White-Collar Criminality

Author(s): Edwin H. Sutherland

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Source: American Sociological Review, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Feb., 1940), pp. 1-12
Published by: American Sociological Association
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 cA'merican
SOCIOLOGICAL
REVIEW

Volume 5 FEBRUARY, 1940 Number 1

WHITE-COLLAR CRIMINALITY
EDWIN H. SUTHERLAND
Indiana University
T HISPAPER1is concerned with crime in relation to business. The econo-
mists are well acquainted with business methods but not accustomed
to consider them from the point of view of crime; many sociologists are
well acquainted with crime but not accustomed to consider it as expressed in
business. This paper is an attempt to integrate these two bodies of knowl-
edge. More accurately stated, it is a comparison of crime in the upper or
white-collar class, composed of respectable or at least respected business
and professional men, and crime in the lower class, composed of persons of
low socioeconomic status. This comparison is made for the purpose of de-
veloping the theories of criminal behavior, not for the purpose of muckrak-
ing or of reforming anything except criminology.
The criminal statistics show unequivocally that crime, as popularly con-
ceivedand officially measured, has a high incidence in the lower class and a
low incidence in the upper class; less than two percent of the persons com-
mitted to prisons in a year belong to the upper class. These statistics refer
to criminals handled by the police, the criminal and juvenile courts, and the
prisons, and to such crimes as murder, assault, burglary, robbery, larcency,
sex offenses, and drunkenness, but exclude traffic violations.
The criminologists have used the case histories and criminal statistics
derived from these agencies of criminal justice as their principal data. From
them, they have derived general theories of criminal behavior. These theo-
ries are that, since crime is concentrated in the lower class, it is caused by
poverty or by personal and social characteristics believed to be associated
statistically with poverty, including feeblemindedness, psychopathic devi-
ations, slum neighborhoods, and "deteriorated" families. This statement, of
course, does not do justice to the qualifications and variations in the con-

' Thirty-fourth Annual Presidential Address delivered at Philadelphia, Pa., Dec. 27, I939
in joint meeting with the American Economic Society (its Fifty-second) at which President
Jacob Viner spoke on the relations of economic theory to the formulation of public policy.
I
2 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

