ABSTRACT

Conventional criminologists, journalists and whatever is meant by ‘public opinion’ are fixated on a very narrow idea of crime as something that low-income or working-class people do when they steal, behave violently, drink to excess or take drugs. This idea is unfortunate because the scale and the scope of crimes committed by powerful companies and high-income professionals are staggering, as are the terrible consequences for large numbers of people affected by white-collar, or corporate, crime. As a useful point of comparison we can start with the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report for 2000. This revealed that there were 407,842 robberies in the USA, netting the perpetrators a total of $477 million or an average of $1,170 per robbery. Comparisons can be odious but they can also be telling. As Punch (1996) points out, just one broker employed by Drexel, Werner, Lambert in the 1980s, and working on take-over deals, relied on insider trading, created dummy companies and engaged in secret, offshore operations, fraudulently netting himself hundreds of millions of dollars. That broker successfully ‘plea-bargained’ his case while agreeing to pay back $600 million in return for the dropping of the 90 criminal charges he was facing!