amounts of common crime, thus "trivializing" serious law breaking, it has three main thrusts. First, it extends Moynihan’s observation by focusing on white-collar and corporate crime. Second, it considers criminological definitions and theorizing that trivializes the term white-collar crime itself. Third, it provides a case study of how definitional trivialization affected policy and enforcement practices in the 2008 financial meltdown. It concludes that: efforts by some in the scholarly community to revise Sutherland’s original definition of white-collar crime have had the unintended effect of creating a downward view of the phenomenon; definitional trivialization occurs because elite white-collar crimes are more hidden, are rarely criminally adjudicated, and information about them is more difficult to obtain; the claim that the status of the offender needs to be separated from the act in order to avoid biased social analysis allows the most consequential forms of white-collar and corporate law breaking to fly well below the political, academic, and policy radar screens; and that the use of significant status, power and privilege need to be centrally considered.

Author

• Henry N. Pontell, University of California, Irvine