ventional theories of criminal behavior, but it presents correctly their cen-

tral tendency.
The thesis of this paper is that the conception and explanations of crime
which have just been described are misleading and incorrect, that crime is in
fact not closely correlated with poverty or with the psychopathic and socio-
pathic conditions associated with poverty, and that an adequate explana-
tion of criminal behavior must proceed along quite different lines. The con-
ventional explanations are invalid principally because they are derived from
biased samples. The samples are biased in that they have not included vast
areas of criminal behavior of persons not in the lower class. One of these
neglected areas is the criminal behavior of business and professional men,
which will be analyzed in this paper.
The "robber barons" of the last half of the nineteenth century were
white-collar criminals, as practically everyone now agrees. Their attitudes
are illustrated by these statements: Colonel Vanderbilt asked, "You don't
suppose you can run a railroad in accordance with the statutes, do you?"
A. B. Stickney, a railroad president, said to sixteen other railroad presidents
in the home of J. P. Morgan in i890, "I have the utmost respect for you
gentlemen, individually, but as railroad presidents I wouldn't trust you
with my watch out of my sight." Charles Francis Adams said, "The diffi-
culty in railroad management . . . lies in the covetousness, want of good
faith, and low moral tone of railway managers, in the complete absence of
any high standard of commercial honesty."
The present-day white-collar criminals, who are more suave and decep-
tive than the "robber barons," are represented by Krueger, Stavisky, Whit-
ney, Mitchell, Foshay, Insull, the Van Sweringens, Musica-Coster, Fall,
Sinclair, and many other merchant princes and captains of finance and
industry, and by a host of lesser followers. Their criminality has been dem-
onstrated again and again in the investigations of land offices, railways,
insurance, munitions, banking, public utilities, stock exchanges, the oil in-
dustry, real estate, reorganization committees, receiverships, bankruptcies,
and politics. Individual cases of such criminality are reported frequently,
and in many periods more important crime news may be found on the
financial pages of newspapers than on the front pages. White-collar crim-
inality is found in every occupation, as can be discovered readily in casual
conversation with a representative of an occupation by asking him, "What
crooked practices are found in your occupation ?"
White-collar criminality in business is expressed most frequently in the
form of misrepresentation in financial statements of corporations, manipu-
lation in the stock exchange, commercial bribery, bribery of public officials
directly or indirectly in order to secure favorable contracts and legislation,
misrepresentation in advertising and salesmanship, embezzlement and mis-
application of funds, short weights and measures and misgrading of com-
 WHITE-COLLARCRIMINALITY 3
modities, tax frauds, misapplication of funds in receiverships and bankrupt-
cies. These are what Al Capone called "the legitimate rackets." These and
many others are found in abundance in the business world.
In the medical profession, which is here used as an example because it is
probably less criminalistic than some other professions, are found illegal
sale of alcohol and narcotics, abortion, illegal services to underworld crim-
inals, fraudulent reports and testimony in accident cases, extreme cases of
unnecessary treatment, fake specialists, restriction of competition, and fee-
splitting. Fee-splitting is a violation of a specific law in many states and
a violation of the conditions of admission to the practice of medicine in all.
The physician who participates in fee-splitting tends to send his patients
to the surgeon who will give him the largest fee rather than to the surgeon
who will do the best work. It has been reported that two thirds of the sur-
geons in New York City split fees, and that more than one half of the physi-
cians in a central western city who answered a questionnaire on this point
favored fee-splitting.
These varied types of white-collar crimes in business and the professions
consist principally of violation of delegated or implied trust, and many of
them can be reduced to two categories: misrepresentation of asset values
and duplicity in the manipulation of power. The first is approximately the
same as fraud or swindling; the second is similar to the double-cross. The
latter is illustrated by the corporation director who, acting on inside infor-
mation, purchases land which the corporation will need and sells it at a fan-
tastic profit to his corporation. The principle of this duplicity is that the
offender holds two antagonistic positions, one of which is a position of trust,
which is violated, generally by misapplication of funds, in the interest of
the other position. A football coach, permitted to referee a game in which
his own team was playing, would illustrate this antagonism of positions.
Such situations cannot be completely avoided in a complicated business
structure, but many concerns make a practice of assuming such antagonistic
functions and regularly violating the trust thus delegated to them. When
compelled by law to make a separation of their functions, they make a
nominal separation and continue by subterfuge to maintain the two positions.
An accurate statistical comparison of the crimes of the two classes is not
available. The most extensive evidence regarding the nature and prevalence
of white-collar criminality is found in the reports of the larger investigations
to which reference was made. Because of its scattered character, that evi-
dence is assumed rather than summarized here. A few statements will be
presented, as illustrations rather than as proof of the prevalence of this
criminality.
The Federal Trade Commission in i920 reported that commercial bribery
was a prevalent and common practice in many industries. In certain chain
stores, the net shortage in weights was sufficient to pay 3.4 percent on the
4 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICALREVIEW
investment in those commodities. Of the cans of ether sold to the Army in
I923-I925, 70 percent were rejected because of impurities. In Indiana, dur-
ing the summer of I934, 40 percent of the ice cream samples tested in a
routine manner by the Division of Public Health were in violation of law.
The Comptroller of the Currency in i908 reported that violations of law
were found in 75 percent of the banks examined in a three months' period.
Lie detector tests of all employees in several Chicago banks, supported in
almost all cases by confessions, showed that 20 percent of them had stolen
bank property. A public accountant estimated, in the period prior to the
Securities and Exchange Commission, that 8o percent of the financial state-
ments of corporations were misleading. James M. Beck said, "Diogenes
would have been hard put to it to find an honest man in the Wall Street
which I knew as a corporation lawyer" (in i9i6).
White-collar criminality in politics, which is generally recognized as fairly
prevalent, has been used by some as a rough gauge by which to measure
white-collar criminality in business. James A. Farley said, "The standards of
conduct are as high among officeholders and politicians as they are in com-
mercial life," and Cermak, while mayor of Chicago, said, "There is less graft
in politics than in business." John Flynn wrote, "The average politician is
the merest amateur in the gentle art of graft, compared with his brother in
the field of business." And Walter Lippmann wrote, "Poor as they are, the
standards of public life are so much more social than those of business that
financiers who enter politics regard themselves as philanthropists."
These statements obviously do not give a precise measurement of the
relative criminality of the white-collar class, but they are adequate evidence
that crime is not so highly concentrated in the lower class as the usual statis-
tics indicate. Also, these statements obviously do not mean that every busi-
ness and professional man is a criminal, just as the usual theories do not
mean that every man in the lower class is a criminal. On the other hand,
the preceding statements refer in many cases to the leading corporations in
America and are not restricted to the disreputable business and professional
men who are called quacks, ambulance chasers, bucket-shop operators,
dead-beats, and fly-by-night swindlers.2
The financial cost of white-collar crime is probably several times as great
as the financial cost of all the crimes which are customarily regarded as the
2 Perhaps it should be repeated that "white-collar" (upper) and "lower" classes merely
designate persons of high and low socioeconomic status. Income and amount of money in-
volved in the crime are not the sole criteria. Many persons of "low" socioeconomic status are
"white-collar" criminals in the sense that they are well-dressed, well-educated, and have high
incomes, but "white-collar" as used in this paper means "respected," "socially accepted and
approved," "looked up to." Some people in this class may not be well-dressed or well-educated,
nor have high incomes, although the "upper" usually exceed the "lower" classes in these
respects as well as in social status.
 WHITE-COLLAR CRIMINALITY 5

