Criminal Classes: The lower classes;
in contradistinction to the middle
and upper classes in whose midst
embezzlement, commercial and political
bribery, fraud, force, misrepresentation,
manipulation of stocks, fee-splitting, and
price fixing are not considered offenses.

...from the Dictionary for the Disenchanted by Rosenberg.

INTRODUCTION In continuation of our explorations of white collar crime, we will examine the kinds of crime committed in some of the most highly valued, socially integrated, high status occupations in the United States. Again, use the data in these cases to test the goodness of fit of the theories of crime you learned in the first Lectures...and remember, good policy requires good theory.

We will begin with crime in sports and end with a survey of crime in academia.  First, let's try to understand what sports is all about in mass societies.

SOLIDARITY AND SPORTS All societies must solve the problems of solidarity if they are to survive. In those societies in which men compete with each other for scarce resources: land, water, cattle, jobs, sexual access or symbolic rewards, the problems of solidarity are great.

Team sports are used for solidarity purposes in many societies. The men who are in a conflict relationship in everyday life come together in close and intensive cooperation when playing against the teams of other villages and counties.

In America today, sports has grown to be a significant solidarity mechanism for schools, colleges, towns and work groups. Bowling teams, softball teams, volleyball and golf bring competitive, individualistic, and stressful males together in bonding situations.

The conflict inherent in the five great structures of domination is masked, to some extent, by the solidarity generated by the elegance of professional sports; by the victories of the home team; by the drama of the well played game. Football, baseball, basketball and hockey bring men together as spectators and fans from different social classes, ethnic groups, and occupational groups.

Sports spectacles create a thin and false solidarity.

Creative Crime   There are several kinds of crime which involve the athlete directly. First there is an assortment of crime committed against the athlete...then there are the crimes the athletes commit against each other in the desperate effort to win. Owners of professional teams commit a variety of crimes against the communities in which the teams are located.

Selected Cases The cases below give one a sense of the variety and costs of white collar crime in American sports.

*The University of Minnesota Athletic Department was purged in July, 1988 after 2 1/2 years of problems. Basketball stars were accused of rape; football players received illegal payments; minority athletes charged discrimination.

*The University of South Carolina administration had to fire the athletic Director and the team physician in February, 1988 for failing to oversee the drug testing program as required by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. All this after the death of one player from OD on crack and the arrest of another athlete for dealing in cocaine.

*British soccer fans fought with other fans in the 1985 games in Belgium. 39 people were killed and thousands injured.

*The Chicago Black Sox players took bribes to lose in the World Series. After the scandal was revealed; the team changed its name to the White Sox.

*Golf pros conspire to share in prize money at tournaments. They agree in advance who will get what share of the monies won by its members.

*Horse racing owners instruct jockeys to lose after betting on other, less favored horses.

*Beginning boxers in professional boxing are required to throw the match in order to get a contract with established contenders. Contenders don't want a loss to interfere with their shot at the title.

*Football players sell opposing teams the playbook and the game strategy...or take the book with them when they are sold to another team.

*NFL owners attempted to steal 19.3 million dollars from the pension fund of NFL players. A federal court ordered the owners to pay the money into the fund.

*Track stars regularly take illegal drugs in order to win. Coaches, doctors, and funding committees all conspire to help their teams evade detection.

*Olympic teams in basketball, soccer, volleyball and other sports are regularly paid handsome salaries by corporations and athletic clubs when they are supposed to be amateurs. Being paid to do nothing but compete in meets around the world, they are professionals.

*Congresspersons, state gambling commissioners, gambling inspectors and others take bribes from organized crime in Las Vegas and Atlantic City in a dozen disguised forms.

*Organized crime launders money from drugs, prostitution and protection through casinos they own.

*City officials take kick-backs on contracts they make to build facilities for professional sports teams.

*In 1989, seven Southwest Conference colleges in Texas were either on probation or under investigation for cheating on NCAA rules.

Among the favorite form of cheating is providing athletes with answers to examinations in all the courses...files are maintained; tutors provide the answers for a few dollars an hour wages.  Athletes who cannot read or write make passing grades.

*The University of Kansas basketball team was found guilty of bribing young men to play there. The team won the National championship in 1988. The university got prize money and lots of good publicity. The star player signed for $2 million a year; the coach was hired by a pro team; crime pays off for white collar cheats and thieves.

CRIMES AGAINST ATHLETES Some two million young men play football, basketball, softball, volleyball and compete in track meets each year. Their competition generates enthusiasm, loyalty, and commitment to the high school...some of which transfers to the academic setting for both athletes, student body and faculty alike.

Modern high schools are characterized by excitement and anticipation of athletic contesting between 'rival' high schools. Especially in the poor minority sections of the city, the joy and delight of sports redeems the bitter imperfections of education...for the moment of the game and its aftermath, at least.

The same is true for the American college to a lesser extent. With its regimented, overcrowded lower division classes the academic part of college life is often alienated drudgery. Students look forward to the interactively rich, emotionally rich, behaviorally rich challenge of intramural and intercollegiate sports.

Depersonalization. In intercollegiate sports, college athletes are fodder for the college coaches and administration which tries to enroll and to retain students in conditions of alienated education: mass, impersonal classes; large, routinized programs; depersonalized competition for grades; objective grading routines with binary choices with which to reflect the nuances of a subject matter; inadequate financing coupled with the demands of time and energy from outside jobs as well as the poor preparation given to some entering students by the high school experience.

As student athletes go into this situation, they are exploited by coaches and administrators who are eager to create the dramaturgical facsimile of greatness through intercollegiate athletics rather than through the interactionally rich, informationally rich, emotionally rich appeal of good teaching and good learning.

Harry Edwards, a Berkeley University sociologist specializing in the sociology of sports reports that fewer than 10 percent of college athletes graduate with their class. Especially, for Black athletes, the college experience is one of impersonal use and abuse by the coaching staff.

Athletes are brought into college life, segregated, managed as one would manage a herd of cattle, and discarded when they can no longer serve solidarity and dramaturgical needs of the university. Oklahoma, Nebraska, Notre Dame, University of California at Los Angeles have fine teams and poor educational processes for athletes.

In 1988, the NCAA commissioned a study which showed that if universities used the same admission rules for athletes as they did for other students, nearly 60% of those recruited to play football and basket ball would have been ineligible.

Now that the NCAA enforces academic standards, the portion of athletes who get better grades has improved. The percentage of athletes who graduate is improving as well. Athletes are trained at public expense, a few go into professional sports while most are discarded without the qualifications for a white collar job.

