Book Review: The Criminal Elite: Understanding White-Collar Crime (5th ed.)

• Author: Joan Brockman
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016806291179
• Published date: 01 June 2006
• Date: 01 June 2006
• Subject Matter: Articles

There is a greater relevance to Encyclopedia of Murder and Violent Crime, however. For

years, Hickey has been ahead of the criminological curve in the study of the most extreme,

pathological forms of criminal behavior. He is best known for the book Serial Murderers

and Their Victims, which is a bestseller and now in its fourth edition. For some time, unfor-

tunately, mainstream criminology tended to focus on more normative offenders and less

extreme forms of antisocial behavior. As a result, the study of murder and other extreme

forms of violent crime were important but demonstrably peripheral to the discipline.

Because the general public is fascinated with more extreme forms of criminal violence,

academic criminology clearly missed an opportunity to connect with public audiences,

including practitioners and policy makers. Possibly the only criticism of the Encyclopedia

of Murder and Violent Crime is that some readers will find its material too sensationalistic.

Things have changed. For more than a decade, criminology has shifted its focus, become

more interdisciplinary, and frankly become dominated by the life-course, criminal career/

career criminal paradigm. In particular, there is a growing interest, appreciation, and emphasis

on theoretical and empirical research of the most chronic, recidivistic, and dangerous criminal

offenders. As academic criminology becomes more amenable to psychological, biological,

and biosocial perspectives, a multifaceted study of the worst types of criminal offenders

will likely continue. In other words, the study of murder and violent crime, serial killers,

psychopaths, sociopaths, and related phenomena will move from the periphery to the core

of criminology. As such, the Encyclopedia of Murder and Violent Crime should be required

reading.

Matt Delisi

Iowa State University

The Criminal Elite: Understanding White-Collar Crime (5th ed.), by James William

Coleman. New York: Worth Publishers, 2002. 254 pp.

DOI: 10.1177/0734016806291179

James William Coleman, professor of sociology at the California Polytechnic State

University, has written an outstanding textbook on the mammoth field of white-collar

crime. After reviewing problems surrounding the definition and measurement of white-

collar crime, Coleman concludes (rightly so) that it is “too useful a conceptual tool to be

thrown on the intellectual scrap heap” (p. 5). Although he sees merit in typologies that

focus on the effects of white-collar crime (property and economic damage versus injury,

sickness, and death) and those that differentiate between the offenders (individual versus

corporate or organizational), studies such as those by Calavita and Pontell, where the orga-

nization was used as a tool to collectively embezzle, led Coleman to favor a continuum

of occupational and organizational crimes. He also pinpoints the Watergate scandal in the

early 1970s as the event that breached the “wall of silence” surrounding white-collar crime

in the United States.

Chapter 2 provides an extensive litany of white-collar crime and misconduct that fall on

the continuum from individual larceny and embezzlement to conflicts of interest, market

Book Reviews 173