Criminal Law

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Criminal Law

Criminal activities entail all actions in opposition to the established laws and regulations that govern a given state. White-collar crimes are a special cluster of criminal activities usually committed in the corporate world mainly through deception. As opposed to the usual street crimes where criminals tend to use force and violence to obtain cash and other valuables from their victims, white-collar crime tends to be intellectual. In white-collar crime, victims are duped into parting with their valuables in exchange for false assurances.

Types of white-collar crimes are as many as the ideas presented by the perpetrators. These activities range from embezzlement of funds without relevant authority, bribery of both government and private officials for favors, extortion, larceny, bankruptcy, fraud (health care, tax), spoofing activities, misleading consultations, stocks acquisitions, telemarketing, identity theft, insurance, mail, public corruption, environmental crime, securities and commodities law violations, financial fraud, and forgery.

Each of the above criminal activities is usually perpetrated using documented material or an electronic medium. It should be however, noted that most of these white-collar crimes usually go unnoticed and hence the perpetrators may never be prosecuted. In the United States of America, white-collar crime is prosecuted at either federal or state level. The prosecution is however only possible if the given state has adequately banned the identified activity.

The idea of white-collar crime for a given period has been a concern in most criminology literatures. The idea was first fashioned by Edwin Sutherland, a prominent researcher, who also gave it the term “white-collar crime”. In fact, he is the person who authored the first book that dealt with criminology as a subject. This was achieved during a speech that Sutherland was delivering to the ASA on 27 December 1939.

Sutherland defined white-collar crime in his 1949 criminology publication as a criminal activity committed by an individual holding an office of high responsibility during the serving period or duration. The realm of symbolic interactionism, which is a field of view in sociology, deals with the analysis of the formulation of personal identity through a person’s association with other persons, self and through relationships. Edwin Sutherland also developed the differential association theory towards an elucidation of how criminals learn and develop the skills to perpetrate their criminal activities. He was of the view that criminal behavior was developed through an individual’s interaction with other people in the society.