The percentage of pro athletes who failed to finish college is so high that their enrollment in something called a university is a fraud on the athlete. The odds against a high school player making a college team is 100 to 1. The odds against making the NBA is 10,000 to 1. Most of those who do become professional fail to earn a degree.

67%     80%          84%             92%

It is not athletic ability which is related to poor academics...athletes in nonrevenue sports get better grades than nonatheletes in college. Being gifted athletically does not mean being intellectually inferior. In fact, being a good football or baseball player requires considerable mental ability to read defenses and to make good judgments instantly.

The fact of the matter is that coaches, principles, school board members, and college administrations expect less academically and socially from athletes and get it. That is a structural crime.

Funding. Many of the best college football and basketball players are funded illegally. Some departments pay athletes for nonexistent jobs. Some use booster clubs to pay athletes. Automobiles, houses, bonuses, jobs for parents, sexual access to women, and extra tickets to sell are among the underground economics for college players.

Cheating. Many of the best universities provide the athlete with an inferior education. Courses offered by the athletic department for athletes are easy 'A's and 'B's with little content and less effort. Coaches hire tutors to rehearse tests in advance; sometimes with the examination that is very close to that which is given in class.

Drugs. The abuse of drugs by trainers and coaches in preparing and in repairing the athlete has grown to epidemic proportion in America. The use of steroids is particularly harmful to the athlete. The many side effects include bouts of rage and depression. Steroids are pushed in football, weight-lifting and other sports to build muscle.

The Winter Olympics in Canada, 1988, were relatively drug free according to the drug testing team which monitored the 140 contestants. The officials would not say whether drugs were found...only that those banned by the Olympic Organizing Committee were not detected. But trainers search for undetectable drugs to give to athletes.

The Summer Olympics in Korea were racked by drug scandals as gold medal winners were disqualified for using steroids and other performance enhancers. Ben Johnson, Canada, won the 100 meter dash only to be stripped of the gold medal (to the great disappointment of Canadian fans). The Hungarian and Bulgarian weight lifting team were pulled from the games by their own officials after testing positive for steroids.

Racism Black athletes are the object of many illegal activities on the part of the university. The law forbids discrimination on grounds of race, religion or gender under a variety of Constitutional provisions and statutory regulations.

Black Athletes are aggressively recruited while Black students are not aggressively recruited by admissions departments. The message is that Blacks are athletes; not students. Their graduation rate is far lower than White athletes.

At the University of Colorado, 80% of the offenses committed by athletes are committed by Black athletes. Head Coach Bill McCartney explains that Black athletes are subjected to racist remarks. The predominantly white police force is far more likely, as well, to arrest a Black and an athlete for fighting than a white student who started a fight.  McCartney later retired and formed a religious organization to help all males who have trouble being decent human beings.

Black athletes have to be demonstrably better in order to start on football and basketball teams as well. They are excluded from certain positions reserved for white athletes.

After college, they have fewer chances to join a coaching staff at high schools, colleges and professional teams than their white counterparts. College sports is a dead-end for most Blacks and many Whites.

Violence in Games. Many college teams have a 'headhunter' whose job it is to injure the star of the opposing team. In football and basketball at all levels from junior high to professional sports, dirty tricks are coached. Hockey teams keep special headhunters on the bench to use to provoke fights and penalties with the stars of other teams.

The National Athletic Trainers Association reports that, in football alone, over one half million boys are injured each year. Of these injuries, about 50,000 are serious. There were 37,000 operations for such injuries at the high school level.

Boxing matches are explicitly organized violence. The hardest blows are run and rerun on televised matches while spectators watch entranced by the amount of violence that the head or body can take and still continue.

Rooster Fighting remains a big draw in many Southern States and Mexico.

Pit bulldogs are matched against each other and against other animals in fights to the death in Colorado and other states. Cockfights are weekend events in the Southwest. Bull fighting and bull baiting, while illegal, still are staged in Texas and New Mexico.

Economic Crimes The owners of major league baseball teams conspire to violate the legal rights of players to freely negotiate their salaries with other teams. An independent arbitrator, accepted by both sides, ruled in September, 1987, that, in the 1985 season, the owners had agreed among themselves to not offer free agents jobs at salaries much higher than the present owner offered.

Sports professionals have tried for years to get decent health care coverage as part of the price of professional sports. They have tried to get decent retirement plans. They have tried to participate more democratically in the work process. All of these efforts have been resisted, obstructed, and ignored by owners associations...the thought is that players are property and owners have the right to use, abuse or reap the fruits of their labor...that is the basic rights of ownership.

CRIMES BY THE ATHLETE. In addition to knowing participation in the crimes mentioned above, the athlete is involved in a wide variety of other crimes.

Drug abuse. The use of alcohol, cocaine and other prohibited substances among athlete compares to that of the college population as a whole.

Sexual violence. The status enjoyed by the athlete in college as well as the adulation provides him with special access to sexual favors by the followers of the team. Even so, some athletes, coached in aggression and dominance, forces his sexuality upon dates.

Theft In many universities, athletes caught stealing in the dorms or at the campus bookstore are turned over to the athletic department for discipline rather than the police.

Cheating Cheating is institutionalized in many university athletic programs. Players are tutored with advance copies of tests in some courses. Athletes caught cheating by professors are channeled though the athletic department rather than through the faculty disciplinary review boards.

Assault Football players and other athletics, trained to use violence, sometimes use violence off the field. Two such athletes at the University of Colorado were found guilty of assault and ordered to do a few days of community service.

The idea of community service is a good idea...but when it is used for college athletes and not for similar cases when unemployed street kids are involved, non-athletes are denied equal standing before the law.

Professional Contracts Although his estimate is higher than that of others, Jim Abernathy, a sports agent, says that 80% of the top athletes in American universities have signed pro contracts before finishing their playing season.

PROFESSIONAL SPORTS Professional athletes get paid huge sums of money. A million dollars per year is not unusual in football, basketball or baseball. Athletes pay a price for the chance to earn big money. Violence and risk are part of the structure of sports and sports.

Professional Sports Injuries. USA Today (May 12, 1988) reports 65% of professional football athletes left the game with permanent injuries. That was an increase from the 1950s when 38% were permanently injured.

There are other prices that athletes pay for serving as fodder to the advertizing industry:

Divorce. 33.5 % get divorced after retirement (USA Today (May 12, 1988).   That change in life is most traumatic; family violence erupts after the athlete retires and finds himself at a loss for meaning and purpose.

