Reimagining Sutherland 80 years after white‐collar crime*

Abstract

Eighty years ago, Edwin H. Sutherland conceptualized and defined white‐collar crime. In this article, I engage retrospectively with Sutherland's ideas and work to emphasize important aspects that continue to guide research today; to note where he was prescient as well as shortsighted. I center this discussion around “corporate crime” or crimes by business. Four main themes are discussed: 1) law and official responses to corporate offending—the data problem, 2) corporate crime and the life cycle of organizations, 3) psychological and trait‐based explanations, and 4) consequences of definitional ambiguity.

Stealing Like Artists: Using Court Records to Conduct Quantitative Research on Corporate Environmental Crimes

“…Nevertheless, unlike street crimes the criminal sanction plays a small role in the overall sanctioning of white-collar crimes (M. J. Lynch et al, 2016;Simpson, 2019). Rather than responding with calls for more criminal indictments, fines and prison terms for corporate executives, some legal scholars have argued that the street crimes should be handled more like white-collar crimes, with a variety of deterrence options (Schell-Busey et al, 2016), and that smart policing shown to be effective with street crime could be scaled to address corporate crimes (Brown, 2001;Laufer, 2017).…”

“…Second, because the dataset is based on criminal complaints, there is no information on firms sanctioned by the EPA under administrative and civil statutes. As others have noted, criminal referrals by the EPA to the DOJ are relatively infrequent and appear to be on the decline over the last few years (Kates, 2014; Simpson, 2019). On the other hand, what the EFD and similar datasets constructed from archival documents allow is the employment of mixed methods.…”

“…We suggest that recent developments in the availability of data and methodological techniques provide the potential for criminologists to reinvigorate such research efforts. In her recent address to the American Society of Criminology, (ASC) president Sally Simpson (2019) assessed where criminology stands with regard to white-collar crime studies 80 years after Sutherland’s presidential address. Among other issues, she notes that[b]ecause systematic counts and measures of business crimes still do not exist, the process of creating an offending database is, even now, labor intensive.…”

“…Researchers must scour criminal, civil, and regulatory documents to match firms with reports of wrongdoing across a variety of different offense types. (Simpson, 2019, p. 193)…”

The Inaugural Issue of the Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime

“…Simpson (2019), Alvesalo-Kuusi and Whyte (2018), Geis (2015), Teachout (2014), and Yeager (2009) have delivered recent state-of-the-art reflections and assessments. These same criminologists have also provided historical frameworks for the developing areas of white collar and corporate crime inquiry.…”