white collar crime opinion essay

Why Do White-Collar Criminals Do It?

Former Tyco CEO and infamous white-collar criminal L. Dennis Kozlowski recently ended his parole

Former Tyco CEO and infamous white-collar criminal L. Dennis Kozlowski—the guy who once threw a $2 million birthday party while committing all manner of corporate fraud—recently ended his parole and claims to be thoroughly rehabilitated after spending more than six years in jail.

What would lead someone to do the kinds of things Kozlowski did? James William Coleman explored that question in a 1987 paper for the American Journal of Sociology.

Sociologist Edwin Sutherland invented the idea of white-collar crime in 1939 as a way to expand the concept of criminality beyond that era’s focus on illegal acts among immigrants and the working poor and apply it to the powerful. But Coleman writes that the justice system generally still treats white-collar crime more leniently than street crime.

And yet, Coleman writes, white collar crime “causes far more deaths and injuries than any other types of crime.”

Why do people like Kozlowski commit their crimes? Partly because they find ways to justify their behavior to themselves. Embezzlers tell themselves they’re just borrowing the money. Executives flaunting government regulations on worker safety or pollution dismiss those rules as unreasonable intrusions into the free market.Corporate managers who cheat their company’s clients say they’re just doing what the job—and their bosses—demand. Surveys show a majority of executives see unethical and even illegal behavior as standard in their industries, making it easy for some to commit misdeeds themselves.

At a more basic level, the motivation for white-collar crime is so simple we might not bother to think about it: making money. But Coleman suggests we look more closely at the “culture of competition” that emphasizes individual achievement and the pursuit of wealth and status.

We often see acquisitiveness and material competition as inherent human characteristics, but researchers have found they are irrelevant to hunter-gatherers and weak in agricultural societies. They became an increasingly important part of our motivation starting in the 17 th century, as capitalism and social mobility grew. A key element in white-collar crime is the overwhelming importance of the drive to succeed and the parallel fear of failure.

The question might then become why corporate crimes aren’t more universal. Coleman writes that the answer is social norms that prevent destructive economic behavior. But, as the survey results noted above suggest, these norms vary depending on the workplace and industry. Employees at one pharmaceutical firm who helped conceal studies showing dangerous side-effects of one of their company’s drugs “seemed to drive into the activity without thinking a great deal about it.”

Of course, there are other, external factors, including how much opportunity for criminal behavior a job provides, whether the workplace culture involves sharing information on how to commit crimes, the chance of getting caught, and potential criminal penalties involved. Like individual criminals’ behavior, these factors come back, to some extent, to ambiguous social norms that treat corporate malfeasance differently than other crimes. And that means that really addressing corporate crime could require deep cultural changes.

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White-Collar Crime: What It Is and How It Affects Society

April 17, 2020

If you’ve ever wondered what white-collar crime is and how it impacts society, you’re in the right place. White-collar crime has long been viewed as a “lesser” crime and glamorized in Hollywood; in reality, it can be devastating for society and victims. Read on to learn about white-collar crime, and how it is treated differently than “street” crimes.

What Are White-Collar Crimes?

What does the term “white-collar crime” mean and is it really less dangerous or harmful than other types of crimes? The term “white-collar crime” was first defined in 1939 by sociologist Edwin Sutherland as “a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of their occupation.”

The name “white-collar” crime comes from the button-up white shirts that businessmen traditionally wore (as opposed to blue-collar shirts).

Since then, the term has been used to describe a wide range of activities including corporate fraud, securities fraud, embezzlement, money laundering, bribery and cybercrime. While white-collar crimes are generally considered less severe because violence is not involved in the commission of criminal acts, these crimes can destroy businesses and cause people to lose their homes, jobs, and community resources.

Distinction Between Violent and Non-Violent Crime

The FBI.gov website reiterates that “white collar crime is generally non-violent in nature.” However, most experts in the field of sociology agree that the economic impact of white-collar crime is significantly greater than other types of crime.

Unlike other classes of criminals, perpetrators of white-collar crime often retain access to assets allowing them to hire top-notch legal counsel, despite the fact that their crimes involve the theft of financial resources. This makes criminal prosecution more difficult and makes it harder for victims to pursue available civil remedies.

The use of a weapon in so-called “street crimes” can result in significantly harsher sentencing, even if no actual physical harm was involved. What this translates to is a perpetrator who brandishes a knife to steal a roll of quarters from a common area laundry room may face significantly more jail time than an executive who embezzles millions using a pen.

Disparate Sentencing

White-collar crime is more difficult to detect than other crimes. It is estimated that up to 90% of such crimes go unreported. In 2022, there were only 4,180 white collar crime prosecutions, over 50% less than the number of prosecutions that occurred 10 years ago, despite no correlating decrease in the crimes themselves. When offenders are caught, most don’t have a criminal record and are labeled “first time offenders,” giving them preferential treatment in sentencing, even though the nature of these crimes are complex, involve extensive planning and require multiple illegal steps in order to execute the crime.

A recent U.S. Sentencing Commission report found that Black men in America receive a 19.1% longer sentence than White men for similar crimes. Still, this ignores the fundamental issue that white-collar crimes are statistically more likely to be committed by White males ages 41-60 than any other demographic, and the disparate criminal consequences for these types of crimes, as compared to other offenses, is a source of racial injustice in and of itself.

In the U.S., the average prison sentence for white-collar crimes is only 23-27 months while armed robbery is a felony which typically receives a sentence of at least 10 years, with more time if a gun was used or the perpetrator has prior convictions. Statistics indicate that white-collar crime costs victims over $400 billion per year, while “street crimes” like burglary, larceny and theft cost victims around $16 billion a year. The paradox lies in the fact that street crimes are often borne out of poverty and necessity, while white-collar crimes are often a product of unrestrained greed fueled by a lack of fear of consequences.

While little research has been dedicated to the study of white-collar crime offenders, the data that does exist indicates that our society’s treatment of white-collar crime highlights and perpetuates gender and racial discrimination. A study conducted by the Harvard Business School determined that male senior executives were punished more leniently for white-collar crime offenses than female senior perpetrators.

Other studies have determined that prosecutions are directed toward lower-level or small-time offenders, while higher-ranking culprits are not prosecuted. Even decisions about who to charge with the offense seem to be affected by the wealth and power of the offender, potentially because an offender’s access to money and influence presents significant challenges on the road to justice.

Psychological Factors

The intersection between psychiatry, psychology, and the law is a complex one, but an area often explored in criminal profiling for violent crimes and in making sentencing recommendations for violent or drug-related offenses. There has been very little research conducted in the forensic psychology or psychiatry field with respect to white-collar criminal offenders. Interestingly, white collar offenders seem to share the same malignant personality traits as offenders labeled violent or more dangerous.

