Assignment: Provide a three to five page assessment of the application of theory to crimes of the powerful. Be sure to show me you understand the theories and theory integration presented in the chapter you are assigned for this week. Do not merely restate the theory verbatim, discuss it showing me you understand it, how, and why might it explain WCC/COP? In other words, how could each theory help explain white-collar crime or crimes of the powerful or do they fail to do so and if so why? Does integrating them and looking at all of the levels of analysis help? How so or how not? Format: This assignment should be a 3-5 page essay (plus any references drawn on), double spaced, Time New Roman, 12 font with 1 inch margins. Goals: To apply theoretical concepts to cases of white-collar crime. To gain a basic foundation of criminological theory. Objectives: To understand criminological theories. To understand how they can explain a certain phenomenon.

1. Read Rothe and Kauzlarich 2016 Chapters 4 2. Read Sutherland Legacy In 1939, Edwin Sutherland gave the Presidential speech at the American Sociological Association conference that revolutionized criminology by taking a different approach to defining and studying crime. Sutherland’s original definition of white-collar crime, however, was very vague and left much room for interpretation (Kramer 1982). A decade later, 1949, Sutherland wrote the first white-collar crime book stating that, “White collar crime may be defined approximately as a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation… [footnoted] the term ‘white collar crime’ is used here to refer principally to business managers and executives” from Sutherland’s White Collar Crime (1949:9). Sutherland looked at corporations such as Westinghouse and others, using a scientific study to examine how many times the corporations violated and were charged for violating regulatory laws. However, when giving his case studies he also talked about the farmer or the shoe salesman and ‘crimes’ committed by them. This was the beginning of the debate of what types of crimes should be included as white-collar crimes as well as what should be considered a crime. The definitional debate continued, and the distinctions of this dispute is seen through what studies develop over the next 50 years and their impetus-the outcome as we will see is two distinct divisions within white-collar crime. Should it be corporate crimes or what is often referred to as occupational crime? We will revisit this question with the following section discussing the Yale school of thought. But it is important to first provide the next several decades of Sutherland’s legacy. We should also note though that Sutherland was not the first to discuss crimes of the white-collar class, but they were not impactive. For example, during the late 1800’s there was talk about “robber barons” and journalists would write about them, but the journalists were only considered to be ‘muckrakers’. Other examples included Upton Sinclair’s “the Jungle” (meat packing industry). Corporations were emerging, the progressive movement was in full swing, and there were reforms regulating corporations (ex. Railroads *though this is often argued it was to benefit corporations more than to regulate them). But it was Sutherland that brought all this together and scientifically studied the phenomena as such. Returning to the Sutherland legacy, from 1949 through the 1960’s not much research on white-collar crime took place. Though Marshall Clinard did a study in 1952 on the Black-Market during World War II where wartime rations were being sold at high profits illegally. Donald Cressy (1953) also wrote about embezzlers in federal prisons as white-collar offenders. In the early 1960’s Gill Geis also kept Sutherland’s concepts alive and did some publishing on WCC. But otherwise, not much research regardless of the ongoing definitional debate of what constitutes WCC. This period is often referred to as the Big Chill period in the United States as many social changes were occurring such as the civil rights movement, Vietnam war protests, to name a few. During the 1970’s, the era of Watergate and other political scandals led to greater recognition of white-collar crime as real crime. During this decade, the United States Justice Department ‘discovers’ white-collar crime as a top investigative priority (Poveda 1994). The defined it as “White-collar offense shall constitute those classes of non-violent illegal activities which principally involve traditional notions of deceit, deception, concealment, manipulation, breach of trust, subterfuge or illegal circumvention” (from Attorney General’s White Collar Crime Committee in 1977) (Poveda 1994:134). Their transformation of white-collar crime into a legal concept resulted in the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigations definition fundamentally altered Sutherland’s concept of white-collar crime by including the criminal acts of non-elite persons within their scope. The Justice Department had also adopted an offense-based rather than offender-based definition. The defining criterion was not who committed the act (elite or non-elite), but the nature of the act itself. Nonetheless, scholars such as Edelhertz (1970) worked toward clarifying the term white-collar crime (though Edlehertz’s definition will