Rethinking White-Collar Crime.

• Date: 22 June 1995
• Author: Weiss, Robert P.
• Published date: 22 June 1995
• Author: Weiss, Robert P.

Tony G. Poveda's latest book, Rethinking White-Collar Crime, is a critical survey of the nature, etiology, and control of white-collar crime in the United States. One of the most striking and enduring features of white-collar crime - particularly the corporate variety - has been its general invisibility relative to other types of crime. Public concern and the criminal law have focused almost exclusively on crimes of the poor. Occasional waves of regulatory activism over the last century have led to civil law remedies and administrative controls on corporate misconduct, but even these efforts at reform have been partial and short-lived.

Poveda's project to "rethink" white-collar crime couldn't be more timely, as the pendulum of class justice today swings high on the side of the rich and powerful. While drag and street criminals receive Draconian sentences, businesses and professionals enjoy a new round of deregulation (see, for example, Georges, 1995; Labaton, 1995; Lewis, 1995). White-collar criminals today serve less jail time than do all other types of criminals, and they have failed to pay billions in fines (Emshwiller, 1995).

The disparity injustice is largely the work of ideology, Poveda argues. Our culture and legal system obscure crimes of the powerful, making enlightenment about crime a perpetual struggle. Poveda's central objective in this seminal book is to "demystify" white-collar crime by exposing the myths that reduce its visibility and help to legitimate a double standard of justice. The ideological obstacles to equal justice are formidable. American culture militates against class awareness in general and, in particular, supports a variety of myths that help obscure the role of power and privilege in shaping the law and its enforcement.

According to Poveda, conventional thinking about crime is fundamentally based in what Sue Titus Reid called the "dualistic fallacy" - the assumption that a dichotomy exists between criminals and noncriminals. Poveda's first order of business is to critically examine the myths of "the criminal type" and "the law-abiding citizen." These myths basically correspond to class and race, and deflect our attention from the harms committed by the socially and economically powerful.

Characterizations of "career criminals" are as old as the study of criminology. The many variants extend from Lombroso's "criminal man" physical type to Wilson and Herrnstein's recent biosocial theory on crime and human nature, but they all point to the poor as a "dangerous class." Those who fall outside the stereotype, despite the harm their actions cause, are somehow viewed as not "real" criminals. As an antidote to this delusion, Poveda concludes his opening chapter with a short but convincing comparison of conventional and white-collar crime in terms of property loss and personal injury.

The myths of the criminal type and the law-abiding majority together function as a sort of "master myth," from which a cluster of subsidiary myths serves to "explain away" as exceptional those especially egregious white-collar crimes that come to public attention. Chapter 2 analyzes three case studies of the most common...