The FBI.gov website page about Serial Murder lists “sensation seeking, a lack of guilt or remorse, impulsivity, the need for control and predatory behavior” as personality traits correlated with psychopathic personality disorder, a predictive behavioral indicator for serial murder. These same traits are evident in many of the white-collar crime cases where perpetrators have conned private individuals or committed frauds involving the misappropriation of public resources on a large scale.

How White-Collar Crimes Affect Society

There are also significant misconceptions about the actual costs of white-collar crimes to society and others and who ends up paying the price. With the growing true-crime obsession, people see tangible images of gruesome murder scenes and graphic injuries flashed across the television screen. There are no corresponding mental pictures for the losses white-collar crime causes – less money for public resources such as schools and infrastructure, increased healthcare costs, and diversion of essential resources away from those who need it the most, costs that are then passed on to taxpayers and not borne by the individuals or business that created the damage.

In contrast to the portrayal of violent crime, white-collar crime is often portrayed as glamorous, like in the popular TV series “White Collar” where a con artist turns FBI informant in a last-ditch effort to start a new life. Even the more recent series “Ozark,” which chronicles the lives of a married couple who move their family to the Ozarks and become money launderers, leads us to justify the crimes and moves us to root for the anti-hero. The show also illustrates, however, the dangerous link between white-collar crime and other criminal enterprises like dealing drugs and gambling.

In calculating the damage caused by white-collar crimes, we must ask ourselves, what price are we putting on the struggle for businesses and communities to economically rebuild or the psychological damage to victims? How do we measure the damage to someone’s soul or their loss of faith in humanity, especially if the crime resulted in the loss of their possessions or eviction from their home?

The difficulty with assessing an appropriate punishment is that the damages caused by these crimes are simply immeasurable. Another uncomfortable question we as a society must consider is whether the greed of a white-collar criminal is more or less dangerous than that of a shoplifter or a robber, and if so, why does our justice system treat them so differently?

Serious Threat

While the accepted rationale has been that other crimes are punished more harshly because violence was used in the commission of the crimes, recent cases like the Murdaugh case have demonstrated that white-collar criminals are highly motivated to engage in violence to cover up their crimes to prevent exposure to law enforcement and the public.

The fact that such criminals often possess the money, resources and intelligence to do so without detection makes this genre of crime a more serious threat to society than the general public has previously considered.

Heather Williams Forshey

Heather Williams Forshey is the owner of Raleigh Divorce Law Firm and holds credentials as a family law specialist, family financial mediator, and parenting coordinator. She is a brain tumor survivor and an aspiring writer. She has previously written articles for Attorney at Law Magazine on the Gabby Petito murder case, the Depp v. Heard defamation trial, and false abuse allegations in child custody cases.

How America should be addressing its 'dirty money' problem around white-collar crimes, according to a legal scholar

Jennifer Taub is a legal scholar and advocate who's testified as a banking law expert before Congress and appeared on MSNBC and CNN.
The following is an excerpt from her new book, " BIG DIRTY MONEY: The Shocking Injustice And Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime. "
In it, she examines white collar crime, its history, and why these offenders fail to face the consequences that street level criminals do from Congress and the Supreme Court.
She explains how the country's biggest crimes — like the financial crisis in 2008 to the ongoing opioid epidemic — have taken a toll in its citizens on a systematic level and the US can do better moving forward.
Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories .

America, we have a big dirty money problem.

The corporate crime, elite impunity, and public corruption disease did not infect us overnight, though. We've been exposed now for so very long that we are almost immune. Almost.

If you still get angry when you see prosperous predators get away with it, we still have a chance to fight back. I'm ready to speak up about what's broken and promote specific, significant, and enduring fixes. At the end of this chapter, following these proposed solutions, I'll explain why and how you can join this effort.

You don't need a law degree or a lobbyist's contact list to exert influence. There are more honest people in America who believe that when we get big money out of politics and when big businesses and the elite are made to obey the law, we are all safer and our society is more just.

In a nutshell, here's the problem:

The extremely wealthy and well connected have incentives and opportunities for crime and corruption. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Extreme wealth is criminogenic and members of the upper classes provide one another with a kind of mutually assured immunity. It's difficult for law enforcement with comparatively limited resources to intervene.

Prosecutors also have insufficient incentives to pursue complex and time-consuming cases against respectable high-status individuals and business entities. And the tools they have to detect and punish offenders have been dulled by the courts.

Furthermore, the urgency to prioritize white collar crime is low when it's hard for the public to see the victims.

Our most powerful counterweights are whistleblowers and journalists. Yet they lack the protection and financial support they need.

Finally, we have incomplete and inconsistent data available on the amount and nature of white collar crime and white collar offenders. So what are the corresponding solutions?

Meeting the challenge

A hundred years ago, progressive legal reformer Louis Brandeis wrote, "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman." But today, to clean up this white collar crime epidemic, we need more than vision. Today the crime today is hiding in plain sight. Now we need to use our voices.

As abolitionist Frederick Douglass proclaimed in 1857, "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

It's time to demand an end to this elite crime spree. We must act, and not just for us, but for the society that will be here generations to come. We owe it to our children and grandchildren. And we owe it to the people who have come before us, like journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.

The last two sentences of her final blog post were: "There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate." May her memory be a call to action.

Jennifer Taub is a legal scholar and advocate whose writing focuses on "follow the money" matters — promoting transparency and opposing corruption. She has testified as a banking law expert before Congress and has appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe and CNN's Newsroom. Taub was the Bruce W. Nichols Visiting Professor of Law in fall 2019 at Harvard Law School and is now a professor of law at the Western New England University School of Law. A former associate general counsel at Fidelity Investments, she is a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School.

Watch: The CEO of one of the largest health insurers in the US explains the problem with healthcare in America

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By James B. Stewart

Sept. 29, 2020

BIG DIRTY MONEY The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime By Jennifer Taub

Donald Trump is not the ostensible subject of “Big Dirty Money,” Jennifer Taub’s polemic against America’s failure to curb the destructive criminal tendencies of the very rich. Yet the president, his friends and former Trump campaign and administration officials parade through these pages. The latest example may be Steve Bannon, Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, whose arrest in August on fraud charges came too late for inclusion in Taub’s book.

Trump is very rich, although how rich remains a subject of investigation, given the wildly varying and self-serving values he’s assigned his many real estate assets . He has escaped the consequences of what amounts to a lifetime of dubious business dealings. As Taub, a law professor at Western New England University, writes, “Trump took advantage of a system that gives first, second, third and seemingly infinite chances to the elite.”

As president, he has been investigated, impeached, tried and summarily acquitted for high crimes and misdemeanors over his dealings with Ukraine and attempts to impede Congress. Trump also oversees the Justice Department and its investigations of white-collar crime, including cases involving many of his friends and associates. It should thus be no surprise that white-collar prosecutions on his watch have plummeted . He hasn’t hesitated to enlist his compliant attorney general, William P. Barr, in the effort to gain leniency for friends like his former campaign adviser Roger Stone and his former national security adviser Michael Flynn . Both were accused of lying under oath — one of the most common crimes committed by the wealthy and well connected.

