Exploring Beyond Traditional Crime for a More Comprehensive Criminology - Essay Sample

Introduction

According to Edwin Sutherland, studying crime and justice is quite incomplete due to the narrow focus that is given to traditional crime (Sutherland, 2017, p. 3). He claims that it is inadequate to base criminology on conclusions such as the making of the law, reasons for breaking it, how it was broken and who broke it. His reasoning was mostly founded on the fact that such deductions did not often fit the concept of criminology consistently. He claimed that the sample acts of crime that all other theories of criminology are based on are biased, bringing in the concept of white-collar crime (Shapiro, 2015, p. 11). Traditional concepts of crime have mostly been focused on common offenders-mostly convicting poor people while leaving out the rich. Sutherland argued that analysis and reviews of crime minus the categorization of white-collar crime would lead to serious mistakes in describing crime itself in general, how its causes were understood, and its evaluation by criminal justice systems.

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The term white-collar crime has been taken to mean various aspects of criminology in varying disciplines (Simpson and Weisburd, 2009, p. 4). Although Edwin Sutherland never gave a distinct outline of white-collar crime, his definition was that it stood for crimes executed by reputable people in high social status within their course of occupation. This description has since been well-suited to sociologists as a means of labelling and talking about offenses done by prosperous and wealthy people in society (Simpson and Weisburd, 2009, p. 4). The definition incorporates the often silent aspect of these individuals having unlimited access to resources due to their respect within the community. From his point of view, therefore, Sutherland's definition completely rejected the concept that white-collar criminals needed to have been convicted before to qualify as criminals.

Scope of White-Collar Crime

White collar crime is considerably different from common crime in terms of legal and sociological definition, making the controversy over its criminology appropriateness easily identifiable. The controversy itself is centered on three major elements: whether the violation of laws in question qualify it to be a crime; whether the alleged offender's behavior equates to the conceptual meaning of criminal behavior and what is up for grabs apart from the confusion and imprecision through reformulating crime (Cliff and Desilets, 2014, p. 28). In most cases, as earlier mentioned, white-collar criminals will mostly be respected people in the community and will seldom think of themselves as criminals. Most sociological writers often give the opinion that white-collar crime is a legitimate area of research in criminology even though it is customarily set aside as a special behavior system in criminology (Cliff and Desilets, 2014, p. 29).

The scope of white-collar crime has recently been seen to result from the convergence of numerous cultural elements. Contemporary society has been seen to create legislation to specifically control economic and political activities that might relate to this type of crime. From wider respect, the created legislation is particularly directed at the more influential social classes (Gottschalk, 2016). With the rapid industrialization, growth of corporations and the expansion of cooperatives and labor unions, the definition of the scope of white-collar crime has been made quite vivid. As a result, society has come to terms with the fact that conventional laws concerning theft and further socially immoral conduct cannot be applied directly to white-collar criminals and give effective feedback due to certain important relationships.

Courts' View on White and Blue-Collar Crime

Blue-Collar Crime

Although there is no definite description of blue-collar crime as per any State or federal statute, the term has been repeatedly used as a shorthand to refer to a crime that results in theft, physical injury and damage of property. The term was coined as a response to white-collar crime that was contemplated to be widely free of violence (O'Hear, 2013, p. 427). Therefore, the perception of blue-collar crime as an offense executed by blue-collar workers has been misleading since people from all walks of life usually commit such crime regardless of social status.

From previous research studies, the perception of criminal justice has mainly been attributed to concerns regarding the cause of criminal behavior so much such that external situations have been found to affect the leniency of judging blue-collar criminals (Pontell, 2016, p. 39). For instance, the perception of a blue-collar criminal's social status can lead to a different perception of their crime by jurors. Certain studies have shown the existence of an inverse association between a person's social status and the tendency of the courts to view the stimulus as an offense for a particular crime (Pontell, 2016, p. 39). For the justice system, even though blue-collar criminals have often been met with harsh sentences, the social classes have been perceived as influential regarding the severity of the sentences. People in elite social classes have often been perceived to get a compromised sentence while their counterparts in non-elite social class get harsher sentences (Pontell, 2016, p. 40).

White-Collar Crime

Unlike blue-collar crime, the reaction to white-collar crime by courts in the US was quite vague until the enactment of the sentencing guidelines for organizations in 1991. Before the guidelines, handling white-collar crime was massively a gray area, with minimal direction on how to perceive an action as a crime given the subtlety it depicted in society (Newman, 2018, p. 735). After the enactment, however, conceptualizing the legal and political responses to white-collar crime have been through the scrutiny of two main actors: corporations and individuals. Today, the courts can find a corporation liable under that "respondeat superior" doctrine.

