WHO IS THE WHITE-COLLAR CRIMINAL?

White-collar crime is traditionally associated with high status and respectable offenders: the ‘crimes of the powerful’ and corporate crime. However, examination of one group of white-collar offences reveals that offenders were typically small businesses, employees, and those more properly described as ‘criminal businesses’. While this could be attributed to the ‘immunity’ of the corporate offender from prosecution, it can be argued that such patterns of offending reflect not only enforcement policies but also wider structural and market factors. Thus, analyses of economic and white-collar crime may concentrate overmuch on the corporate offender, and make oversimplistic distinctions between ‘corporate’ and other varieties of white-collar offending.