The president wields the power of the pardon, and Trump has freely used it on behalf of wealthy white-collar criminals. He did so earlier this year for Michael Milken and Eddie DeBartolo Jr. , sending a powerful message that white-collar crimes don’t really matter, even though white-collar crime in America “costs victims an estimated $300 billion to $800 billion per year,” Taub reports, while “street-level ‘property’ crimes, including burglary, larceny and theft, cost us far less — around $16 billion annually, according to the F.B.I.”

Trump is a stark illustration of why so few wealthy malefactors are held accountable. Like other members of the .01 percent, he can act with seeming impunity, able to buy or influence his way out of trouble. He empathizes with rich people who run afoul of the law. He minimizes their guilt, suggesting white-collar crimes aren’t really crimes, especially when the accused are white men, as the vast majority of all rich white-collar criminals are. Yet Trump is a symptom, not the cause.

Taub is hardly the first author to call attention to the American justice system’s curious indifference to white-collar crime, apart from occasional spasms of attention triggered by populist indignation. Brandon L. Garrett’s “ Too Big to Jail ” (2014) and John C. Coffee Jr.’s “Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Crisis of Underenforcement” (2020) are excellent examples.

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A-Z Publications

Annual Review of Sociology

Volume 39, 2013, review article, white-collar crime: a review of recent developments and promising directions for future research.

Sally S. Simpson 1
View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742; email: [email protected]
Vol. 39:309-331 (Volume publication date July 2013) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-071811-145546
First published as a Review in Advance on May 01, 2013
© Annual Reviews

White-collar crime is one of the least understood and arguably most consequential of all crime types. This review highlights and assesses recent (primarily during the past decade) contributions to white-collar crime theory (with special emphasis on critical, choice, and organizational theories of offending), new evidence regarding the sentencing and punishment of white-collar offenders, and controversies surrounding crime prevention and control policies. Several promising new directions for white-collar crime research are identified, as are methodological and data deficiencies that limit progress.

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White-Collar Crimes Causes Essay

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Individual Perspective

Environmental perspective.

White-collar crime and its roots have been subjected to extensive research and debate; however, fewer people pay attention to it compared to violent crime, which currently captures national news and is the subject of television shows. The society’s attitude towards white-collar crime is different: there is some degree of fascination while in the broader sense it is merely uninteresting (Olejarz, 2016). In this paper, two theories of white-collar crime will be discussed. The first theory will focus on the individual perspective of white-collar crime causes explored by Watt (2012) while the second theory will focus on the environmental perspective studied by Pontell and Geis (2013).

An individual perspective that explains why white-collar crime occurs is associated with the role that personality can play (Watt, 2012). According to the research conducted by Watt (2012), white-collar crime is directly linked to self-control, which is an individual characteristic that allows individuals to resist any type of benefit or gratification that crimes can offer. Therefore, an individual perspective on causes of white-collar crime is associated with trait theories that explore a combination of either stable or unstable character attributes that could explain people’s predispositions towards offending (Hirschi & Gottfredson, 1987).

Components of the trait theory include such characteristics as impulsivity, simple tasks, self-control, physical activity, self-centeredness, and tolerance (Watt, 2012). Also, the researcher explored the role of gender as an individual characteristic that could influence white-collar crime. Watt (2012) found that men were more likely to commit white-collar crime because they usually held higher managerial positions in the business world and thus possessed more power than women. In conclusion of the argument about the individual perspective with regards to white-collar crime, it is worth mentioning that the levels self-control to refrain from offending in combination with the characteristics mentioned above predicted whether an individual would commit a white-collar crime.

While it has been proven that individual characteristics played a large role in predicting whether a person would commit white-collar crime, the environment’s impact is also essential to discuss. Pontell and Geis (2013) explored the role of the economic development in contributing to white-collar crime. The researchers suggested that such events as a Great Economic Meltdown increased the likelihood of white-collar crime and thus led to the inability of the government to address the dramatic rise in criminal prosecutions (Pontell & Geis, 2013). On the other hand, the government’s negligence could have been considered deliberate due to the worries that showcase trials of different corporate executives would undermine the authority of officials as well as the already declining levels of public trust in capitalism. Since businesses that committed a white-collar crime were considered “too big to fail” and their CEOs “too big to jail,” more and more individuals began committing such crimes due to the decreased fear of being prosecuted for their actions (Pontell & Geis, 2013, p. 76). To conclude, the deteriorating state of the economy means that more individuals can commit white-collar crimes.

To conclude, there are as many explanations for white-collar crimes as there are such crimes (Siegel, Brown, & Hoffman, 2015). However, research articles explored above provided substantial evidence for either theory that characterizes causes of white-collar crime: while individual characteristics such as self-control explain why specific people may commit this type of crime, the economic conditions are environmental factors that regulate whether white-collar crime will occur in general. The individual perspective is more effective in predicting white-collar crime since it focuses on personal features that have a larger role in characterizing behaviors.

Hirschi, T., & Gottfredson, M. (1987). Causes of white-collar crime. Criminology, 25 , 949-974.

Olejarz, J. (2016). Understanding white-collar crime . Web.

Pontell, H., & Geis, G. (2013). The trajectory of white-collar crime following the Great Economic Meltdown. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 30 (1), 70-82.

Siegel, L., Brown, G., & Hoffman, R. (2012). Choice theory: Because they want to. In L. Siegel (Ed.), Criminology: The core (10th ed.) (pp. 77-98). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

Watt, R. (2012). University students’ propensity towards white-collar versus street crime. Studies by Undergraduate Research at Guelph, 5 (2), 5-12.

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Life After White-Collar Crime

A man wearing a pair of loafers and a prison uniform

In the nineties, Jeffrey D. Grant had a law firm in Westchester County, a seat on the local school board, and an ownership stake in a bistro called, if you’ll forgive the irony, the Good Life. He was in his early forties, garrulous and rotund, and he gloried in his capacity to consume. Each year, he took his wife and daughters on half a dozen “shopping vacations,” though they sometimes neglected to open the bags between trips.

Grant had developed an early appreciation for personal displays of wealth and power. Born in 1956, the son of a marketing executive, he grew up on Long Island, graduated from SUNY Brockport, and worked his way through New York Law School as a shoe salesman. By then, his parents had divorced, and his father had moved in with Lynda Dick, a wealthy widow whose properties included one of the most storied mansions in Greenwich , Connecticut, a hilltop estate known as Dunnellen Hall. (It later became famous as the home of Leona Helmsley , the hotel magnate convicted of tax evasion in 1989, after a trial in which a housekeeper testified that Helmsley had told her, “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”)

Grant cultivated an ability to muscle his way into one opportunity after another. In law school, he approached the box office of a concert venue in Boston and, pretending to be the son of a music promoter, threatened revenge if he and three friends were not admitted free of charge. The brazen charade worked so well that the headliner, the rock-and-roll pioneer Gary U.S. Bonds, hosted the group backstage and, at the concert, sang “Happy Birthday” to one of Grant’s friends. As a lawyer, Grant specialized in real estate and corporate work and regarded himself as an “assassin.” In business and out of it, his philosophy was “Win, win, win.”