"crime problem." An officer of a chain grocery store in one year embezzled

$6oo,ooo, which was six times as much as the annual losses from five hun-
dred burglaries and robberies of the stores in that chain. Public enemies
numbered one to six secured $130,000 by burglary and robbery in I938,
while the sum stolen by Krueger is estimated at $250,000,oo0, or nearly two
thousand times as much. The New York Times in I93i reported four cases
of embezzlement in the United States with a loss of more than a million
dollars each and a combined loss of nine million dollars. Although a million-
dollar burglar or robber is practically unheard of, these million-dollar em-
bezzlers are small-fry among white-collar criminals. The estimated loss to
investors in one investment trust from i929 to I935 was $580,ooo,ooo, due
primarily to the fact that 75 percent of the values in the portfolio were in
securities of affiliated companies, although it advertised the importance of
diversification in investments and its expert services in selecting safe se-
curities. In Chicago, the claim was made six years ago that householders
had lost $54,000,000 in two years during the administration of a city sealer
who granted immunity from inspection to stores which provided Christmas
baskets for his constituents.
The financial loss from white-collar crime, great as it is, is less important
than the damage to social relations. White-collar crimes violate trust and
therefore create distrust, which lowers social morale and produces social
disorganization on a large scale. Other crimes produce relatively little ef-
fect on social institutions or social organization.
White-collar crime is real crime. It is not ordinarily called crime, and call-
ing it by this name does not make it worse, just as refraining from calling it
crime does not make it better than it otherwise would be. It is called crime
here in order to bring it within the scope of criminology, which is justified
because it is in violation of the criminal law. The crucial question in this
analysis is the criterion of violation of the criminal law. Conviction in the
criminal court, which is sometimes suggested as the criterion, is not ade-
quate because a large proportion of those who commit crimes are not
convicted in criminal courts. This criterion, therefore, needs to be supple-
mented. When it is supplemented, the criterion of the crimes of one class
must be kept consistent in general terms with the criterion of the crimes of
the other class. The definition should not be the spirit of the law for white-
collar crimes and the letter of the law for other crimes, or in other respects
be more liberal for one class than for the other. Since this discussion is
concerned with the conventional theories of the criminologists, the criterion
of white-collar crime must be justified in terms of the procedures of those
criminologists in dealing with other crimes. The criterion of white-collar
crimes, as here proposed, supplements convictions in the criminal courts in
four respects, in each of which the extension is justified because the crimi-
6 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
nologists who present the conventional theories of criminal behavior make
the same extension in principle.
First, other agencies than the criminal court must be included, for the
criminal court is not the only agency which makes official decisions regard-
ing violations of the criminal law. The juvenile court, dealing largely with
offenses of the children of the poor, in many states is not under the criminal
jurisdiction. The criminologists have made much use of case histories and
statistics of juvenile delinquents in constructing their theories of criminal
behavior. This justifies the inclusion of agencies other than the criminal
court which deal with white-collar offenses. The most important of these
agencies are the administrative boards, bureaus, or commissions, and much
of their work, although certainly not all, consists of cases which are in viola-
tion of the criminal law. The Federal Trade Commission recently ordered
several automobile companies to stop advertising their interest rate on in-
stallment purchases as 6 percent, since it was actually ii percent. Also it
filed complaint against GoodHousekeeping, one of the Hearst publications,
charging that its seals led the public to believe that all products bearing
those seals had been tested in their laboratories, which was contrary to fact.
Each of these involves a charge of dishonesty, which might have been tried
in a criminal court as fraud. A large proportion of the cases before these
boards should be included in the data of the criminologists. Failure to do so
is a principal reason for the bias in their samples and the errors in their gen-
eralizations.
Second, for both classes, behavior which would have a reasonable expect-
ancy of conviction if tried in a criminal court or substitute agency should be
defined as criminal. In this respect, convictability rather than actual con-
viction should be the criterion of criminality. The criminologists would not
hesitate to accept as data a verified case history of a person who was a crim-
inal but had never been convicted. Similarly, it is justifiable to include
white-collar criminals who have not been convicted, provided reliable evi-
dence is available. Evidence regarding such cases appears in many civil
suits, such as stockholders' suits and patent-infringement suits. These cases
might have been referred to the criminal court but they were referred to
the civil court because the injured party was more interested in securing
damages than in seeing punishment inflicted. This also happens in em-
bezzlement cases, regarding which surety companies have much evidence.
In a short consecutive series of embezzlements known to a surety company,
go percent were not prosecuted because prosecution would interfere with
restitution or salvage. The evidence in cases of embezzlement is generally
conclusive, and would probably have been sufficient to justify conviction
in all of the cases in this series.
Third, behavior should be defined as criminal if conviction is avoided
 WHITE-COLLAR CRIMINALITY 7