be more akin to the traditions of the Yale school of thought). For example, Clinard and Quinney broke white collar crime into separate and distinct concepts of the occupational crime (“offenses committed by individuals for themselves in the course of their occupations and the offenses of employees against their employers”) and corporate crime (“the offenses committed by the corporate officials for their corporation and the offenses of the corporation itself”) (Kramer 1982). In 1977, Richard Quinney’ Class, State, and Crime book was published, and nearly all college radical students took to reading this –and radicalism began to rise. Marxism was revisited in the United States while challenges were being made of major institutions, consumer movements were taking off. Further expansions of what ‘crime’ should be defined as continued. Schrager and Short (1978) examined organizational crime –this was a major turn for white-collar crime as well as it returned to Sutherland’s definition. Shrager and Short argued that the impact of illegal organizational behavior and the characteristics of crimes committed in organizational settings provide a framework for identifying a class of illegal actions as organizational crimes. During the 1980’s, putting Sutherland’s original concepts and definitions aside, corporate crime became considered as a subset of possible white collar crime offenses and corporate crime as a subset or larger offenses under organizational crimes (“criminal acts engaged in by corporate organizations themselves as social and legal entities or by officials or employees of the corporation action, acting on behalf of or in concert with the corporate action”) (Kramer 1982). In 1982, Kramer defines corporate crime as criminal acts (of omission or commission) that are the result of deliberate decision making (or culpable negligence) by persons who occupy structural positions with the organization as corporate executives or managers. The decisions are organization in that they are organizationally based – made in accordance with the operative goals and cultural norms of the organization – and are intended to benefit the corporation itself. Marshall Clinard also returns to studying Corporate Crime with Peter Yeager (a graduate student of Clinard) to conduct the first major empirical study of corporate crime since Sutherland’s study of the 70 corporations called Corporate Crime in 1980. As the study of corporate crime gets on solid footing in criminology, the formal ‘split’ between what white-collar crime is or should be occurs during this same timeframe. The Yale School of thought emerges with a focus on occupational crimes in line with the formal definition provided by the United States Department of Justice- a legalistic and limiting conception of white-collar crime. The Yale School of Thought As we previously noted, with the interest in white-collar crimes, as defined by the Department of Justice, was gaining traction, so to were grants for academics studying white-collar crimes as occupational crimes during the same period the political ‘tough on crime’ mantra was growing. For example, as a result of a grant from the National Institute of Justice, Stanton Wheeler, David Weisburd, Elin Waring and Nancy Bode of Yale University presented their grant research findings in an article titled White Collar Crimes and Criminals (1988) and The Organization as a Weapon in White-Collar Crime (1982) and a couple of books (Crimes of the Middle Classes White-Collar Offenders in the Federal Courts (Weisburd et. Al., 1991); Sitting in Judgement: The Sentencing of White-Collar Criminals (Wheeler, 1992). During this period, other Yale scholars took on occupational crimes as a topic of research including Susan Shapiro (1987) that wrote Wayward Capitalists Targets of the Securities and Exchange Commission; and Kenneth Mann’s (1985) Defending White Collar Crime A Portrait of Attorneys at Work. The Yale School of thought utilized the United States Federal Court System to identify those that commit white-collar crime or occupational crimes. These early Yale researchers identified eight ‘offenses’ under the federal criminal code as the white-collar crimes: securities violations, anti-trust violations, bribery, bank embezzlment, mail and wire fraud, tax fraud, false claims and credit-lending institution fraud. In the quest to also identify if there are distinctions or differences between the white-collar criminal and ‘street’ criminal the Yale scholars (1991) along with several other scholars (Benson and Walker 1988; Hagan et.al., 1980) began collected and analyzing federal data. As Benson and Simpson note, these early offender studies, while having some issues of generalizability, do note that the “standard image of the white-collar offender” is called into question (2009:31). In this vein, white-collar offenders are ordinary, middle class individuals (Poveda 1994). Since the early Yale school of thought era, with the focus on offender and legalistic definitions, the study of occupational crimes as white-collar crimes expanded greatly. While the work by the Yale school of though are legitimate research areas they do move away from Sutherland’s concepts to a formal more limited scope of what is considered white-collar crimes. These all omit the importance of social status and the many expansions of what should b