Before term 'white-collar crime,' poverty got blamed for all thievery

By Cynthia Crossen
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Sunday, October 19, 2003

Before Edwin Sutherland, most criminologists thought that theft was a pathological reaction to poverty.

But in 1939, Sutherland, a widely respected sociology professor at Indiana University, coined a new term: white-collar crime.

People of "respectability and high social status," Sutherland asserted, broke laws as often as members of the lower classes, but the government, media and public didn't think of them as criminals. Until scholars accepted that affluent and reputable people also steal, Sutherland argued, they would never truly understand the criminal mind.

[...]

Furthermore, he discarded the notion that white-collar criminals were "rotten apples," individuals born with a predisposition to steal. White-collar crime is learned behavior, Sutherland argued, a consequence of corporate cultures in which regulation is regarded as harassment, and profit is the measure of the man.