As he reached his mid-forties, however, Grant found himself unravelling. He had become addicted to painkillers—first Demerol, prescribed for a torn Achilles tendon, and then OxyContin. He was increasingly erratic and grandiose, betting wildly on dot-com stocks. In 2000, as his debts mounted, he started filching money from clients’ escrow accounts. The following year, after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Grant applied for a disaster-relief loan from the Small Business Administration, claiming to have lost the use of an office near Ground Zero. That was a fiction. He received two hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars, which he used to cover personal and office expenses.

In July, 2002, under investigation for breaching his clients’ accounts, he surrendered his law license and was later disbarred. That summer, as he sat in a Ralph Lauren wicker chair in his greenhouse in Rye, he attempted suicide, swallowing forty tablets of Demerol. He survived, and entered drug and alcohol rehab. He and his wife moved to Greenwich, seeking a fresh start, but the marriage was too badly frayed to survive.

Grant’s undoing was not yet complete: officers of the Internal Revenue Service discovered the false claim on his loan application, and in 2004 a warrant was issued for his arrest. He pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering, and a judge sentenced him to eighteen months in prison, chastising him for exploiting a national tragedy. On Easter Sunday, 2006, two friends drove Grant three hours west from Greenwich to Allenwood Low, a federal prison in the mountainous Amish country of central Pennsylvania. Grant quickly learned the rules: never take someone’s seat in the TV room or ask a stranger what landed him in prison. And he mastered the black-market economy that runs on “macks,” or foil packages of smoked mackerel, which sell for about a dollar in the commissary. He marked time mostly by walking—circling an outdoor track three or four hours a day, listening to NPR on headphones. “In the morning, all the airplanes from the East Coast would fly over going west, and at night they would come the other way,” he told me. “I would remember myself as a businessman.”

Grant was released to a halfway house in June, 2007, after fourteen months in prison. He had walked thirty-five hundred miles around the track and shed sixty-five pounds. He returned to Greenwich with no idea of what to do next.

Many people who have served time for white-collar felonies look to get back into business. Barely six months after the home-wares mogul Martha Stewart emerged from prison—she had been convicted of lying to investigators about a stock trade—she was hosting two new television shows. Grant, who no longer had a law license, tried applying himself to good works instead. He volunteered at rehab facilities that had helped him get sober. He joined the board of Family ReEntry, a nonprofit in Bridgeport, which aids formerly imprisoned people and their families, and he later served as its executive director. Hoping to improve his inner life, he studied for a divinity degree at Union Theological Seminary, in Manhattan. In 2009, he married Lynn Springer, a Greenwich event planner he had met in recovery. In 2012, they founded the Progressive Prison Project, a ministry focussed on white-collar and other nonviolent offenders.

As word of his experience spread, Grant started hearing from neighbors who were heading to prison or had recently returned and were seeking advice or companionship. At the time, a sense of alarm was animating conversations among businessmen along the Metro-North corridor: Preet Bharara , the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, had imposed a crackdown on insider trading, leading to more than eighty guilty pleas and convictions. Some of these cases were later invalidated by an appeals court, but Operation Perfect Hedge, as it was known, had punctured the realm of traders, analysts, and portfolio managers. “My phone would ring in the middle of the night,” Grant said. One financier, under indictment, called while hiding in his office with the lights out. “He said, ‘I’m afraid that people will recognize me on the street,’ ” Grant recalled. A reporter from Absolute Return , a trade publication for the hedge-fund industry, asked Grant, “How do Wall Street skills usually translate in prison?” His reply: “These skills are not only in large degree useless, they are probably counterproductive.” As he told me recently, “Business rewards a certain type of attitude and assertiveness—all things that will get you killed in prison.”

Grant, in his pastoral role for anxious brokers, fallen hedgies, and other wobbling pillars of late capitalism, came to expect fresh inquiries from desperate people each morning when he opened his e-mail. “Everyone going through this is freaking out, so they’re up all night, Googling,” he said. In the hope of nourishing his unlikely flock, Grant developed an ambitious reading list, which included “ Letters and Papers from Prison ,” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and “ The Gulag Archipelago ,” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. If some callers found that Bonhoeffer’s words of resistance to the victims of national socialism did not seem immediately applicable, Grant also offered practical tips. Before reporting to prison, he advised them, mail yourself the phone numbers of family members and friends on the visitors’ list, because “you’ll be too discombobulated to remember them once you’re inside.” And remind your wife never to touch paper money on the morning of a visit; almost every bill bears traces of drug residue, which will set off the scanners.

In 2016, Grant established what he called the White Collar Support Group, an online meeting inspired by twelve-step programs for drug and alcohol addiction. He described the program as a step toward “ethics rehab” and, on his Web site, explained that it was for people who wanted to “take responsibility for our actions and the wreckage we caused.” In blunter terms, he told me that it was for “guys detoxing from power and influence.”

The first session attracted four attendees, including a hedge-fund manager and a man who had pilfered from his child’s youth-soccer club. But soon the program grew. In the next five years, more than three hundred people cycled through, either on their way to prison or just out and trying to reëstablish a semblance of their old order. Some of Grant’s flock were familiar from front-page scandals, born of Ponzi schemes, insider trading, and other forms of expensive corruption; others were virtually unknown to the public. This summer, I asked him if I could sit in on a meeting of the White Collar Support Group. He agreed, but alerted his members in advance, in case anyone wanted to preserve his privacy.

At seven o’clock one evening in July, I signed on to Zoom and found myself with twenty-eight people, mostly male and white, each identified by a name and a location. Meetings are free, though Grant suggests a donation of five dollars to his ministry. He draws a distinction between his work and the industry of white-collar “prison coaches” who offer bespoke services for a price. Among them, Wall Street Prison Consultants promises to “ensure you serve the shortest sentence possible in the most favorable institution.” It sells consulting packages at the levels of Bronze, Silver, and Gold, the finest of which includes “Polygraph Manipulation Techniques,” “Prison Survival Orientation Coaching,” and an “Early Release Package” that helps clients apply for a drug-treatment program to reduce the length of a sentence.

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Grant, who now lives in Woodbury, Connecticut, appeared on camera wearing a pale-blue oxford shirt and sitting before a stone fireplace. As he called the meeting to order, we recited Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, and then Grant reminded everyone of the rules: with few exceptions, anyone who talked for more than three minutes would hear a snippet of music—on this occasion, the Parliament funk classic “Mothership Connection (Star Child)”—signalling him to wrap it up. Surrendering control, Grant likes to tell his charges, may not come naturally.

