ABSTRACT
Some white collar crimes are enacted on behalf of an individual against the corporation (embezzlement). Others are those that are enacted on behalf of the corporation against the general public, consumers, or employees (corporate crime). Still other types include governmental crime (receiving bribes, violating international treaties) and professional crime (performing unnecessary surgery, overcharging a client). The public’s reaction to corporate crime is ambiguous. On the one hand, public opinion polls reveal that most people regard corporate crimes that harm people as serious offenses. On the other hand, when corporate criminals are judged by a jury, they tend to receive more lenient penalties than tends to be the case for street crime. Thus, the question arises: Is white collar crime a genuine form of deviance? Corporate crime possesses several features that are uncharacteristic of or in comparison with ordinary or Index Crime; it tends to be made up of complex and relatively sophisticated actions; it is intermingled with legitimate behavior; victimization tends to be more diffuse; the sums of money that it entails tend to be larger; it is less likely to be detected and prosecuted and characteristically, offenders receive relatively lighter sentences; it does not fit the stereotype of what crime is supposed to look like; corporate criminals, even after conviction, rarely consider themselves equivalent to common criminals; conviction tends not to be personally discrediting or stigmatizing; and very few corporate criminals set out to intentionally harm their victims; rather, they calculate public harm within the framework of “risk assessment.” Moreover, their perpetrators tend to be respectable individuals. Most of the public sees a fundamental incongruity in a respectable executive being marched off in handcuffs to a correctional facility that typically holds murders, rapists, and armed robbers. These features are serious impediments to strong public censure.
