Tricks of the Trade: How to Think about Your Research While You're Doing It by Becker Howard S

Author:Becker, Howard S. [Becker, Howard S.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2011-07-11T18:42:35.077000+00:00

Crime

The same reasoning applies to the well-known phenomenon of white-collar crime. Why did Edwin Sutherland find it necessary to devote his presidential address to the American Sociological Association (1940) to the subject of white-collar crime? Because he wanted to accuse his colleagues of a conceptual error that had a similar basis in inadequate sampling based on conventional, socially approved prejudice. Criminological journals and books, at the time Sutherland delivered his blast, were filled with theories about crime and research on crime. What was crime, this thing all the theories and research were about? Activity that violated the criminal law. That seemed fair enough. The mountains of research that had been done showed that crime was highly correlated with poverty, with broken homes, and all the other conventional indices of what was then called “social pathology.” Sutherland asked a simple question: how can that be true when there are crimes being committed by very well-to-do people who do not exhibit the conventional signs of social pathology, and by the largest and most respected corporations in the country, which similarly did not come from broken homes?

The answer to that was simple enough. No one, no conventional criminologists certainly, thought the crimes well-to-do people and corporations committed were, in some fundamental way, “really crimes.” Besides, the culprits involved were seldom convicted of criminal violations, because these cases were often settled as civil suits. If there were no criminal convictions, how could there be any criminals? The government was typically more interested in getting the bad guys to stop their mail frauds and security swindles and forcing them to pay off those who had been cheated than in sending anyone to jail. But that was not a natural consequence of the nature of the crimes, which couldjust as well have been prosecuted under criminal statutes, and occasionally were. It resulted from judgments made by prosecutors, who exercised the discretion the law gave them as to whether to pursue criminal or civil remedies.

Prosecutors had other reasons for not pushing for criminal convictions. As Katz's later (1979) research showed, white-collar crime and crimes of the more conventional kind differ in another important way. In ordinary crime, there's no question that a crime has been committed. Someone has been robbed or assaulted. The question is: who did it? In white-collar crimes, on the other hand, there's no question about who did it. The big grocery chain did label meat that weighed 14 ounces as weighing one pound. The question is not who did it but rather is it a crime or not? Such a thing, after all, might have happened because a scale was faulty and the company didn't know about it, or because a crooked butcher was skimming some of the profit for himself, or for any of a number of reasons that would show that the company lacked criminal intent. So, for both sets of reasons, white-collar criminals are convicted of crimes far less often than common criminals.

Sutherland's impeccable reasoning was that if you decided

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