7 - Beyond the Law?

Summary

No one who deigns to consider the problem of white-collar crime can avoid concluding that it exacts a staggering toll on individuals, organizations, and, possibly, social institutions. Its costs dwarf comparable losses to street crime, and the gap almost certainly is growing. Increasingly, victimization and harm cross international borders (Levi, 2001b). These are sufficient reasons to focus greater attention on white-collar crime and responses to it, albeit these do not appear to be high priorities currently. The reasons are many, but they include neglect if not unconcern from on high.

In the United States, the Bureau of Justice Statistics annually issues a torrent of descriptive research on robbers, burglars, drug offenders, and other street criminals. It publishes next to nothing on white-collar crime. The infrequent exceptions to this long-standing pattern are of little use in any case, primarily because of the overly broad definition of white-collar crime used for analysis (U.S. Department of Justice, 1986; 1987; 2000b). For all intents and purposes, the agencies of the U.S. Department of Justice that compile and publish statistical information on crime have chosen to ignore white-collar crime and its victims. This is one reason it can require painstaking work to put together useful statistical data on white-collar crime (Geis and Salinger, 1998; Szockyj and Geis, 2002). Compiling time-series data over more than a few decades, for example, is challenging and labor intensive.