White Collar Crime And Offenders

Provides a portrait of white-collar criminals and their punishments. The authors of this book argue that white-collar crime is committed largely by the middle classes and as opportunities for financial wrong-doing increase so will people's susceptability.

For more than three decades, rational-choice theory has reigned as the dominant approach both for interpreting crime and as underpinning for crime-control programs. Although it has been applied to an array of street crimes, white-collar crime and those who commit it have thus far received less attention. Choosing White-Collar Crime is a systematic application of rational-choice theory to problems of explaining and controlling white-collar crime. It distinguishes ordinary and upperworld white-collar crime and presents reasons theoretically for believing that both have increased substantially in recent decades. Reasons for the increase include the growing supply of white-collar lure and non-credible oversight. Choosing White-Collar Crime also examines criminal decision making by white-collar criminals and their criminal careers. The book concludes with reasons for believing that problems of white-collar crime will continue unchecked in the increasingly global economy and calls for strengthened citizen movements to rein in the increases.

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.

Approaches white-collar crime from a coherent theoretical perspective, critiquing the roles of socioeconomic class, gender, ethnicity, and race, and analyzing the latest case studies from around the world, like the new forms of fraud emerging in the wake of the COVID pandemic Addresses the growing social problem of crimes of the powerful with full intersectionality, broadening this textbook's appeal to the race and ethnic studies audience A leading competitor in the white-collar crime textbook market due to its rigor and timeliness

This book presents descriptions of theories about white-collar crime offenders and offenses. A case study is developed from a sample of 369 white-collar criminals generated by extracting newspaper stories and supplemented by court records. Numerous approaches to white-collar crime are organized and applied to the database. Theories are cataloged and tested against empirical data. The main aim of this book is to present a framework for a general theory of white-collar crime based on a number of sub-theories. Over the years, from research done on white-collar crime, three major characteristics have been attributed. First there is economics, where non-violent acts are committed for financial gain. Next there is organization, where offenders take advantage of professional authority and power to commit crime. Finally, there is behavior, where a number of deviant personality traits are often found.Criminal investigation is a procedure or method for reconstructing the past. Its purpose is creating an account of what has happened, how it happened, and who did what to make it happen. Private investigation cases are evaluated based on a number of theories and criteria. The success or failure of a private investigation can be measured at different stages in the process: basis for initiation of investigation, work methodology, investigation results, and investigation consequences. This book presents case studies of private investigation reports by financial crime specialists and fraud examiners.

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 is a landmark in the study of white-collar crime and is the largest study of its kind ever conducted. This book will serve the needs of criminologists, policy-makers and the public as well. It will address the issue of what white-collar crime is, how social scientists have grappled with its definition, and report on the results of a 20-year longitudinal study of white-collar offenders. The frequency of their criminal conduct is analyzed and compared to other types of offenders. The study involved retrospectively analyzing the data on the criminal careers on a very large cohort of more than 17,000 offenders.The purpose of the study was to:(1) test hypothese about white-collar and street crime offenders, (2) evaluate and critique theories of crime in relation to both types of offenders, (3) determine the extent of chronic offending among white-collar and street crime offenders within the career criminal paradigm, and (4) measure the degree of offense specialization found among all the offenders in the study.