ABSTRACT
The traditional account of opportunity theory as an explanation for crimes of the powerless continues to hold great attraction. Inequality, Crime and Public Policy began to explore the theory and empirical evidence in support of the proposition that societies with more unequal distributions of wealth and power will have deeper crime problems. Sutherland did show that white-collar crime is frequent, when white-collar crime is defined as ‘a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation’ The prediction of the theory, nevertheless, is that even where hegemony is strong, inequality will still have some effect on the crime rate because: hegemony will never be total, and because hegemony undermines feelings of being exploited without undermining the ideology of exploitation that enables the victimisation of the exploited.