Before the meeting, Grant had warned me not to expect universal contrition. “Almost everyone who contacts us has been successful, controlling, and perhaps narcissistic,” he said. “The elements that made them successful are also the elements that contributed to their demise.” Throughout their pre-indictment careers, aggression and rule-bending were considered strengths. In American culture, white-collar crime is often portrayed less as evidence of unfettered greed than as a misguided sibling of success.

By and large, the country’s governing class has encouraged that view. After the stock market crashed in 1929, Congress faced public pressure to curb the backroom manipulation that had helped devastate millions of shareholders. But Richard Whitney, the president of the New York Stock Exchange, a graduate of Groton and Harvard, told senators in Washington, “You gentlemen are making a great mistake. The exchange is a perfect institution.” In 1938, Whitney was caught embezzling from the New York Yacht Club, his father-in-law, and a number of others. He went to Sing Sing dressed in a double-breasted suit.

Not long after Whitney’s fall, the sociologist Edwin Sutherland devised the term “white-collar crime,” to describe wrongdoing committed “by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation.” Since then, each cycle of boom and bust has delivered new iterations of rapacious self-dealing, often indelibly linked to time or place, like schools of painting—the naked fraud of a Savings & Loan, the whimsical math of an Arthur Andersen. In 2001, following the accounting scandals at Enron and other companies, a publication called CFO Magazine quietly abandoned its annual Excellence Awards, because winners from each of the previous three years had gone to prison.

Since the turn of the millennium, the prosecution of white-collar crime has plummeted—but this should not imply a surge in moralism among our leading capitalists. After the attacks of September 11th, the F.B.I. began to shift resources toward counterterrorism. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers cut the budget of the Internal Revenue Service so sharply that it had the same number of special agents in 2017 as it had half a century earlier, even though the national population has grown by two-thirds.

The effects of impunity have become more blatant since the Great Recession of 2007-09, when, infamously, almost no top executives went to prison—despite the loss of more than nineteen trillion dollars in household wealth. At the time, leaders at the Department of Justice claimed that they could not prove fraudulent intent by Wall Street titans, who were many layers removed from the daily handling of toxic securities. Jed Rakoff, a judge in the Southern District of New York, believes that this was a catastrophic misreading of the law. Executives, he argues, could have been prosecuted under the principle that they were “willfully blind” to patterns of abuse that enriched them. “Dozens of people defrauded millions of people out of probably billions of dollars,” Rakoff told me. The imperatives had less to do with compensating victims than with deterring crimes not yet conceived. “There are studies that are more than a hundred years old that show that the best way to deter any crime is to catch the perpetrators quickly,” he said.

In the years since, the failure to hold top executives accountable has become intertwined with historic levels of income inequality, a phenomenon that Jennifer Taub, a professor at Western New England University School of Law, calls “criminogenic.” In her 2020 book, “Big Dirty Money,” she wrote, “In our society, extreme wealth often confers tremendous power. So just as power tends to corrupt, so does excessive wealth.” But nothing expressed America’s ambivalence toward white-collar crime more eloquently than the election of Donald J. Trump, whose life and career as a business fabulist merited no fewer than a hundred and twenty-five mentions in “ Big Dirty Money .” Under his leadership, federal prosecutions of white-collar crime reached an all-time low. In 2020, Trump delivered pardons and clemency to a slew of affluent felons, including Michael Milken, the junk-bond trader who had pleaded guilty to securities violations three decades earlier. Taub noted that the official White House announcement about the pardoned businessmen used the word “successful” to describe them four times.

Measurements of success, or something like it, haunt the conversations in the White Collar Support Group. In the Zoom meeting, one of the first people to speak up was Andy Tezna, a thirty-six-year-old former executive at NASA , who had been sentenced the previous week for fraud. Applying for COVID relief in the name of fictitious businesses, Tezna had collected more than three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, including loans issued under the Paycheck Protection Program. He used the money to finance a Disney Vacation Club time-share, a swimming pool ($48,962), and, to ease the social isolation of the pandemic, a French bulldog ($6,450).

“I got eighteen months,” Tezna told the group, glumly. “Definitely not the number I had in mind.” He was sitting beside a window covered by venetian blinds; he wore white earbuds and several days’ growth of beard. He was waiting for word on when to report to prison. In court, Tezna and his lawyer had presented him as an American success story gone wrong. His family had come from Colombia when he was thirteen and lived in an unfinished basement, while he helped his mother clean houses. Later, he earned a degree from George Mason University and landed a job at NASA, which paid him a hundred and eighty-one thousand dollars a year. In the job, he attended a space launch with members of Trump’s Cabinet and Elon Musk. “I just thought, My life is great,” he told the group.

To the judge, Tezna had framed his malfeasance narrowly, arguing, “I was bad at managing my finances.” The Justice Department thought it was worse than that. “These are not one-off mistakes,” a prosecutor told the court. “This was greed.”

A voice on the call piped up: “Hey, Andy? It’s Bill Baroni.”

It took me a moment to place the name. Then I remembered Bridgegate. In 2013, after the New Jersey governor Chris Christie appointed Baroni as the deputy executive director of the Port Authority, he was accused of helping to arrange a traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge, in order to punish the mayor of Fort Lee, who had refused to endorse Christie for reëlection. Baroni was convicted of fraud and served three months in prison. But he denied the charges, and eventually the Supreme Court overturned his conviction. Justice Elena Kagan wrote that, even though the evidence showed “deception, corruption, abuse of power,” the Bridgegate episode did not meet the legal threshold of fraud. Baroni’s victory in the Supreme Court gave him unique status in the group. “I got the exact same sentence you did—eighteen months,” he told Tezna. “I know what’s in your head today.”

For the next ninety minutes, the mood veered between grave and celebratory. Members swapped tidbits about mutual friends (“He got moved out of the private prison in Mississippi”) and applauded new ventures (“I signed a lease last week”). Grant has developed a soothing vocabulary—about strength regained and community embraced—which collided occasionally with members’ laments. “As a single guy, I can tell you dating sucks,” a man in Delaware said, “because the reactions from women run the gamut from ‘Oh, my God, you’re the worst form of life on earth’ to ‘Oh, that’s cool! Women like bad boys.’ ” A former hedge-fund manager in Chicago was still smarting over the publicity around his indictment. “Reporters were calling my parents and my brother,” he said. “I don’t even know how they got their phone numbers.” Members of the group arrive in disparate circumstances: some have managed to keep significant assets, while others are tapped out after restitution and legal expenses. According to Grant, the biggest distinction is between those who have been to prison and those who have not. Those who haven’t served time, he told me, are “sort of outside the club.”

