ABSTRACT
Though he took only one course in the field as a student, Edwin H. Sutherland has come to be recognized as America's most prominent and influential criminologist. Prior to Sutherland, American criminology was mired in a multiplicity of biological determinist and psychiatric individualist explanations of crime. Criminals and criminal behavior were looked for and assumed to be concentrated only among the lower classes. When Sutherland died in 1950, taken by a stroke as he was walking across the IU campus on his way to class, he was arguably America's most prominent criminologist, influential and respected among academics and practitioners alike, with the exception of J. Edgar Hoover, generally reputed to be America's number-one crimefighter. It is not surprising that Hoover had declined the invitation that Sutherland and National Institute on Mercenary Crime (NIMC) offered him in 1931 to join the movement against mercenary crime.