merely because of pressure which is brought to bear on the court or substi-

tute agency. Gangsters and racketeers have been relatively immune in
many cities because of their pressure on prospective witnesses and public
officials, and professional thieves, such as pickpockets and confidence men
who do not use strong-arm methods, are even more frequently immune. The
conventional criminologists do not hesitate to include the life histories of
such criminals as data, because they understand the generic relation of the
pressures to the failure to convict. Similarly, white-collar criminals are rela-
tively immune because of the class bias of the courts and the power of their
class to influence the implementation and administration of the law. This
class bias affects not merely present-day courts but to a much greater
degree affected the earlier courts which established the precedents and rules
of procedure of the present-day courts. Consequently, it is justifiable to in-
terpret the actual or potential failures of conviction in the light of known
facts regarding the pressures brought to bear on the agencies which deal
with offenders.
Fourth, persons who are accessory to a crime should be included among
white-collar criminals as they are among other criminals. When the Federal
Bureau of Investigation deals with a case of kidnapping, it is not content
with catching the offenders who carried away the victim; they may catch
and the court may convict twenty-five other persons who assisted by se-
creting the victim, negotiating the ransom, or putting the ransom money
into circulation. On the other hand, the prosecution of white-collar crim-
inals frequently stops with one offender. Political graft almost always in-
volves collusion between politicians and business men but prosecutions are
generally limited to the politicians. Judge Manton was found guilty of ac-
cepting $664,000 in bribes, but the six or eight important commercial con-
cerns that paid the bribes have not been prosecuted. Pendergast, the late
boss of Kansas City, was convicted for failure to report as a part of his in-
come $3iSooo received in bribes from insurance companies but the insur-
ance companies which paid the bribes have not been prosecuted. In an
investigation of an embezzlement by the president of a bank, at least a
dozen other violations of law which were related to this embezzlement and
involved most of the other officers of the bank and the officers of the clear-
ing house, were discovered but none of the others was prosecuted.
This analysis of the criterion of white-collar criminality results in the con-
clusion that a description of white-collar criminality in general terms will
be also a description of the criminality of the lower class. The respects in
which the crimes of the two classes differ are the incidentals rather than the
essentials of criminality. They differ principally in the implementation of
the criminal laws which apply to them. The crimes of the lower class are
handled by policemen, prosecutors, and judges, with penal sanctions in the
8 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICALREVIEW
form of fines, imprisonment, and death. The crimes of the upper class either
result in no official action at all, or result in suits for damages in civil courts,
or are handled by inspectors, and by administrative boards or commissions,
with penal sanctions in the form of warnings, orders to cease and desist,
occasionally the loss of a license, and only in extreme cases by fines or prison
sentences. Thus, the white-collar criminals are segregated administratively
from other criminals, and largely as a consequence of this are not re-
garded as real criminals by themselves, the general public, or the criminol-
ogists.
This difference in the implementation of the criminal law is due princi-
pally to the difference in the social position of the two types of offenders.
Judge Woodward, when imposing sentence upon the officials of the H. 0.
Stone and Company, bankrupt real estate firm in Chicago, who had been
convicted in I933 of the use of the mails to defraud, said to them, "You are
men of affairs, of experience, of refinement and culture, of excellent reputa-
tion and standing in the business and social world." That statement might
be used as a general characterization of white-collar criminals for they are
oriented basically to legitimate and respectable careers. Because of their
social status they have a loud voice in determining what goes into the
statutes and how the criminal law as it affects themselves is implemented
and administered. This may be illustrated from the Pure Food and Drug
Law. Between I879 and i906, I40 pure food and drug bills were presented
in Congress and all failed because of the importance of the persons who
would be affected. It took a highly dramatic performance by Dr. Wiley in
i906 to induce Congress to enact the law. That law, however, did not create
a new crime, just as the federal Lindbergh kidnapping law did not create a
new crime; it merely provided a more efficient implementation of a principle
which had been formulated previously in state laws. When an amendment
to this law, which would bring within the scope of its agents fraudulent
statements made over the radio or in the press, was presented to Congress,
the publishers and advertisers organized support and sent a lobby to Wash-
ington which successfully fought the amendment principally under the
slogans of "freedom of the press" and "dangers of bureaucracy." This pro-
posed amendment, also, would not have created a new crime, for the state
laws already prohibited fraudulent statements over the radio or in the
press; it would have implemented the law so it could have been enforced.
Finally, the Administration has not been able to enforce the law as it has
desired because of the pressures by the offenders against the law, sometimes
brought to bear through the head of the Department of Agriculture, some-
times through congressmen who threaten cuts in the appropriation, and
sometimes by others. The statement of Daniel Drew, a pious old fraud,