More than a few members attributed their crimes to a kind of consumerist inadequacy. Craig Stanland, who defrauded the networking company Cisco of equipment worth more than eight hundred thousand dollars, told the group, “It was just pure shame from the beginning—not being able to tell my wife that I couldn’t afford that life style, all the way through getting arrested. And then the scarlet letter.” But Bill Livolsi, speaking from the Tulsa suburbs, who went to prison for his role in a Ponzi scheme that passed itself off as a hedge fund, had come to see his new circumstances as an unburdening. “I finally got a job after a year of being out. It makes a whopping fifteen dollars an hour, but I’ve never been happier with a job,” he said. “My focus isn’t on what flight I’m taking or where I’m going on this particular vacation. It’s on how my family’s doing and how I’m doing.”

Grant is solicitous. He asks new members to introduce themselves and, when needed, draws them out. Richard Bronson, a former Lehman Brothers stockbroker with cropped gray hair and a beard, said, “I used to work on Wall Street. I did very well.” In fact, Bronson became a partner at Stratton Oakmont, the firm made infamous by Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street.” He moved to Florida and converted a small trading house called Biltmore Securities into a firm with five hundred employees. In Miami, he joined the boards of the ballet and the museum of contemporary art, opened a night club and started a magazine, and held court at an oceanside villa. But prosecutors said that all this was built on deceit; they accused him of running a boiler room that fed investors a stream of bogus stocks, causing losses estimated at ninety-six million dollars. Bronson disputed this figure, and insisted that he had repaid his clients. Nevertheless, he pleaded guilty to securities and wire fraud in 2002, and served twenty-two months in prison.

Bronson told the group, “This is really the first time I’ve ever been around people who have similar comeuppances.” He has been trying to revive his business career, launching 70 Million Jobs, a post-prison employment service, and an app called Commissary Club (“the exclusive social network for people with criminal histories”). “I’ve been out of prison for sixteen years, and I committed my crimes more than twenty-five years ago, and yet I wake up every morning with this gaping hole in my heart, out of regret for the things that I did.” He choked up momentarily and paused to collect himself. “I don’t suspect that I’ll get over this feeling,” he said, “and that saddens me.”

Others tried to buck him up. “I think we’re going to have to have a meeting about self-care soon,” Grant said.

Behind each new revelation of white-collar crime lurks an uncomfortable question about some of America’s most lucrative businesses: Are they attracting rogues or grooming them? Eugene Soltes, a professor at Harvard Business School, told me that regulations were partly to blame. “There is more white-collar crime today because there are more things that are criminal today than fifty years ago,” he said. Bribing a foreign official, for instance, was legal until the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, and insider trading was rarely prosecuted until the nineteen-eighties. Today, those are among the most common offenses. But, Soltes went on, “I suspect that you might be asking the more intuitive version of this question. Given the same laws, same number of people, et cetera, is the proclivity for someone to engage in white-collar crime higher than it was fifty years ago?”

For his book “ Why They Do It ,” Soltes interviewed scores of people convicted or accused of white-collar crime. He said that he had found no evidence of a growing inclination to break laws. What has changed, though, is what he calls the “psychological distance” between perpetrators and their victims: “Business is done with individuals at greater length now, which reduces the feeling that managers are harming others.” In thought experiments, people agree to sacrifice the life of someone they can’t see far more readily than that of someone who stands before them. In Soltes’s interviews with people who had committed price-fixing or fraud, he found that many of them had never had a personal encounter with the victims.

In recent years, the lament that moral constraints have weakened has been voiced not just by critics of Wall Street but also by practitioners. In 2012, John C. Bogle, an iconic investor who founded the Vanguard Group and spent more than six decades in finance, wrote, “When I came into this field, the standard seemed to be ‘there are some things that one simply doesn’t do.’ Today, the standard is ‘if everyone else is doing it, I can do it too.’ ” Soon afterward, the law firm Labaton Sucharow conducted a survey of finance professionals, in which a quarter of them said that they would “engage in insider trading to make $10 million if they could get away with it.” Around the same time, Greg Smith, an executive director at Goldman Sachs, announced his resignation, decrying a “decline in the firm’s moral fiber.” Writing in the Times , he observed, “Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as ‘muppets.’ . . . You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about ‘muppets,’ ‘ripping eyeballs out’ and ‘getting paid’ doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.”

Researchers have elucidated the way that dubious behavior moves through a community. In the mid-aughts, the federal government brought criminal and civil cases for backdating stock options—manipulating records so that executives could take home a larger return than their options really delivered. Studies found that the practice had started in Silicon Valley and then infected the broader business world; the vectors of transmission could be traced to specific individuals who served as directors or auditors of multiple companies. An unethical habit spreads in encounters among neighbors and colleagues, through subtle cues that psychologists call “affective evaluations.” If people are rising on one measurement (profit) even as they are falling on another (ethics), the verdict about which matters more will hinge on the culture around them—on which values are most “exalted by members of their insular business communities,” Soltes observed in his book. As he told me, “If you spend time with people who pick locks, you will probably learn to pick locks.”

In 2013, prosecutors announced an indictment of S.A.C. Capital Advisors—named for its founder, Steven A. Cohen —calling it a “veritable magnet for market cheaters.” Cohen, like a considerable number of his peers, lived in Greenwich. In the previous decade, as the hedge-fund industry surged in scale and profits, the rise of the Internet had allowed funds to leave Wall Street, and many moved to southern Connecticut to take advantage of favorable tax rates and easy commutes. By 2005, hedge funds had taken over two-thirds of Greenwich’s commercial real estate.

After the charges against Cohen were announced, David Rafferty, a columnist for Greenwich Time , a local paper, published a piece with the headline “ Greenwich, Gateway to White-Collar Crime .” He wrote, “A few years ago you might have been proud to tell your friends you lived in ‘The Hedge Fund Capital of the World.’ Now? Not so much.”

Rafferty, in his column, described a “growing sense of unease in certain circles as one hedgie after another seems to be facing the music.” Cohen, however, faced the music for a limited interlude. Under an agreement brokered with prosecutors, his firm pleaded guilty to insider trading and was sentenced to pay $1.8 billion in penalties. After a two-year suspension, Cohen returned to the hedge-fund business, and made enough money to buy the New York Mets. The price was $2.4 billion, the largest sum ever paid for a North American sports franchise.

Luigi Zingales, a finance professor at the University of Chicago, told me that he wishes his profession spoke more candidly about accountability and impunity. Most of the time, he said, business schools find “every possible way to avoid the moral questions.” He added, “I don’t know of any alum that has been kicked out of the alumni association for immoral behavior. There are trustees of business schools today who have been convicted of bribery and insider trading, and I don’t think people notice or care.” He went on, “People are getting more and more comfortable in the gray area.”

