Understanding White Collar Crime

Understanding White Collar Crime is a comprehensive yet concise tour through the statutes, legal opinions, procedures, and policies that make up one of the most fascinating and fast growing areas of the law: white collar and corporate crime. While the book will serve primarily as a text for law and business students in white collar crime, federal criminal law, and corporate crime classes, it is also an unrivaled desk reference for practicing lawyers, compliance professionals, and business leaders. The complexities of mainstay white collar crimes--from wire fraud and insider trading to computer crime and money laundering--are made clear through straightforward analyses of statutory elements, supported by a discussion of the main U.S. Supreme Court and Circuit Court cases interpreting those statutes. Understanding White Collar Crime fills a much-needed gap between law school case book and practitioner hornbook, providing succinct case summaries instead of excerpted opinions, which can bog readers down in unnecessary procedure. This allows for a deeper and more nuanced discussion of the prevailing, yet oftentimes conflicting, law in this dynamic area. In addition, the book explores the significant policy issues that arise in white collar and corporate crime investigations, prosecutions, pretrial diversion agreements, and sentencings. J. Kelly Strader, Irwin R. Buchalter Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School, and Todd Haugh, Associate Professor of Business Law and Ethics at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, are both award winning scholars and teachers with many decades of experience practicing, teaching, and researching white collar and corporate crime. They have authored a text that aims to educate students, practitioners, and experts alike through their practical, yet comprehensive style.

Unlike other books of its kind, Understanding White-Collar Crime: An Opportunity Perspective uses a coherent theoretical perspective in its coverage of white-collar crime. Using opportunity perspective, or the assumption that all crimes depend on offenders having some sort of opportunity to commit an offense, allows the authors to uncover the processes leading up to white-collar crimes and offer potential solutions to this rampant issue, without being reductive in their treatment of the topic. With this second edition, Benson and Simpson have greatly expanded their coverage to include new case studies, substantive materials, and an annotated appendix of online resources to make this a core book for courses on white-collar crime.

This book introduces the concept of white collar crime, which is popularly associated with high status and powerful offenders and takes place within working environments. It includes the study of corporate crime. It looks at a variety of forms of white collar crime, such as fraud, corruption, employment, consumer, safety and environmental crime.

What drives wealthy and powerful people to white-collar crime? Why They Do It is a breakthrough look at the dark side of the business world. From the financial fraudsters of Enron, to the embezzlers at Tyco, to the insider traders at McKinsey, to the Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff, the failings of corporate titans are regular fixtures in the news. In Why They Do It, Harvard Business School professor Eugene Soltes draws from extensive personal interaction and correspondence with nearly fifty former executives as well as the latest research in psychology, criminology, and economics to investigate how once-celebrated executives become white-collar criminals. White-collar criminals are not merely driven by excessive greed or hubris, nor do they usually carefully calculate costs and benefits before breaking the law. Instead, Soltes shows that most of the executives who committed crimes made decisions the way we all do-on the basis of their intuitions and gut feelings. The trouble is that these gut feelings are often poorly suited for the modern business world where leaders are increasingly distanced from the consequences of their decisions and the individuals they impact. The extraordinary costs of corporate misconduct are clear to its victims. Yet, never before have we been able to peer so deeply into the minds of the many prominent perpetrators of white-collar crime. With the increasing globalization of business threatening us with even more devastating corporate misconduct, the lessons Soltes draws in Why They Do It are needed more urgently than ever.

Introduction to the varieties and characteristics of white collar crime -- Detection, prosecution, law and legislation -- Exposing employee theft, fraud, computer crime, tax fraud, crimes against consumers, employee and public safety issues, and pollution.

Chapter 9 Internal white-collar crime investigations

White-collar crime costs the United States more than $300 billion each year. It is surprisingly common, with one in every three Americans eventually becoming a victim. The criminals often dismiss these crimes as victimless, but those unfortunate enough to fall prey would disagree. An Introduction to Corporate and White-Collar Crime provides readers with an understanding of what white-collar crime is, how it works, and the extent to which it exists in our society. The broad-based coverage in this text analyzes the opportunity structures for committing white-collar crime and explores new ways of thinking about how to control it. Topics include: Theories behind white-collar crime, including social and psychological theories Routine activity, crime pattern, and situational crime prevention theories Laws that govern the securities industries, including the Securities Exchange Act and Sarbanes–Oxley Bank fraud, money laundering, racketeering, and organized crime Crimes involving public officials and obstruction of justice Control and prevention of white-collar crimes and sanctions for white-collar criminals The material is organized and presented in a logical fashion, with each chapter building from the previous content. Every chapter begins with objectives to help readers focus on the topic and concludes with review questions to test assimilation of the material and promote debate. Several chapters conclude with a practicum to facilitate real-world understanding of the material.

A comprehensive and state-of the-art overview from internationally-recognized experts on white-collar crime covering a broad range of topics from many perspectives Law enforcement professionals and criminal justice scholars have debated the most appropriate definition of “white-collar crime” ever since Edwin Sutherland first coined the phrase in his speech to the American Sociological Society in 1939. The conceptual ambiguity surrounding the term has challenged efforts to construct a body of science that meaningfully informs policy and theory. The Handbook of White-Collar Crime is a unique re-framing of traditional discussions that discusses common topics of white-collar crime—who the offenders are, who the victims are, how these crimes are punished, theoretical explanations—while exploring how the choice of one definition over another affects research and scholarship on the subject. Providing a one-volume overview of research on white-collar crime, this book presents diverse perspectives from an international team of both established and newer scholars that review theory, policy, and empirical work on a broad range of topics. Chapters explore the extent and cost of white-collar crimes, individual- as well as organizational- and macro-level theories of crime, law enforcement roles in prevention and intervention, crimes in Africa and South America, the influence of technology and globalization, and more. This important resource: Explores diverse implications for future theory, policy, and research on current and emerging issues in the field Clarifies distinct characteristics of specific types of offences within the general archetype of white-collar crime Includes chapters written by researchers from countries commonly underrepresented in the field Examines the real-world impact of ambiguous definitions of white-collar crime on prevention, investigation, and punishment Offers critical examination of how definitional decisions steer the direction of criminological scholarship Accessible to readers at the undergraduate level, yet equally relevant for experienced practitioners, academics, and researchers, The Handbook of White-Collar Crime is an innovative, substantial contribution to contemporary scholarship in the field.