Emotional Problems. 29% of retired athletes say that they have emotional problems all or most of the time (USA Today (May 12, 1988).

Spectator Violence Sports figures and other fans are subjected to violent abuse from other fans. At races, football games, hockey games, and especially soccer games, fans are stimulated by the Zeitgeist of violent sports and become violent as a consequence.

*At the Kentucky Derby, drinking, brawling, seminude fans shout obscenities at each other.

*At the Indianapolis 500, the same kind of spectator brawling goes on in the 'snake-pit.'

*Spectators at Cincinnati threw golfballs, baseballs and radios at the umpire who ejected Pete Rose for pushing the umpire...twice.

*Billy Martin, manager of the New York Yankees, is continuously assaulted by fans in other cities. That Martin is a loud-mouthed lout is beside the point. One does not have the legal right to assault louts.

*Students at the University of Dayton, a Catholic institution, shout vulgarities and obscenities at the visiting team...the small auditorium is filled with such verbal abuse.

On the other hand, Billy Martin continually assaults players, coaches and umpires and thus contributes to the culture of violence suffusing sports.

*Major league baseball and football are considering a ban on beer as a measure to control fans who become more violent every year. 18 of the 26 major league baseball teams stop the sale of beer in the 7th inning to reduce fan violence. The Padres, Dodgers, Pirates, Angels and White Sox have removed alcohol from the dugout. Some have 'booze-free' sections so drunks won't push and curse other fans.

*College students at Texas A&M, Colorado A&M, Iowa State, and Oklahoma often become uncontrollable as they drink and fight each other.

*It took 2500 police to stop soccer violence in the 1988 European Championship games in Dusseldorf, West Germany. The Inner City Firm, an east London gang, says they fight '...purely for the fun of it.'

In the USA, sports, violence, alcohol, and the chanting, singing, and playing of music all combine in a solidarity ritual. Out of all this comes the false solidarity of the moment which ends as the game or the season ends.

CRIMES AGAINST THE COMMUNITY. Significant crime against the community is the cynical use of solidarity for pathological purposes at the college level as well as in professional sports.  The substitution of the false solidarity of sports for the authentic solidarity of a shared and compassionate social life world remains the largest structural effect of organized commodified sports.

Moving Franchises. The residents of Brooklyn gave their loyalty and money to support the Dodgers for generations. The owners of the team moved it to California where profits were better. The owners of the Oakland Raiders moved to L.A. rending asunder the solidarity given to the team by Oakland fans.

The owners of the Saint Louis Cardinals are ready to sacrifice the interests of the community to the profit interests of the owners. They moved the franchise to Phoenix. Tomorrow the Detroit Tigers, the Denver Broncos or the L.A. Lakers (which came from Minnesota) may leave their fans behind for the profits offered by another city.

Lobbying for subsidies. The owners of sports franchises lobby and bribe city officials for free resources from city councils. They want subsidized stadia, subsidized parking; subsidized police protection, subsidized advertizing and subsidized labor.

In return the owners will contribute to the solidarity needs of the community until...they can persuade another city council elsewhere to give them a better deal.

The owners of the Chicago Cubs threaten to move the team to Florida if the City did not subsidize its operations. The reciprocity of team and city is a one way street in which the accountant polices the traffic...to the profits of owners who may or may not live and breath in the city.

Destruction of Ethnicity. In Los Angeles, Cincinnati, New York and else where, when new stadia are built by cities for profit making teams, ethnic neighborhoods are invariably the place where condemnation, demolition and new construction occur.

There is little concern about the integrity of the ethnic community...what does matter is that land is cheaper, the city saves a few million and the team gets a brand new stadium. The ethnic community can move away from their friends and neighbors.

Alienated Patriotism The Olympics have become part of the patriotic chauvinism of capitalist and socialist societies as each economic system tries to prove itself superior by counting the number of Gold medals won at the events. The compulsion to be first in sports events as proof of merits of a society is a superficial form of proof.

Selling the Olympic Games:  Members of the International Olympic Organizing Committee routinely take bribes from City Officials eager to get the games.  Salt Lake City, a Mormon town, was the latest to buy the games from the IOOC.

In the effort to use the Olympics to generate patriotism and to obtain political legitimacy, much harm is done to the athlete and to the principles which are said to be the heart of the Olympics. The Olympics are flawed with cheating, lying, drugging and fraud. In Gymnastics, track, and volleyball, top athletes are paid as private companies try to transfer the charisma of victory to hamburgers, watches, tires and beverages as well as to national patriotism.

Neither the coach nor the competitors are amateurs as the rules require. McDonalds' hires Bela Karolyi who coaches several hundred children in gymnastics. Finland pays Ben Johnson to endorse milk and Italy pays him to endorse shoes. Members of the Peruvian women's' volleyball team each got a free house when it won a silver medal and the Soviet women each got 20,000 rubles when they won the Gold Medal in volleyball at Korea.

Colonizing Desire The advertizing industry appropriates the esteem and the loyalties of professional sports from the solidarity needs of the community to the profit needs of advanced monopoly capitalism.

US corporations spend over $6.2 billion to sell their products through sports. Robert Dowling, publisher of Sports Marketing News came up with that figure through a one year study. T.V. leads with about $2.5 billion; newspapers are next with $1.4 billion then come magazine, radio, stadium ads and endorsements by athletes who wear headbands, tee shirts, shoes and equipment with this or that company brand name prominently displayed.

The Cost of Desire

Arnold Palmer $8 million          Jack Nicklaus $6 Million

Boris Becker 6                              Greg Norman 4.5

Michael Jordan 4*                         Ivan Lendl 3

John Madden 3                              Jim McMahon 3

Dennis Conner 2                          Chris Evert 2

*Michael Jordan's total contribution to the National economy is figured at around 3 billions (1998].  These figures are presented with both pride and amazement. 

Actually Jordan is part of a great social problem; one in which false needs for consumer goods drive both street crime and white collar crime.  Colonizing desire for luxury goods among people who can't afford them sets the context for criminal behavior among some few thousands of the millions exposed to advertizing.

WAGE THEORY. The Structural-functionalists will tell you that the millions paid athletes each year are rewards from society for the sacrifice the athlete made when training and reward for doing the most important work of society. The more functional the task; the more reward it gets. Baseball players are paid more than anybody else because their work is more useful to society than that of doctors, garbage collectors or police.

The fact is that athletes do the important work of realizing profit for the capitalist firm. Whether this is the most important work in society is questionable. Faced with the competition in the market place by products which are little different from the product of one's client, the advertizing industry attempts to transfer the charisma of the athlete to the profane items that it promotes.

