The myth of community tolerance toward white-collar crime

Edwin Sutherland (1983), who invented the concept of white-collar crime in 1939, defined it as crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation (Sutherland, 1983:7). One of Sutherland's central contentions was that white-collar crime is allowed to flourish because of permissive community attitudes toward it. The assumption that the community is not particularly concerned about white-collar crime may explain, in part at least, the very neglect of the topic by criminologists that Sutherland was attempting to correct. In a survey of articles published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology between 1968 and 1977 (O'Connor, 1980), only one article on white-collar crime was cited. This situation has improved since the survey was conducted. Whether Sutherland's perception of community tolerance toward white-collar crime was correct at the time of his 1939 presidential address to the American Sociological Society, we will never know, but we now have evidence which casts serious doubt on the applicability of this conclusion to contemporary societies, including Australia. The purpose of this article is to present this evidence. We begin by first considering the American evidence a country where much survey research has been done in the area of white-collar crime and then move to evidence from other countries before specifically discussing Australia, where both research in this area, and discussion on the phenomenon generally, are fairly recent. Finally, we present the results of a nationwide survey in Australia on the seriousness of a number of criminal offences, including white-collar offences.