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3 Criminologica 13 (1965-1966)
The Respectable Criminal

handle is hein.journals/crim3 and id is 15 raw text is: Page 13 May, 1965 CRIMINOLOGICA THE RESPECTABLE CRIMINAL' Why some of our best friends are crooks Spring has returned, and with it two of the major themes of strategy in American life-how to win a base- ball pennant and how to beat the income tax collector. Because as a sociologist I'm professionally interested in why people cheat, I'll leave theories about baseball to others. At this time of year many of us toy with the idea of income tax evasion. Some succumb to the temptation. Those who do are not poor, culturally deprived slum dwellers. They do not like to think of themselves as criminals. Tax evaders, along with people who pad their insurance claims, embezzle from their employers, or conspire with others to fix the price of goods usually have steady jobs and wear white collars to work. They are, nevertheless, committing what we call 'respectable crimes. As recurrent newspaper headlines remind us, these are widespread forms of criminal behavior in our society. To develop a truly comprehensive theory of criminality we must learn more about why such men become violators of the law. My own interest in respectable crime goes back to my days as a graduate student at Indiana University after World War II. My major professor, Edwin H. Sutherland, was conducting a study of the crimes com- mitted by the 70 largest non-financial corporations in the U.S. He invented the concept of white-collar crime and encouraged criminologists, administrators of crimi- nal justice, and laymen to reexamine the generalizations they had traditionaly made about crime and criminals. Sutherland's examination of the laws on certain kinds of business practices-such as restraint of trade, infringe- ment of patents, false and misleading advertising, unfair labor practices-convinced him that these were indeed criminal laws. Violation of these laws is, accordingly, a crime; crimes of this sort must be included in any generalization about crimes and criminals. Sutherland found that the 70 largest corporations had about 980 decisions recorded against them for violation of four laws-an average of about 14 for each corporation. At the time of the study, the most popular criminological theories tended to link criminal behavior to social and personal pathologies of various kinds. Theoreticians em- phasized poverty, poor education, broken homes, and psychological characteristics of criminals. The white- collar criminals that Sutherland had discovered, like the high officials of G.E. and Westinghouse who were convicted of conspiracy to fix prices in 1962, were per- sons of respectability and high social status who had committed crimes in connection with business, They did not fit the theoretical description. It followed that the theory would have to be revised to account for this type of criminality. Donald R. Cressey Sutherland's position was confused by the fact that he studied corporations, rather than individual white- collar criminals. I tried to correct this defect by making a study of embezzlers. It was my impression that em- bezzlers are white-collar criminals whose backgrounds are not likely to contain the social and personal path- ologies which popular notions and traditional theory ascribe to criminals. Actually I doubt that these char- acteristics are in fact present in the background of most criminals. On the basis of my study, I know that they are almost never present in the background of em- bezzlers. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF EMBEZZLING When I turned, as a first step, to the existing litera- ture for an explanation of embezzling, I found that there was a basic confusion about the nature of this crime. Most books about embezzling are written by ac- countants-guides to businessmen to help them avoid embezzling in their own finns. Their major thesis is that weak internal controls and poor auditing systems cause defalcations by failing to eliminate the possibility of committing the crime. While I must agree that a detailed check on all business transactions would prevent defalcations, I doubt whether these crimes can be explained by the absence of such checks. In the first place, even the most fool- proof accounting procedures can never eliminate cheat- ing entirely. The versatility of embezzlers is astounding, and greatly underestimated. In the second place, modern society presupposes business transactions based upon a considerable amount of trust. No matter what account- ing system is used, an element of trust remains. A brief review of the history of embezzlement will make this point clear. When commerce was beginning to expand in the 16th century, the legal rule regarding financial rela- tions between masters, servants, and third persons was simply this: (a) property received from the master re- mained in his possession, the servant having mere charge of custody of it; but (b) property received from a third person for the master teas in the servant's pos- session, and he was not guilty of a felony if he con- verted it for his own use. As business expanded and servants became in fact clerks and cashiers, the situa- tions in which the master retained possession were ex- panded. It became the rule that if a clerk placed money in a cash drawer, it thereby came into the possession of the master; if the servant subsequently took the money from the cash drawer to keep, this act was larceny. But until 1799, if a clerk received money from one of his employer's customers and put it directly into his CRIMINOLOGICA May, 1965

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