MEDICAL CRIME: The most costly white collar crime, in terms of people crippled or dead; in terms of dollars lost and productive time lost, is to be found in the health and medical system.

Again, one should note that the majority of doctors are honest the vast majority of the time. And one should remember that much crime is located in the organization of medicine rather than in the person of the doctor. Both personal crime and structural factors contribute to medical crime.

The major kinds of personal medical crime are:

*defrauding third party insurance carriers

*performing unnecessary operations or making unnecessary tests in order to increase the bills of patients.

*taking kickbacks from other doctors for referring a patient to them.

*ownership in a hospital to which they send their own patients when not required by the medical problem.

*use of narcotics. The highest rates of drug abuse are found among physicians.

Charles Inlander, president of the People's Medical Society, charges that:

*20% of those admitted to hospitals, leave with a problem they didn't have when they were admitted.

*About 10,000 patients die from inept anesthesia practices.

*5 million of the 35 million operations are unnecessary.

*78,000 people get cancer from the X rays they take.

*1 out of six drug addicts in the USA are doctors

*In any given hospital, 60 patients per hour get the wrong medicine!

*A 1988 report said that over 300,000 people, mostly elder citizens, died needlessly from the wrong prescription, prescriptions wrongly filled, or a fatal combination of prescriptions.

*Of the 1.6 billion prescriptions written in 1987, 40% or more were improperly prescribed. On average, each person in the USA got 6 prescriptions; 2 or 3 of them were, on average, wrong.

The AMA says these figures are grossly distorted. It also says that 90% of the operations are necessary. Most medical sociologists agree that it is a minority of doctors which create the most crime in medicine.

A House subcommittee chaired by John Dingell, D-Michigan, found 'fraud, gross overcharging, kickbacks,and poor quality of care" in the medical profession are rampant.  [Dingell himself is a paid lobbyist for the National Rifle Association.

Corruption in the medical laboratory industry adds millions to the medicaid bills the government pays. Medical labs charge fees to the insurance companies or to the government and then pass money back to the doctors who order unnecessary tests. According to Richard Kusserow, Inspector General for the department of Health and Human Services, it's spreading like a cancer through the medical community.

Structural Crime In Medicine Some of the structural crime to be seen in the practice of medicine includes:

*Exploitation of the surplus value of the labor of nurses, aides, orderlies, clerks and secretaries in health care.

Nurses are grossly underpaid and are leaving the profession by the thousands because most of the income for health care goes to doctors rather than to nurses who do most of the patient care and treatment. Almost half of the qualified nurses in America have left the profession and it is difficult to get young women...and men...to go into nursing.

*Legal Controls Many states have laws prohibiting health workers to strike for decent wages and working conditions. The quality of health service is subverted by the conditions of work.

*Orientation of the health care system to therapy rather than to prevention.

Prevention is much more cost effective in improving the health statistics of a society, but therapy is much more profitable to the medical profession.

For every dollar invested in preventing disease, a society saves ten. And several years of good health is added to the lifespan of the citizens.

The American Medical Association has only recently taken a stand against smoking. All the evidence suggests that tobacco use accounts for half of the 1,000,000 new cases of cancer each year. It is more profitable to treat cancer patients than to prevent it.

*Withholding of adequate health care.

In 1989, some 40 Million Americans lack adequate health care. The USA has the best medical technology in the world, however the relations of production are inferior to those of many nations. Canada and Mexico have a national health plan.

The high cost of health care tends to push people toward panaceas and patent medicines. Of the 30,000 drugs sold in drug stores around the country, fewer than 100 really work well...and the pharmaceutical industry has the legal right to withhold drugs that are effective unless the patient can pay 2, 4, 10, or 100 times the costs of production.

*Monopoly over the fund of health knowledge.

The AMA and various state laws give doctors a monopoly over health and medical knowledge. Physicians use that monopoly for private profit. When illness and treatment is straight forward and simple, the patient still must go to the office of a doctor, pay for a 'visit' and pay for a prescription.

In a society organized for the democratic distribution of health knowledge, such information would be freely available.

The AMA monopoly also tends to discourage and eliminate alternative healing systems: osteopathy, Christian Science, naturopathy, and holistic healing practices are pushed aside by the chemical and surgical practices of modern capitalist medicine.

*Technicization of the therapeutic process.

It is much quicker and therefore more profitable to use chemicals, machines or mass production techniques to process patients than to give them personal care.

A physician can see 75 or 100 patients a day if the patients are processed by computers. Nurses and physician assistants can ask for symptoms; a low paid clerk can enter the symptoms into a computer program and a doctor can glance at the printout, write out a prescription and go on to the next patient.

In such a mass production system, the patient sees nurses and clerks for 10 or 20 minutes but sees the doctor for a very few minutes. The patient is billed at the rate for visiting a physician, $60-100 per hour, but sees that doctor for fleeting seconds.

This system has made doctors the highest paid occupation in the USA. It has tripled the income of the physician in the past 20 years.

*The franchising of health care.

There are four or five hospital chains which are siphoning off the cream of the patient crop and leaving low profit patients for the public health service.

Such a system is creating a two-tiered health care system, an excellent one for the rich and a degenerating one for the poor. Many public hospitals can no longer afford to give free health care to poor people in the community since they no longer are able to set their own charges high enough to Medicare and Medicaid or to private insurance carriers to subsidize the poor.

*the Medicalization of middle class crime.

There is a long term trend to define some kinds of disapproved behavior as illness rather than as crime. Alcoholism, drug use, gambling, abortion, and juvenile delinquencies as well as homosexuality, shoplifting and even murder have been brought into the realm of medicine.

While the medical justice system is much more humanitarian than is the prison, still the bias in service indicts the medical profession. And the medical profession is unethical in defining some illegal behaviors as illness when they are, in fact, variations in life style rather than pathology. You can see the point in the next section.

*The invention of illness.

The medical profession has been a political tool for those who would define some life styles as criminal. Doctors accept that the behavior is pathological but disagree that it is criminal...they see it as a medical pathology rather than a moral one. Madness rather than badness. Psychiatrists are particularly adept at it.

Pharmaceutical companies are the worst offenders since they stand to make 100, 500 or 1000 percent profit on drugs if they can find a disease which one cures. Alka-Seltzer cures the Blahs and its owners laugh all the way to the bank.

Among the invented mental illnesses are: hysteria, homosexuality, post-partum depression, the hyperactive child, nymphomania and insanity judgments. 