From Edwin Sutherland's view of white-collar crime, four main factors come to play before the court systems (Sutherland, 2017, p. 4). The first factor is that civil agencies will always manage corporate crime that might have, however, been considered as a scam in criminal justice system instead of civil courts. The second aspect is that senior citizens will always get more concerned about getting civil damages instead of seeing an imposition of criminal punishment (Gottschalk, 2017, 606). The third aspect is that white-collar offenders will always be unduly able to avoid trial due to status bias within the courts; white criminals have adequate ability to influence the administration and implementation of laws (Smith, 2017, p. 2). The fourth factor is that white-collar trials typically end with one guilty party while ignoring other associates within the crime syndicate.

While the courts often look for criminal actions to try and pass sentences, white-collar criminals often escape the clutches of justice as long as they do not engage in direct action toward blatant crime that involves injury or property damage (Benson, Van Slyke, and Cullen, 2016). A related concept is that white-collar crime, instead, consists of numerous stages of illegal omissions or commissions from an individual or an entire syndicate in a somehow legitimized formal organization (Sutherland, 2017, p. 4). The operations of such syndicates have often been by operative goals of the organization in which the leaders work.

White-Collar Crime Treatment by Courts

As mentioned, the actions against white-collar crime have been vague for a while before anyone could figure out the guidelines of conceptualizing the legality involved. However, even with such guidelines present, there is still a disparate conduct of white-collar offenders as compared to conventional criminals seen from the perspective of criminal justice systems. The pattern is mostly presumed to have been influenced by the model of social realities in the early 20th century (Nagel and Hagan, 2012, p. 1428). The judicial sentencing philosophy has occasionally been seen to act more leniently towards white-collar criminals as opposed to their blue-collar counterparts mainly because of their respectable status in society. The limits have mainly been attributed to the traditional justification that elite social groups ought to be treated differently, causing the disparate treatment in such cases (Ryder, 2016). However, research studies have shown that the justice system itself and the courts do not intentionally impose lighter sentences on individuals of high status in society. Such studies have instead realized that the sophisticated organization of most white-collar crime often present a puzzle that could prove to be time-consuming to unravel (Michel, Cochran, and Heide, 2016). As a result, most of the cases often fail to get desired ruling in court due to insufficient evidence.

Conclusion

In conclusion, according to Edwin Sutherland's investigations, basing all crime on the principles of common criminology has proven to provide a narrow scope of looking at crime as a whole. His reasoning determined that common crime theories do not consistently fit the ideology of criminology, especially white-collar crime. Its definition crime has since been pivotal in labelling and talking about offenses committed by successful and wealthy people in society. Its scope has recently been seen to result from the convergence of numerous cultural factors that have allowed the contemporary society to create legislation that can control economic and political activities that might relate to this type of crime. Unlike blue-collar crime, the reaction to white-collar crime by courts in the US was quite vague until the enactment of the sentencing guidelines for organizations. Even then, white-collar criminals have often escaped the clutches of justice as long as they do not engage in direct action toward violent crime. However, it is clear that the justice system itself and the courts do not intentionally impose lighter sentences on individuals of high status in society.

References

Benson, M. L., Van Slyke, S. R., & Cullen, F. T. (2016). Core themes in the study of white-collar crime. The Oxford Handbook of White-Collar Crime, 1-21. Retrieved from https://books.google.co.ke/books?hl=en&lr=&id=1llxCwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq

Cliff, G., & Desilets, C. (2014). White collar crime: what it is and where it's going. Notre Dame JL Ethics & Pub. Pol'y, 28, 481. Retrieved from https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/ndlep28&div=20&id=&page=&t=1558333924

Gottschalk, P. (2016). Understanding white-collar crime: A convenience perspective. CRC Press. Retrieved from https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781315367255

Gottschalk, P. (2017). Convenience in white-collar crime: Introducing a core concept. Deviant Behavior, 38(5), 605-619. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/01639625.2016.1197585Michel, C., Cochran, J. K., & Heide, K. M. (2016). Public knowledge about white-collar crime: an exploratory study. Crime, law and social change, 65(1-2), 67-91.

Nagel, I. H., & Hagan, J. L. (2012). The sentencing of white-collar criminals in federal courts: A socio-legal exploration of disparity. Michigan Law Review, 80(7), 1427-1465. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10611-015-9598-y

Newman, D. J. (2018). White-collar crime. Law & Contemp. Probs., 23, 735.

O'Hear, M. M. (2013). Blue-collar crimes/white-collar criminals: Sentencing elite athletes who commit violent crimes. Marq. Sports L. Rev., 12, 427. Retrieved from https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/mqslr12&div=19&id=&page=&t=1558334236

Pontell, H. N. (2016). Theoretical, Empirical, and...