White-collar Crime - Historical Background

Historical Background

The term white-collar crime was coined in 1939 by Edwin Sutherland, who defined it as a "crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation" in a speech entitled "The White Collar Criminal" delivered to the American Sociological Society. Sutherland hypothesized that white-collar criminals had different attributions and motives than typical street criminals.

His theory was the result of his attempt to study two fields, crime and high society, which had previously lacked empirical correlation. His goal was to demonstrate a correlation between money and social status and the likelihood of going to jail for a white-collar crime. Although the percentage has risen, numbers still show a large majority of those in jail are poor, blue-collar criminals.

Many attribute the social climate following the Great Depression as the factor that led to Sutherland's theory. He noted that in his time, "less than two percent of the persons committed to prisons in a year belong to the upper class". The United States passed antitrust laws in the 1920s and social welfare laws in the 1930s; after the Great Depression, people went to great lengths to rebuild their financial security, and it is theorized this led workers—who worked hard and long and felt underpaid—to take advantage of their positions.

Much of Sutherland's work was to separate and define the differences in blue-collar street crimes, such as arson, burglary, theft, assault, rape, and vandalism, which are often blamed on psychological, associational, and structural factors. Instead, white-collar criminals are opportunists, who learn to take advantage of their circumstances to accumulate financial gain. They are educated, intelligent, affluent, confident individuals whose jobs involve unmonitored access to large sums of money. Precisely because these criminals were held to such high esteem, Sutherland claimed that society turned a blind eye to the crimes they committed.