describes the criminal law with some accuracy, "Law is like a cobweb; it's
 WHITE-COLLARCRIMINALITY 9
made for flies and the smaller kinds of insects, so to speak, but lets the big
bumblebees break through. When technicalities of the law stood in my way,
I have always been able to brush them aside easy as anything."
The preceding analysis should be regarded neither as an assertion that
all efforts to influence legislation and its administration are reprehensible
nor as a particularistic interpretation of the criminal law. It means only
that the upper class has greater influence in moulding the criminal law and
its administration to its own interests than does the lower class. The privi-
leged position of white-collar criminals before the law results to a slight
extent from bribery and political pressures, principally from the respect in
which they are held and without special effort on their part. The most
powerful group in medieval society secured relative immunity by "benefit
of clergy," and now our most powerful groups secure relative immunity by
"benefit of business or profession."
In contrast with the power of the white-collar criminals is the weakness of
their victims. Consumers, investors, and stockholders are unorganized, lack
technical knowledge, and cannot protect themselves. Daniel Drew, after
taking a large sum of money by sharp practice from Vanderbilt in the Erie
deal, concluded that it was a mistake to take money from a powerful man on
the same level as himself and declared that in the future he would confine
his efforts to outsiders, scattered all over the country, who wouldn't be able
to organize and fight back. White-collar criminality flourishes at points
where powerful business and professional men come in contact with per-
sons who are weak. In this respect, it is similar to stealing candy from a
baby. Many of the crimes of the lower class, on the other hand, are com-
mitted against persons of wealth and power in the form of burglary and
robbery. Because of this difference in the comparative power of the victims,
the white-collar criminals enjoy relative immunity.
Embezzlement is an interesting exception to white-collar criminality in
this respect. Embezzlement is usually theft from an employer by an em-
ployee, and the employee is less capable of manipulating social and legal
forces in his own interest than is the employer. As might have been ex-
pected, the laws regarding embezzlement were formulated long before laws
for the protection of investors and consumers.
The theory that criminal behavior in general is due either to poverty or
to the psychopathic and sociopathic conditions associated with poverty can
now be shown to be invalid for three reasons. First, the generalization is
based on a biased sample which omits almost entirely the behavior of white-
collar criminals. The criminologists have restricted their data, for reasons
of convenience and ignorance rather than of principle, largely to cases dealt
with in criminal courts and juvenile courts, and these agencies are used
principally for criminals from the lower economic strata. Consequently,
Io AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICALREVIEW
their data are grossly biased from the point of view of the economic status
of criminals and their generalization that criminality is closely associated
with poverty is not justified.
Second, the generalization that criminality is closely associated with
poverty obviously does not apply to white-collar criminals. With a small
number of exceptions, they are not in poverty, were not reared in slums or
badly deteriorated families, and are not feebleminded or psychopathic.
They were seldom problem children in their earlier years and did not
appear in juvenile courts or child guidance clinics. The proposition, de-
rived from the data used by the conventional criminologists, that "the
criminal of today was the problem child of yesterday" is seldom true of
white-collar criminals. The idea that the causes of criminality are to be
found almost exclusively in childhood similarly is fallacious. Even if pover-
ty is extended to include the economic stresses which afflict business in a
period of depression, it is not closely correlated with white-collar crim-
inality. Probably at no time within fifty years have white-collar crimes in
the field of investments and of corporate management been so extensive as
during the boom period of the twenties.
Third, the conventional theories do not even explain lower class criminal-
ity. The sociopathic and psychopathic factors which have been emphasized
doubtless have something to do with crime causation, but these factors have
not been related to a general process which is found both in white-collar
criminality and lower class criminality and therefore they do not explain
the criminality of either class. They may explain the manner or method of
crime why lower class criminals commit burglary or robbery rather than
false pretenses.
In view of these defects in the conventional theories, an hypothesis that
will explain both white-collar criminality and lower class criminality is
needed. For reasons of economy, simplicity, and logic, the hypothesis should
apply to both classes, for this will make possible the analysis of causal fac-
tors freed from the encumbrances of the administrative devices which have
led criminologists astray. Shaw and McKay and others, working exclusively
in the field of lower class crime, have found the conventional theories inade-
quate to account for variations within the data of lower class crime and
from that point of view have been working toward an explanation of crime
in terms of a more general social process. Such efforts will be greatly aided
by the procedure which has been described.
The hypothesis which is here suggested as a substitute for the conven-
tional theories is that white-collar criminality, just as other systematic
criminality, is learned; that it is learned in direct or indirect association
with those who already practice the behavior; and that those who learn
this criminal behavior are segregated from frequent and intimate contacts
 WHITE-COLLARCRIMINALITY II