One of the longest-running members of the White Collar Support Group is a lean and taciturn man in his forties named Tom Hardin—or, as he is known with some notoriety in Wall Street circles, Tipper X. Not long after graduating from business school at Wharton, Hardin went to work for a hedge fund in Greenwich. He had much to learn. Almost instantly, he began hearing that some competitors, such as the billionaire Raj Rajaratnam , were suspected of relying on illegal tips from company insiders. (Rajaratnam was later convicted and sentenced to eleven years.) In 2007, after Hardin became a partner at Lanexa Global Management, a hedge fund in New York, he got his own inside tip, a heads-up on an upcoming acquisition, and he traded on the information and beat the market. He repeated similar stunts three times. “I’m, like, I would never get caught if I buy a small amount of stock,” he told me. “This is like dropping a penny in the Grand Canyon.” He went on, “You can say, ‘I’m highly ethical and would never do this.’ But once you’re in the environment, and you feel like everybody else is doing it, and you feel you’re not hurting anybody? It’s very easy to convince yourself.”

One morning in 2008, Hardin was walking out of the dry cleaner’s when two F.B.I. agents approached him. They sat him down in a Wendy’s nearby and told him that they knew about his illegal trades. He had a choice: go to jail or wear a wire. He chose the latter, and became one of the most productive informants in the history of securities fraud. The F.B.I. gave him a tiny recorder disguised as a cell-phone battery, which he slipped into his shirt pocket, to gather evidence in more than twenty criminal cases brought under Operation Perfect Hedge. For a year and a half, his identity was disguised in court documents as Tipper X, fuelling a mystery around what the Times called “the secret witness at the center of the biggest insider-trading case in a generation.”

Person on deserted island keeps putting off reading the message in bottles that have washed ashore.

In December, 2009, Hardin pleaded guilty, and his identity was revealed in court filings. He had avoided prison but become a felon, which made features of a normal life all but impossible, from opening a brokerage account to coaching his daughters’ soccer team. He was unsure how he could earn a living. “I would ask my attorney, ‘Are there any past clients you can connect me with who’ve got to the other side of this and are back on their feet?’ He was, like, ‘Sorry, not really.’ ”

He heard of Grant’s group through a friend. “I had no idea something like this existed,” Hardin said. “Jeff was the first one who said, ‘Hey, here’s a group of people just in our situation. Come every Monday.’ ” In 2016, the F.B.I. called him again—this time, to invite him to brief a class of freshman federal agents. Hardin’s lecture at the F.B.I. led to more speeches—first for free, and eventually for a living. He was back on Wall Street, as a teller of cautionary tales. It was not quite motivational speaking; his niche, as he put it, dryly, was “overcoming self-inflicted career decimation.”

In his dealings with his peers, Hardin has learned to distinguish who is genuinely remorseful from who is not. “I’ll hear from white-collar felons who tell me, ‘I made a mistake,’ ” he told me. “I’ll say, ‘A mistake is something we do without intention. A bad decision was made intentionally.’ If you’re classifying your bad decisions as mistakes, you’re not accepting responsibility.”

In the era of rising discontent over injustice, some Americans accused of white-collar crimes have sought to identify with the movement to curb incarceration and prosecutorial misconduct. So far, the spirit of redemption has not extended to the members of the White Collar Support Group, whose crimes relate to some of the very abuses of power that inspire demands for greater accountability. For the moment, they are caught between competing furies, so they rely, more than ever, on one another. “A white-collar advocate still doesn’t have a seat at the table of the larger criminal-justice conversation,” Grant told me. “We exist because there’s no place else for us to go.”

The group members’ predicament rests on an unavoidable hypocrisy: after conducting themselves with little concern for the public, they find themselves appealing to the public for mercy. Baroni, the former Port Authority executive, told me, “I can’t go back. All I can do now is to take the experiences that I’ve had and try and help people.” His regrets extend beyond his scandal. He had been a New Jersey state senator, and, he said, “I voted to increase mandatory minimum sentencing. I never would have done that had I had the experience of being in prison.”

Baroni recently helped establish a nonprofit called the Prison Visitation Fund, which, if it can raise money, promises to pay travel expenses for family members who can’t afford to travel. His partner, and first funder, in the endeavor is a former lawyer named Gordon Caplan, who is one of fifty-seven defendants in the college-admissions scandal known as Operation Varsity Blues. Caplan was a co-chairman of the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher until 2019, when he was indicted for paying seventy-five thousand dollars for a test proctor to fix his daughter’s A.C.T. exam. “To be honest,” Caplan said, on an F.B.I. recording at the time, “I’m not worried about the moral issue here.” He pleaded guilty and was sent to a federal prison camp in Loretto, Pennsylvania, a minimum-security facility that houses low-risk offenders with less than ten years left on their sentences.

Caplan was one of America’s most prominent lawyers, but he never paid much attention to complaints about the criminal-justice system until he was in the maw of it. “What I saw is other people going through a system that’s built for failure, built for recidivism,” he told me recently. Caplan had presumed that incarcerated people had reasonable access to job training and reading materials. He was wrong. “The only courses that were offered were how to become a certified physical trainer and automotive repair.” Inmates could create their own classes, and Caplan taught a short course on basic business literacy. “I had fifteen to twenty guys every class,” he said. “ ‘Do I set up an L.L.C. versus a corporation?’ ‘Should I borrow money or should I get people to invest in equity?’ ” Since getting out, Caplan has been alarmed by the barriers that prevent even nonviolent felons from rebuilding a life. “I have assets and I have family and I’ve got all that. But how does a guy who came out for dealing marijuana even start a painting business?”

Hearing Caplan, Grant, and others talk about their sudden understanding of America’s penal system put me in mind of the work of Bryan Stevenson, a leading civil-rights lawyer and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, which advocates for criminal-justice reform. He beseeches people to “get proximate”—to step outside the confines of their experience. Stevenson often quotes his grandmother, the daughter of enslaved people, who went on to raise nine children. “You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan,” she told him. “You have to get close.”

But getting close is not the same as staying close. After serving twenty-eight days in prison, Caplan returned to Greenwich, where he lives in a seven-million-dollar Colonial, down the hill from the old Helmsley estate. For all his recent concern about the failings of criminal justice, I suspected that the country might have more to learn from him about his own failings. What, I asked, possessed him to pay someone to falsify his kid’s college-admissions test results? He was not eager to answer. “Achievement, I think, is like a drug,” he said, after a pause. “Once you achieve one thing, you need to achieve the next thing. And, when you’re surrounded by people that are doing that, it becomes self-reinforcing. When you also have insecurities, which a lot of highly motivated people do, you’re more apt to do what is necessary to achieve. And it’s easy to step off the line.” Caplan convinced himself that paying to change his daughter’s test results was scarcely more objectionable than other forms of influence and leverage that get kids into school. “I saw what I believed to be a very corrupt system, and I’ve got to play along or I’ll be disadvantaged.”