Hysteria is the name that doctors give to women who don't fit into the complacent, compliant model of femininity required by patriarchy.

Homosexuality is a disease of men who worry about living up to the competitive and violent world of masochism...in their panic, they label men who don't try to be masculine animals as homosexual.

Post-partum depression is the name given to women who bear children without adequate financial, emotional and communal support.  Men would suffer post-partum depression too if they had to care for infants in isolation from others to help with parenting.

Hyperactivity is the name doctors give to children who won't sit quietly in large classes and learn things that bear little relationship to the immediate problems of children; racism, poverty, estrangement from parents, differences in size, weight, height or some mental ability.

Nymphomania is the name given to the behavior of women who don't subordinate their sexuality to the marriage form and to Patriarchal definitions of femininity.

Hysteria was invented by male psychiatrists to explain why some women refused to behave as society would have them behave. Women who did not want to get married or stay married; women who did not want to care for children; women who resisted church teachings and women who thought in holistic rather than linear fashion were defined as hysterics.

In her classic work, Phyllis Chesler (1972) has exposed the gender politics behind such diagnoses of women. Millions of women believe themselves neurotic because they resist and rebel against the structure of gender power. The 5 most frequently prescribed drugs are tranquilizers. Over 75% of the prescriptions are made out to women. Women are narcotized in order to maintain the structure of gender privilege. The medical profession is the agent of social control of women.

*Homosexuality was first defined as a crime by those who disagreed with its practice. Then the medical profession claimed it as a mental illness. Then the American Psychiatric Association dropped it from its list of clinical diseases.

*Over a million children are given prescribed drugs in the USA for hyperactivity. Many of these children are behavioral problems and most certainly do disrupt the classroom. And many of them do settle down when on drugs.

However there are some critics of education who say that the problem is that the classes are overcrowded, the curriculum is inappropriate and that the teaching process is badly designed. If that is true, then the children are displaying pretheoretical rebellion and resistance to a poorly organized social life-world. It is the school which is sick, not the child.

Post partum depression is a clinical entity which is observed after childbirth in many young mothers. Other mothers find the birth of a child to be exhilarating and a high.

The question is whether the depression comes from the birth of a child or from the fact that after the birth the young woman is left alone with the parenting process without material resources and with inadequate help in the parenting process from father, friends and relatives.

In most societies in history, the parenting process is widely distributed among those in the kinship system. There is little evidence of post partum depression in those societies.

Insanity Insanity is presented as a clinical entity which, many medical experts say does not exist. You note that people do odd things...some of which are against the law...and you call them insane. They may be very emotionally unstable but what they do is rationally connected to the conditions of their life.

When John Hinckley tried to assassinate Mr. Reagan, his parents hired psychiatrists who testified Hinckley was legally insane. But Hinckley lived in a society in which violence is a cultural trait; shot at an official who had received much negative publicity; and used a defense which kept him out of a nasty institution.

Had Hinckley been completely mad, he might have tried to kill Reagan with a banana...or selected a horse to assassinate...or cheerfully went to prison believing it to be Paradise. He was not insane, he knew who and why he wanted to kill. Assassination is pretheoretical politics. He was ignorant...not insane.

*importing of illegal, and dangerous, pharmaceuticals from pharmaceutical houses in Central America and Europe. In one case, more than 30 tons of unapproved drugs were imported from Mexico by two companies for use on animals. The drug residues are ingested when people eat the eggs, beef, pork and milk produced by such chemicals.

Distribution of Doctors There is a serious distortion of the distribution of physicians in the nation. There is about one doctor per 900 people in the USA. But some areas have many more doctors to provide health care than other areas.

*There are many counties in the rural areas of the USA with no doctors at all.

*There is a doctor for every 52 people in Beverley Hills, California.

*There are more doctors per thousand population in Cuba than in the USA.

*It is very hard to get Black or White doctors to work in Black neighborhoods in the USA. The percentage of Black Physicians is declining as a total of all physicians in the USA.

*The programs to require doctors who get federal subsidies to practice medicine in small towns and villages for 18 months will soon end.

*The infant mortality rate in Brownsville, a Black suburb of New York, is higher than that of Calcutta, India.

*The inner city mortality rate of new born infants began to increase as the Reagan administration cut back on health care programs, food programs, and aid to American cities. This from an administration that claimed to be 'pro life' in opposing federal funds for abortion clinics.

It is vital to understand that individual physicians do not plan to deprive people of health care. Indeed, it is in the interest of the doctor to have as many patients as possible. It is the profit motive that takes doctors to rich, Anglo areas and which discourages them from providing good health care for poor minority areas. It is the fiscal crisis of the capitalist state that leads politicians to cut funding wherever they can safely do so without political opposition. The poor have few defenders.

Human Organ Trade In the past ten years, an entirely new industry dealing in human organs has developed. The supply of organs is short. Some entrepreneurs are stealing them from cadavers, selling donated organs to rich foreigners, and harvesting organs from live persons. Police in Paraguay rescued seven boys from kidnappers who planned to sell their organs in the USA. Five people are on trial in Florida for stealing corneas from corpses before burial and without permission from relatives (USA Today: 16 Jan., '89)

Market Share In the past five years, pharmaceutical companies have begun to advertized directly to the consumer in the effort to sell more prescription drugs. They plant news stories and hire famous people to push the drug. Direct advertizing bypasses federal laws requiring full disclosure of harmful side effects and contra-indicators of it use. Frontline (28 March, 1989) reported the following cases:

*Mickey Mantle, a famous baseball player, was hired by a drug company to push an arthritis medicine. 39 million people suffer from some degree from arthritis. The company took the largest share of a $50 million market within six months when Mantle appeared on ball games, talk shows and mentioned the drug without saying he was paid to endorse it.

*Another drug company released false and misleading stories about Oraflex, another drug. It became the most popular drug as patients demanded it from their doctors. When people started dying of liver damage, the drug was pulled from market. Over 50 people in Europe had already died but that information was not made available to doctors and patients by the drug company.

Structural Crime and IMR The infant death rate (IMR) is one of the best indicators of quality of life in a society.  IMR has changed for the worst in the five years between 1980 and 1985. Rep. Rowland of Georgia, the only physician in the U.S. Congress, says that the USA has the highest IMR of any industrialized nation. He says that the increase in infant death rates has been due, in part, to spending cuts in the Reagan administration.

Public Voice, a food and health research agency studied the data from 332 of the nation's poorest counties (AP: 8 Dec., 1988). It found the infant death rate beginning to rise again after decades of improvement. The agency estimates that between 4000 and 5000 infants die needlessly because of:

1. poor diets of expectant mothers

2. decline in number of physicians for prenatal care

3. inferior transportation to get women to the clinics

4. failure of schools and mass media to educate women about prenatal care.

