White‐Collar Crime Is Crime

• Author: Nicole Leeper Piquero
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12384
• Date: 01 August 2018
• Published date: 01 August 2018

POLICY ESSAY

VICTIM COMPENSATION AND

WHITE-COLLAR CRIME

White-Collar Crime Is Crime

Victims Hurt Just the Same

Nicole Leeper Piquero

The University of Texas at Dallas

Scholars examining public perceptions of crime seriousness have long shown, through

their findings, that white-collar crimes are considered as equally serious as many

street crimes (Cullen, Link, and Polanzi, 1982; Kane and Wall, 2006; Piquero,

Carmichael, and Piquero, 2008; Rosenmerkle, 2001). Likewise, these scholars have also

shown that respondents support, at times, harsh criminal sanctions for white-collar crimes,

especially for those that inflict physical harm (Cullen, Clark, Mathers, and Cullen, 1983;

Holtfreter, Van Slyke, Bratton, and Gertz, 2008; Schoepfer, Carmichael, and Piquero,

2007). In a variety of victimization reports, the findings continue to show that “white-collar

crime” is a growing problem in terms of both the numbers of people affected as well as

the amount of harm caused to these victims. For example, the Bureau of Justice Statistics

found that 7% of persons 16 years of age or older (an estimated 17.6 million people) were

victims of identity theft in 2014 (Harrell, 2015). Even more recently, an estimate by Javelin

Strategy and Research showed that the costs of identity theft or fraud were somewhere near

$16 billion (nearly $1 billion more than they found in 2015; Pascual, Marchini, and Miller,

2018). As a point of comparison, the gross domestic product of Iceland is approximately

$20 billion dollars. Although official crime reports have only recently started to include the

amount and costs of some types of white-collar crime,1the public has long recognized the

Direct correspondence to Nicole Leeper Piquero, School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences, GR 3.818,

The University of Texas at Dallas, 800 West Campbell Road, Richardson, TX 75080 (e-mail: npiquero@utdallas.

edu).

1. The Bureau of Justice Statistics added a supplement of questions in 2004 to capture estimates of

identity theft victimizations (Baum, 2006). To date, the Identity Theft Supplement has been

administered three times, in 2008, 2012, and 2014. The Uniform Crime Reports began collecting identity

theft and hacking/computer invasion offenses in 2016, and the National Incident-Based Reporting

System will begin collecting fraud offenses of identity theft and hacking/computer invasion as part of

cargo theft beginning January 2019 (FBI, 2017).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12384 C2018 American Society of Criminology 595

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 17 rIssue 3