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. This chapter describes what is known about the white-collar offender or, to put it more accurately, about the people who commit white-collar types of crimes.