The IMR in the counties studied was 13.6 per 1000 births compared to 10.6 nationally. The IMR in Japan and Switzerland is 6 per 1000 births. The IMR among Navajo Indians and poor Southern Blacks is higher than most 3rd world countries. No one plans and no one benefits from the unnecessary death of thousands of infants but they are equally dead as if they were murdered by parents, doctors, legislators or voters who determine health care policy. Their death derives from the structure of health care in the USA.

INFANT MORTALITY RATES IN MAJOR U.S. CITIES

Wash., D.C. 21.2      Detroit 21     Newark, N.J. 19.31

Atlanta 18.6      Chicago 16.6     Philadelphia 15.5

Cuba 8

Medical 'Prisoners' The medical system is involved in the involuntary restriction of hundreds of thousands of people in the asylums of the USA. The procedures by which people are committed to asylums are seriously flawed in terms of due process and competent legal representation.

The procedures by which hundreds of thousands of elderly persons are put into economic guardianship to their children, spouses, judges, lawyers or unknown others are flawed as well. In the 1988 national conference of the American Bar Association report said that from 300,000 to 400,000 elderly under guardianship are stripped of their rights by medical panels and placed under the power of a guardian without the protections given to street criminals.

The structure of medical care and business practices in the USA contributes to the health problems in the 3rd world. Ray Elling has studied the role of the USA in contributing to medical crime in the 3rd world. Briefly, these crimes include:

US industry dumps dangerous products and drugs in the 3rd world when they are banned by law from the stores in the USA. Garbage is also transported to 3rd world nations.

- Pesticides, for example, are shipped to Latin America when they are banned in the USA. Sometimes these pesticides return on the fruit and vegetables exported back to the USA.

-Other unsafe products dumped include children's pajamas which have been sprayed with a fire retardant which causes cancer .

-inter-uterine devices which have killed dozens in the USA are advertized and sold in the 3rd world.

-baby pacifiers upon which American babies choked are widely distributed in the 3rd world.

-many pharmaceuticals which have dangerous side effects are sold without warning in the 3rd world. There are often sold over the counter without prescription or advice from a physician about the side effects.

*the brain drain of doctors and nurses from the poorest, sickest countries in the world. A National Public Radio (29 Marc, 1989) editorial commentator said that the American Health Care system could not run without foreign medical personnel.

-Almost one fourth of the doctors who took US medical boards in 1983 came from 3rd world countries. Doctors from Haiti, Chile, Jamaica, Honduras and Costa Rica staff the city hospitals while American doctors staff the hospitals of the middle class. Those who are ill in Latin America can quietly die.

-Nurses from the Philippine Islands are recruited to replace American nurses...leaving Filipinos with little health care.

*Malnutrition is promoted when food from the poorest countries in the world is shipped to the fattest nations.

MNCs buy up the best land in the 3rd world to raise export crops to send back to Europe, Japan and America. Safeway advertises that it imports food from 54 countries. Hunger is endemic in many of those countries.

-Arby's, McDonald's, Wendy's and several chain stores import beef from
Central America while the protein intake of children there decreases yearly.

*Erosion occurs as land speculators clear the forests to market land for cattle ranches and export crops.

-deforestation contributes to erosion, drought, and the greenhouse effect
which threatens to turn farmlands in the USA into a desert.

*Human experimentation of drugs by some American drug companies are made in the 3rd world because 'friendly' governments permit such experiments without controls.

*Export of hazardous industry by American owners when they want to avoid the pollution laws at home.

-Drug, steel and pharmaceutical plants have been built in the 3rd world so they might freely dump toxic wastes in rivers and streams.

--Of the 21 rivers in Taiwan, 19 of them are polluted by industrial waste...much from plants which sell to the USA.

*Health resources of poor nations are used unwisely.

-Many medical supply companies sell hightech equipment such as catscanners, kidney machines, and electromagnetic resonating equipment to 3rd world countries.

This practice depletes the limited health care budgets in order to serve the therapeutic needs of the wealthy rather than the preventative health needs of the masses.

The primary responsibility for all these assaults on the health and bodies of people in the 3rd world is in the 3rd world country itself but it is part of the medical imperialism of the USA of which Ray Elling (1982) warns us. It is American medical systems which profit from the sale of dangerous products and the distortion of the food system.

What is to be Done Most conservatives and liberals that the Peer Review system of the medical system should be strengthened and improved. Some conservatives argue that doctors should be tried in the courts as common criminals and sent through the criminal justice system...in order to get equal treatment before the law.

Bonnie Berry, a sociologist at UCLA studied the efforts to control the crimes of medical doctors. She reviewed 291 cases of medical crime in Florida between 1980 and 1984 using data from the Board of Medical Examiners [a peer review agency] and the Florida Department of Professional Regulation.

Berry found that power inequalities increased the capacity to commit medical crime and protected the doctor from sanctions. She found that serious crimes had mild sanctions while offenses which were embarrassing to the profession were harshly treated. Of the medical crime she studied, 38% of the doctors involved had committed one or more crimes before. Sanctions do not work to discourage repetition of medical crime.

Berry argued that the size, complexity and elite nature of medicine made it easy to commit crime without detection. They also made it easy to deny guilt. She noted that doctors tended to blame others for their crimes: the surgical team, nurses, patients, his office 'girls,' wives, girlfriends, pharmacists, the medicare program were to blame; not the doctor.

Since the personal crime of doctors arise out of the same dynamics of capitalism which inform street crime, organized crime and corporate crime, the solution is democratic socialism of the sort mentioned above and outlined in the last Lecture of this series.

The radical analysis is that the source of structural medical crime in the for-profit system of health care. It is profits which motivate the overcutting, overbilling, fee splitting and round robin referrals between doctors. The radical solution has several interrelated points:

1. emphasize preventative health practices and

2. provide free health care with low cost medicines

3. distribute medical knowledge widely throughout the general population.

4. create community and district Committees to solve local health problems.

5. eliminate the status and task barriers between doctors, nurses and other health care personnel.

In a democratic and socialist health care system, doctors and nurses, aides and orderlies, technicians and administrators should be paid well enough to maintain a decent life style and should be provided social security upon retirement. But the huge differences in wages and income which now distort the practice of medicine should by eliminated.

