ABSTRACT
In his definition of white-collar crime and in his many writings on the subject, Edwin H. Sutherland described the white-collar offender as a person of respectability and high social status who commits an offense during the course of his or her occupation. In the mid-1970s, a group of researchers led by Stanton Wheeler of Yale University conducted a study of white-collar offenders in the federal judicial system. The Yale researchers began by identifying eight offenses in the federal criminal code that most scholars and lay people would agree were white-collar type crimes. The eight offenses were: securities violations, antitrust violations, bribery, bank embezzlement, mail and wire fraud, tax fraud, false claims and statements, and credit and lending institution fraud. Contemporary data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission shows that the demographic makeup of the people who commit white-collar types of crimes has changed dramatically since the 1970s. This chapter describes what we know about the people who commit white-collar type crimes.
