ABSTRACT
Criminologists spend an enormous amount of time and energy investigating criminals. ey ask all sorts of questions about them. What kind of person is likely to become a criminal? Why do they do it? When do they start? When do they stop? How many crimes do they commit? What kind of crimes do they commit? What are their families like? Where do they live? What kind of friends do they have? e list could go on. Of course, all of these are important questions. We hope that by answering them we will eventually understand why individual involvement in crime seems to vary so much. For a lot of reasons, we need to know as much as possible about the factors that a ect involvement in crime. Indeed, throughout this book, we ask and try to answer many of these questions in regard to the people who commit white-collar crimes. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that knowing about criminals is not the same as knowing about crime. People often confuse the problem of explaining crime with the problem of explaining criminals, but the two should be kept separate (Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990). Crime is an event, something that happens. A criminal, on the other hand, is an individual who behaves in a certain way, a way that society has de ned as unacceptable. Explaining why people behave one way or another is not the same as explaining why a particular event happens at a particular time and in a particular place.