ACADEMIC CRIME.   We will begin a brief survey of white collar crime in the American University. The data in this section come from participant observation over a 30 year study of college life at Colorado State University and several other universities in Montana, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri as well as in Canada, England, and Africa.

Professors in many departments use the time and facilities the tax payers provide for conducting personal business. Those in psychology, accounting, engineering, law, and other disciplines use university time to consult with private clients.

Professors, secretaries, presidents, and students make personal use of phones, mailing privileges, office supplies and university vehicles.

Top administrators use their power to make decisions about contracts that feather their own nest. Deans form private companies to supply their departments with equipment and raw materials. Faculty teams for private companies to exploit patents and copyrights from products developed at public expense.

Professors use university facilities to develop and write textbooks then keep the profits to themselves. Some professors require students to buy text books which are outdated or which are not widely recognized because they have an interests in the sales profits.

Selected Cases Among the crimes against the public, the university and the students found in major universities as in small colleges around the country, one finds many cases. Although these data come from Mediocre State University, such crimes are endemic in academic life.

*Dr. Stephen Breuning was convicted and sentenced to 60 days in prison for falsifying data that lead to hundreds of thousands of children being drugged with Ritalin and Dexedrine to keep them quiet. He lied in order to get grants from the government. He was allowed to do his prison time in community service.

*One president of a university deposited millions of dollars of state funds in a bank which, later appointed him to the Board of Directors of the bank at a handsome fee.

*A department head at Colorado State formed a private company and bought expensive equipment for the engineering faculty through it...making a profit on every purchase.

*A psychology professor at Colorado State University used his position as Chair of the Graduate Program to solicit sexual favors from female graduate students whom he found attractive.

*A sociology professor at Colorado State University came to class drunk; missed classes; gave easy grades to avoid protest and continually made suggestive sexual remarks in class. Each year a few students would go to the Chair of the Department to get him out of the classroom. They failed. He had tenure.

Many universities routinely violate affirmative action hiring laws. They hire white males when qualified Blacks are available. They hire white males when qualified females are available. They use a double standard in hiring and granting of tenure. Minorities must produce better teaching records and more publications than white males in order to be hired and to be promoted.

Many universities invest their trust funds in companies which pollute; which exploit Black labor in the Union of South Africa; which produce military goods and overbill the USA for them; and which disinvest in America.

Many universities have a tracking system which reproduces the structure of gender inequality. They pour funds in the those courses and teams that men go into; they provide the least funds, the worst professors, the oldest buildings and the least support for those courses women are channeled into. Women are far more likely to go into teaching, social work, domestic sciences and nursing. These are among the worst programs in American colleges.

There are a whole range of 'universities,' trade schools, and theology schools which sell phony degrees. There are scores of 'technical schools' which bill veterans for tuition and then split the proceeds with the applicants when the government pays the bill. USAToday (27 March, 1989) reports that 25% of the $13 billions lent to students were not paid back in 1988. Trade schools had the highest rate of default. One computer trade school in New York recruited people off the street to sign the loan applications.

But if the faculty and administrators are white collar criminals who violate their position of trust, students also violate the time and resources entrusted to them.

Student Crime The good and well socialized children of the middle class who attend good and well organized universities and take good jobs with good corporations are refusing to pay back their college loans.

*The number of student loan defaults increased from $200 million in 1981 to almost $1,600 million in 1988 (est) according to the US Department of Education.

*At a Texas college, 300 students were caught running up $100,000 worth of long distance calls. At a Colorado university, 25 students placed $15,000 worth of illegal calls. In North Carolina, 27 university students were charged with stealing $600,000 worth of service from MCI.

*Students in a Michigan university regularly give their I.D.s to friends to get free meals in the university dorms.

*About one student in ten steals small items from the bookstore in a Missouri university according to the campus police.

*Each year, there are some 10 rapes reported on a Campus in California. Date rape is even more common but seldom reported according to a study at a San Francisco college.

*There is an epidemic of breaking and entering into professors' and departmental offices around the time of final examinations in all of the 2400 colleges and universities in the USA.

*Students at an Oklahoma university often find their mail opened. Credit cards and cash are taken. Billfolds and purses are rifled at the locker rooms of many universities.

*Colorado State University has had to use cables to secure computer equipment. Students, graduate students, faculty and staff routinely stole the equipment for personal use.

*Vandalism is a pervasive behavior found in mass universities. Students express their existential anger at the oppression conditions of mass education by defacing walls, destroying furniture and equipment, and tearing out pages in books and magazines in the library.

Students cheat, get drunk, cut classes, vandalize, steal and assault one another in such conditions. In so doing, they betray the trust given them by their parents, the teaching profession and the larger community. Students receive and discard the rare opportunity to step outside of their society for four or more years; to learn and to return to community the resources provided.

All in all, crime is deeply embedded in the American university...a place where one would expect the highest standards of morality and social ethics. While the university may perform far better than many corporations in private business, still the amount of crime there is a national disgrace.

Academic crime is best understood as a product of the conditions of competition, individualism, false needs, and the depersonalization of the mass university.

Existential anger is expressed on the part of students, faculty, and administrators alike...an anger informed by the distorted power arrangements of the educational bureaucracy which bends on students and faculty both. All these factors converge to produce crime among well educated human beings who have been well socialized to the basic values of society.

Racism on Campus It is a violation of the Civil Rights Act and various state, federal and city laws to harass members of minority groups. USA Today (February 25, 1989) reports the incidents of racial harassment has increased in the past ten years on campus.

The National Institute against Prejudice and Violence reports documented racial harassment and violence on 130 American campuses in 1987-88. This is up from 14 in 1985 and 56 in 1986.

*Providence College (R.I.) 14 incidents were reported including crank phone calls to Black women and racial slurs carved in desks.

*The latrines at the University of Louisville are full of racial slurs.

*University of California. A Black woman was harassed by dormitory residents.

*University of Michigan. There have been many racial incidents in Ann Arbor...enough to warrant a special television program on the problems there. The college radio station had been broadcasting racist jokes as part of the racial hostility.

*McAlester College. Tina Edwards got threatening phone calls and racial slurs after she wrote an article on racism.

*Indiana University. Five white males cursed at a Black student, tackled and beat him. A student's door was burned when the student posted a call for a protest march.

What is to be Done About Racism.  Oliver Cox explained the economic Racism on Campus sources of racism in the 1940s. Cox pointed out that democracy and social justice for Blacks improved in good times. Racism returns in bad times. We are now on the downside of a vast Kondratieff cycle about which you learned in Lecture 3.

