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Class, Status, and the Punishment of White-Collar Criminals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

David Weisburd ,
Elin Waring  and
Stanton Wheeler
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Abstract

The treatment of white-collar offenders by the criminal justice system has been a central concern since the concept of white-collar crime was first introduced In general, it has been assumed that those higher up the social hierarchy have an advantage in every part of the legal process, including the punishment they receive as white-collar criminals. In a controversial study of white-collar crime sentencing in the federal district courts, Wheeler, Weisburd, and Bode contradicted this assumption when they found that those of higher status were more likely to be imprisoned and, when sentenced to prison, were likely to receive longer prison terms than comparable offenders of lower status. While they argued that results were consistent with “what those who do the sentencing often say about it,” their analyses failed to control for the role of social class in the sentencing process. In this article we reanalyze the Wheeler et al sentencing data, including both measures of socioeconomic status and class position. Our findings show that class position does have an independent influence on judicial sentencing behavior. But this effect does not demand revision in the major findings reported in the earlier study.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , Spring 1990 , pp. 223 - 243
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1990 

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References

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34 Table 6 in id. at 654 is based on SEI scores from 60 to 960 (rounded to .001). The coefficient for the Socio Economic Index, when based on the range 6.0 to 96.0 is close to that which we report. The difference in significance between our model I results for status and those reported by Wheeler et al. derive primarily from changes in the impeccability index and the addition of lambda. Because the t coefficient for status in the original analysis was 1.97, these changes bring the significance of the variable below p >. 05..+05.>Google Scholar

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