Teaching Criminology: Part IV

Part IV:  White Collar Crime. WCC is often conflated, in texts and in law, with corporate crime...yet the sociology is very different as are the forms of crime involved.

Then too, WCC is one form of human behavior which resists easy theorizing and broad generalizing. Efforts to generate formal, axiomatic, predictive theory fail here as much or more than with other forms of crime. Yet there are some commonalities within the genre which help sort out those differences and, thus, provide some leverage for those interested in equitable reciprocities as well as in social policy oriented to low crime relationships.

A.  Definition. White collar crime is that crime which involves a betrayal of trust implied in the holding of an office or other position of trust.

1.  Street crime; burglary, robbery, theft, arson and other forcible forms of economic gain do not involve existing relationships between persons requiring trust, faith, hope and patience. Those victimized by street thugs do not suspend doubt nor are they betrayed by trusting...other than the civil inattention required in public places which Goffman discussed so well, social relation- ship and all the vulnerability such imply does not exist in the forms of street crime mentioned in Part II.

Customers of organized crime suspend doubt and suspicion of exploitation and falsification as they enter into contractual relationships with drug pushers, prostitutes, lenders or other providers of forbidden goods and services discussed in Part III.

2.  Doctors, lawyers, employees, public officials, teachers, brokers and buyers do enjoy unsuspended trust. Patients, clients, employers, citizens and students have to trust providers of services and goods else most formal organizations would collapse from the want.

While the logic of a completely free market of goods and services warns the buyer to beware, such advice ignores the armor of social honor and the fabric of social innocence essential to social relationship.

3.  Doctors, lawyers, middle and top management as well as brokers and public officials on the take steal or convert to their own use, many times as much wealth as do street thugs. And, as we shall see, corporate crime makes beggers of both.

B.  Forms of white collar crime. Again, simple and encompassing categories do not suffice to inventory the range of white collar crime. Every day, new defaults of trust and new violations of belief are invented with which to exploit the organic solidarity essential to a division of labor in a complex, high-tech society. But we can do an inventory of forms with which to sensitize the student and the public of American Criminology:

1.  Health Care: Doctors take kick-backs on the prescriptions they write; doctors prescribe questionable and expen- sive surgical routines, doctors refer patients to a circle of friends not on the basis of merit but on the basis of mutual gain.

Physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists and hospital administrators over-bill both patient and third-party carriers of health insurance. They bill for services not provided and for patients not existing. They bill for invented clinical entities and they bill for inflated regimes of therapy.

2.  Law and the Court. Police sell out the trust implicit in their office by taking bribes from organized crime. Police subvert the idea of law and order as they over-police minorities and under-police the middle class.

Lawyers enter into pricing conspiricies to charge for services; they bill for hours not given to a client; they convert funds belonging to a trust to their own use or invest such funds for favors granted by the banking/investment firms with which they deal.

Judges seek sexual, economic or career advantage in dealing with the public and the trust placed in the office they hold. Judges reproduce the structures of racist, gender and class inequality in the kinds of evidence they hear, the kinds of motions they honor the kinds of judgements they make and the kind of sentences they hand out.

In the CJS, the tort system, the military justice system, the private justice system as well as the administrative regulatory system, class, status and power distort the quest for criminal justice as for social justice.

Law-makers too violate the public trust. They take bribes from those with wealth; they take gifts from those with high status; they permit corporations to write public policy on auto insurance, rental law, pollution law and liability law.

3.  Employees steal more from the stores and shops in which they hold position of trust than do all the theives, shop-lifters, boosters and false billing con schemes put together. And the greater the position of trust, the greater the magnitude of the theft.

C.  Motives for White Collar Crime. The student will note that I used the term, motive, rather than cause. Causal analysis is useful in discussing the behavior of simple systems but not of complex, open systems...more about which in the last of the series.

a.  Life style. Much in the way of white collar crime can be attributed to efforts of white collar criminals to attain and maintain a middle class life style.

Homes can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sending children to college requires tens of thousands of dollars. Equipping a home with furnishings, art, electronics and other appliances can be very costly. Middle class families buy and maintain two, three four or more automobiles. Middle class families buy and maintain two or three domiciles. Middle class families take vacations in Europe, Australia, South Pacific and Africa. Transportation, lodging, food and amenities can run into tens of thousands of dollars.

b.  Life crisis. Even middle class families face life crises; divorce is very costly...especially to the women in the family. Legal services for other exigencies eat up family reserves. Engineers, professors, doctors, and lawyers can find themselves dis-employed as the economy shrinks or as the fiscal crisis of the state expands into the middle classes.

c.  Retirement Portfolios. Social security may pay a doctor, lawyer, professor or engineer $800/month...$1000/month or even $1200 month. That would cover the cost of transport, food, mortgage, or vacation but not all of these.

Around age 40-45, middle class professionals can see the future and see that it will reduce their circum- stances to those of the lower middle class...so they begin to think about how they might expand their investment portfolios. Doctors can always prescribe hysterectomies or tonsilectomies; Lawyers can always overbill; professors can take on consultancies and thus default on teaching. Administrators can form REITs to buy and sell land they know their university their corporation, their state agency will soon acquire. They can take bribes for letting contracts. They can divert public and corporate funds to private companies.

Investment Schemes....doctors, lawyers, brokers and other not excluding professors get involved in risky investment schemes...and sometime must come up with large sums in order to cover/protect investment.

d.  Existential Anger. As Weber put it, bureaucracies are iron cages into which clients and staff alike are trapped. Once in that trap, an employee suffers all sorts of humiliations. Arrogant bosses; blatant discrimination--usually upon behalf of favored status person--usually white well educated males; unacknow- ledged work, unkind comment, ill-kept temper, unfair evaluations. All these and more alienate the employee and, as with those in the underclass, may produce pre-theoretical rebellion and resistence.

Embezzlement, fraud, theft and sale of company secrets all these and more provide some small measure of revenge; some small satisfaction from the thousand slings and arrows found in any bureaucracy from the state prison to the fortune 500.

e.  Corporate Modelling. Many major corporations require their employees to lie, cheat, steal and betray customers, competitors, inspectors and other employees. Sears requires employees to bait and switch; Wards requires employees to sell worthless insurance; Penney's buys from sweat shops in Indonesia Mexico, Thailand and Korea. From such model behavior on the part of the company, employees learn.

If the company steals from customers; if the company violates pollution laws; if the company converts pension plans to corporate purpose, the moral base is lost and, being lost, renders the company fair game to the dis-enchanted, de-sanctified employee.

D.  Solutions to White Collar Crime. Policing, punishment, shame and other forms of degradation have but limited reach and duration.

Regulatory agencies, civil torts, criminal liability, malpractice suits do not prevent white collar crime...at best they give pause to the deed and craft to the act.

Education, social controls, religiousity, as well as other standard solution alleged to reduce street crime fail for white collar crime. We professionals/employees are already well educated; we already live within a well-organized normative structure; we go to church and condemn those who profane our gods and scandalize our religious values.

In a postmodern criminology, the solutions to white collar crime follow closely the motives for white collar crime. The student can review those and undertake your informal field assignment: generate social policy in both public and private sector which negates the motives.

TRYoung