With full employment, Blacks have the social power and the economic power to go along with moral power. At the same time, Anglos are not competing with Blacks for scarce, lowpaying jobs. Racism tends to decrease.

When Anglos must compete with Blacks, Chicanos or foreign workers for jobs, they use whatever power tools they have to get control of the jobs. That includes physical power. Racial beatings, killings, and bombings increase as jobs get scarce.

Since it is jobs and decent wages which promote racism, the best solution is to guarantee every person who is willing and able, the right to prosocial work.

Stealing from a corporation alters the wage relationship between employee and employer. Capitalism cannot work if workers sell their labor power on the one hand and steal from the company with the other hand. The company bought both hands of the worker; including the one which steals.

White Collar Prisons Ernst Van den Haag, a conservative theorist of punishment condemns the country club atmosphere at white collar prisons. For example, the Federal prison at Egland, Florida offers tennis courts, jogging tracks, softball diamonds, weight rooms, and a lovely landscaping with a quiet and pleasant atmosphere.

Van den Haag says white collar criminals should be made to suffer. Using a utilitarian theory of crime, he argues that people will calculate the probability of rewards; the probability of punishments; the magnitude of the reward; the magnitude of the penalty and, then, decide whether to commit the crime or not.

The warden of Egland prison points out that these high officers and officials have their freedom sharply limited, they are disgraced before their friends and family, and they are paid only 11 cents an hour where before they may have collected hundreds of thousands of dollars daily in dividends, fees, royalties, rents, interest, and commissions.

Liberals object to the dual standards: country club prisons for the rich and violent prisons for the poor. Liberals tend to push for decent and humane conditions for all. Such prisons are humane, effective in controlling convicts, more successful in rehabilitating prisoners and much, much cheaper to run. Egland costs the State of Florida about $15,000 per prisoner per year. Maximum and medium security prisons run up to $25,000 per prisoner per year.

Decriminalization Market liberals tend to argue for decriminalization of most white collar crime...business contracts between adults, for example, should not be defined as fraud. One does not have to sign a contract and if one does, one should take the consequences. For a review of the advantages and disadvantages of decriminalization, turn back to Lecture 11.

Malpractice Suits The existing solution for many forms of white collar crime is the law suit. The civil courts are overflowing with complaints against doctors, lawyers, accountants, stockbrokers, dentists, and even professors for violations of the trust accorded them by patients, clients, students and public.  Civil Suits have exploded in the past 30 years as more and more patients, clients, buyers and renters turn more and more to civil law to protect them from the crimes which are ignored by the Criminal Justice System.

The peer review system is so biased in favor of the white collar criminal that victims seek remedy in court. To protect themselves from the consequences of their crimes, professionals take out malpractice insurance. In 1986, doctors alone spent over $3.5 billions for such protection.

Many state legislatures, under the control of conservatives, have passed laws restricting the amount of damages victims of white collar crime can get through the court system. Citing the crisis in insurance costs, law makers protect the insurance companies and their clients from the harm done in the pursuit of higher profits.

Ralph Nader, speaking in Denver in 1987, noted that most people who are injured by dangerous products or by medical malpractice never get a cent. There are over 300,000 serious malpractice suits each year, and according to Nader, fewer than 20,000 collect damages.

Malpractice suits will not end white collar crime as long as professionals have life style concerns coupled with false needs, an eroding individualism, real needs for social security after retirement and life crisis which threaten life style.

Structural Change Radicals tend to argue for structural change. Employee crime would be prevented if employees owned the means of production. They would not then be employees but owners. The point is that a radical change in the relationship to the means of production would eliminate most crimes against the company by the workers in an enterprize.

Crimes in sports would tend to disappear if sports were, once again, amateur activities used for solidarity purposes rather than violent and competitive spectacles used for creating false needs and patriotic excess on mass media. Such activities as home town softball, volley ball, bowling, Frisbee, the Bolder-Boulder community run...all can contribute to community and to solidarity without the corruption which commercial exploitation brings.

Crimes by executives impelled by retirement needs would be reduced if the social security system were improved. After all, senior citizens left the next generation an economy worth trillions of dollars, they should be able to share in its productivity after retirement.

In the democratic and participatory model of medicine used in many societies, doctors cannot use social power unilaterally. They are responsible to a hospital council of aides, orderlies, patients, nurses, and other doctors as well as citizens from the district served by the hospital.

Crimes against patients would be reduced if health care were made available on the basis of need rather than profit to the medical profession. Doctors, dentists and pharmacists would get a wage adequate to a decent life style but not at the expense of the state, the patient or the community.

Crimes which endanger the health of people in the 3rd world would be reduced by removing profit as the major factor in pushing pharmaceutical drugs; as the major factor in moving dangerous factories to the 3rd world; as a major factor in recruiting health professionals; as a major factor in growing export crops...especially foods. The health of the people should be the major factor; financial reward only a side benefit.

Crimes informed by life crises would diminish if the conditions which create life crises were eliminated. Economic cycles, for example, can wipe out investors overnight. Divorce comes out of the alienated politics and sexuality of a sexist society. Moving to a democratic socialist system would tend to eliminate Kondratieff cycles...and thus protect private savings.

In democratically organized universities, professors and administrators have far less arbitrary authority to exploit the student or the workplace. They would be accountable to the students as well as to the administration and to the public for their behavior.

Crimes against the student, against the academic process, against the university would tend to decline if student power were well used; if faculty and staff were democratically involved in governance; if academic values trumped the market value of a degree.

If we are to rid ourselves of Racism, we much work for full employment, good housing policy, good schools and community policing.  Segregated neighbors is no great problem in societies which provide social justice.  Toronto has many ethnic neighborhoods where people live in peace with their ethnic neighbors; alike or different...and Toronto has very different policies from Detroit.

In a democratically organized society, every one would have a right to health care, to legal aid, to the basic materials for life. The capacity of doctors, lawyers, accountants, merchants or brokers to exploit the public would be greatly reduced.

In general white collar crime is prevented by reorganizing society to eliminate the sources of white collar crime:

--false needs in life style

--economic insecurity

--the profit motive

--life crises

--power stratifications

--gender privilege

--conflict relations

Democratic socialism answers most of the factors which impel well socialized, highly educated, well respected middle class adults toward white collar crime. The emphasis on social justice would sharply reduce all kinds of crime. The costs in life and resources which come with crime and its control would be reduced as well...and hundreds of thousands of police, guards, lawyers, social workers and probation officers could be freed to do more humane and human work.

Market Socialism provides many of the best features of a capitalist system without many of the negative features...you must ask yourself what kind of society you want....and work for it.