White-Collar or Street Offenders, Who Do We Punish More and Why

• In Event: Public Perceptions of Criminal Justice Policy and Practice

Abstract

The study of public attitudes towards crime and punishment has a long-standing empirical tradition, however most studies examining factors that influence punitive preferences have done so while examining street crime, leaving white-collar crime relatively unexamined. Moreover, there seems to be a social bias in favor of white-collar offenders where their crime although viewed as reprehensible and worthy of punishment is seen as an exception, uncommon among respectable higher-class individuals. Using the person-centered approach which posits that evaluations of an individual’s moral character impacts evaluations of the individual’s actions, this study will examine how manipulations of moral character and social status impacts sentencing preferences for street and white-collar offenders. In addition to social status and moral character, race plays an important role in punitive attitudes. Although white-collar offenders predominately tend to be white and such is the automatic racial association of a white-collar offender, Black Americans do make up a substantial portion of low-level white-collar offenders. With this objective, this study examines the influence of offender characteristics such as moral character, race, and social status on punitive preferences for traditional street crime and white-collar crime using a sample (n= 397) recruited from CloudConnect research, an online panel that collects data for academic purposes.

Author

• Merin Sanil, Rutgers University - Newark