with law-abiding behavior. Whether a person becomes a criminal or not is

determined largely by the comparative frequency and intimacy of his con-
tacts with the two types of behavior. This may be called the process of dif-
ferential association. It is a genetic explanation both of white-collar crim-
inality and lower class criminality. Those who become white-collar crimi-
nals generally start their careers in good neighborhoods and good homes,
graduate from colleges with some idealism, and with little selection on their
part, get into particular business situations in which criminality is prac-
tically a folkway and are inducted into that system of behavior just as into
any other folkway. The lower class criminals generally start their careers
in deteriorated neighborhoods and families, find delinquents at hand from
whom they acquire the attitudes toward, and techniques of, crime through
association with delinquents and in partial segregation from law-abiding
people. The essentials of the process are the same for the two classes of
criminals. This is not entirely a process of assimilation, for inventions are
frequently made, perhaps more frequently in white-collar crime than in
lower class crime. The inventive geniuses for the lower class criminals are
generally professional criminals, while the inventive geniuses for many
kinds of white-collar crime are generally lawyers.
A second general process is social disorganization in the community. Dif-
ferential association culminates in crime because the community is not or-
ganized solidly against that behavior. The law is pressing in one direction,
and other forces are pressing in the opposite direction. In business, the
"rules of the game" conflict with the legal rules. A business man who wants
to obey the law is driven by his competitors to adopt their methods. This is
well illustrated by the persistence of commercial bribery in spite of the
strenuous efforts of business organizations to eliminate it. Groups and in-
dividuals are individuated; they are more concerned with their specialized
group or individual interests than with the larger welfare. Consequently, it
is not possible for the community to present a solid front in opposition to
crime. The Better Business Bureaus and Crime Commissions, composed of
business and professional men, attack burglary, robbery, and cheap swin-
dles, but overlook the crimes of their own members. The forces which im-
pinge on the lower class are similarly in conflict. Social disorganization
affects the two classes in similar ways.
I have presented a brief and general description of white-collar criminal-
ity on a framework of argument regarding theories of criminal behavior.
That argument, stripped of the description, may be stated in the following
propositions:
I. White-collar criminality is real criminality, being in all cases in viola-
tion of the criminal law.
2. White-collar criminality differs from lower class criminality principal-
12 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

ly in an implementation of the criminal law which segregates white-collar

criminals administratively from other criminals.
3. The theories of the criminologists that crime is due to poverty or to
psychopathic and sociopathic conditions statistically associated with pov-
erty are invalid because, first, they are derived from samples which are
grossly biased with respect to socioeconomic status; second, they do not
apply to the white-collar criminals; and third, they do not even explain the
criminality of the lower class, since the factors are not related to a general
process characteristic of all criminality.
4. A theory of criminal behavior which will explain both white-collar
criminality and lower class criminality is needed.
S. An hypothesis of this nature is suggested in terms of differential asso-
ciation and social disorganization.