Greed, of course, is older than the Ten Commandments. But Caplan’s experience illuminated the degree to which greed has been celebrated in America by the past two generations, engineered for lucrative new applications that, in efficiency and effect, are as different from their predecessors as an AR-15 rifle is from a musket. If you have the means, you can hone every edge, from your life expectancy to the amount of taxes you pay and your child’s performance on the A.C.T.s. It’s not hard to insure that the winners keep winning, as long as you don’t get caught.

In the most candid moments on the Zoom call, people acknowledged the damage that their crimes had inflicted on their spouses and children. Seth Williams, a former district attorney of Philadelphia, pleaded guilty in 2017 to accepting gifts in exchange for favors, and served nearly three years in federal prison. Afterward, he struggled to find an apartment that would accept a felon. His first job was stocking shelves overnight at a big-box store; eventually, after an online course, he became a wedding officiant for hire. He was not surprised that former colleagues avoided him, but watching the effects on his family left him in despair. “It affects all of us in how our children are treated at their schools, on the playground,” he said. “Some of our spouses, people want nothing to do with them.”

Not long ago, Grant regained his law license in the State of New York, based largely on his work as a minister and as an expert on preparing for prison and life after. Nineteen years after being disbarred, he rented an office on West Forty-third Street in Manhattan and started practicing again, as a private general counsel and a specialist in “white-collar crisis management.” At seminary, he had studied migrant communities, and he came to see an analogy to people convicted of white-collar crimes. “We have one foot in the old country, one foot in the new,” he told me. If they hoped to thrive again, they would have to depend on one another. “Greek Americans funded each other and opened diners. They lift each other up.” He went on, “The problem we have in the white-collar community is that people who have been prosecuted for white-collar crimes want to become so successful again that they are no longer associated with it. I’ve approached some of the household names, and to a one they’ve rejected it.” I asked him if he was referring to people like Michael Milken and Martha Stewart. Grant demurred. “My mission is to help people relieve their shame, not to shame someone into doing something.”

Grant will tell you that shame does not help in recovery. But America’s record in recent years suggests that, in the nation at large, too little shame attaches to white-collar crime. If the country has begun to appreciate the structural reasons that many of its least advantaged people break the law, it has yet to reckon with the question of why many of its most advantaged do, too. Members of Grant’s group usually come to accept that they got themselves into trouble, but more than a few hope to follow Milken and Stewart back to the club they used to belong to—winners of the American game.

As the Zoom meeting wound down, Grant asked Andy Tezna, the former NASA executive on his way to prison, if there was anything else he wanted to say. “I had a lapse of judgment,” he began, then caught himself and confessed impatience with the language of confession. “I’m so tired of using that word, but, whatever it was that led me to make my mistake, it’s not going to define me for the rest of my life.” He thanked the members of the group for helping him get ready to embark on his “government-mandated retreat.” He’d see them afterward, he said, “once I’m out, a little wiser, a little older, with a few more gray hairs.” ♦

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What I’ve Learned About White-Collar Crime

Mary Jo White

A former top prosecutor shares her insights on what motivates perpetrators, how to prevent illicit conduct, and what corporate compliance efforts get wrong.

When I began practicing law, in the 1970s, white-collar crime didn’t get much attention outside my old office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Prosecutors cared much more about homicides, drug kingpins, and the mob. Financial crimes weren’t considered very serious or interesting by most prosecutors. That’s changed for a variety of reasons.

MW Mary Jo White , currently the senior chair of the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton, is the former chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Article contents

Public knowledge about white-collar crime.

Cedric Michel Cedric Michel Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. University of Tampa
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.496
Published online: 30 July 2018

A considerable body of research on societal response to white-collar and corporate crime has evidenced a hardening of public attitudes, including increased perceived seriousness of upper-class criminality and punitiveness toward its perpetrators. These findings suggest that, over time, the public has gained a better understanding of white-collar crime and its deleterious social impact. However, none of the opinion surveys included a direct measure of public knowledge. As a result, it is difficult to determine to which extent U.S. citizens are objectively informed about crimes of the powerful. In fact, only a few studies have focused exclusively on the intersection between knowledge about white-collar crime and sentiment toward it. These scholarly efforts have concluded that the American people continue to underestimate the actual financial and physical consequences of white-collar crime, which may be the result of selective reporting by the mass media and biased research foci by scholars. By choosing to focus on traditional criminal law violations, such as homicide and theft, and relegating white-collar offenses to the rank of victimless crimes, journalists and criminologists have contributed to the construction and propagation of myths about upper-world criminality. In turn, continuous adherence to these myths might lead to polarized opinions about which type of penal policy to adopt against white-collar crime.

public knowledge
perceived seriousness
punitiveness
white-collar crime
criminality

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How to Stop White-Collar Crime

A federal judge says fear of prison is the best way to deter bad behavior.

July 25, 2017

It’s politically safer for federal prosecutors to fine corporations than take the risk of trying to convict executives. | iStock/chinaface

Big fines paid by businesses that break the law provide no incentive for companies to change cultures that lead to that illegal activity, says Jed S. Rakoff , a senior judge on the bench of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Even large fines and bad publicity are often viewed as a cost of doing business rather than a deterrent for companies that break the law.

And a common federal tactic, so-called “deferred prosecution,” is in effect a “get out of jail free” card for executives, says the jurist.

Although the public might like to see accused executives wind up behind bars, they don’t because the U.S. Department of Justice finds it easier to prosecute corporations instead of the people who run them, he says. Rakoff spoke to Insights during a recent visit as part of Stanford GSB’s new interdisciplinary Finance and Society Visitor Program, organized by Anat Admati , the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics. Rakoff’s work as a prosecutor is covered in Jesse Eisinger’s recently released book The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives . Eisinger, a journalist, also came to Stanford as part of Admati’s visitor program.

What incentive would work to change corporate behavior? The threat of prison, says Rakoff. “I found that to a person, [executives accused of white-collar crimes] feared prison, and they feared it mightily. They would have paid any amount of money, done anything to avoid going to prison. So prison does have a major deterrent effect,” he says.

Rakoff spent seven years prosecuting white-collar criminals as a federal prosecutor before shifting to a private practice, where he defended many of them for 15 years. He was appointed to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton in 1995 and now hears cases stemming from alleged criminality by corporations at the heart of this country’s financial system.

Unlike many federal judges, Rakoff has spoken out extensively on a variety of broad legal issues. He is the author of five books, 135 published articles, 600 speeches, and 1,500 judicial opinions. Rakoff says he feels it is part of a federal judge’s role to educate the public and legislators about the need to rethink the way white-collar crime is prosecuted and punished.

Deferred Prosecution: Not Just for Juveniles

Until the late 1990s, the United States, along with most of the developed world, prosecuted individuals — not corporations — in cases of white-collar crime. That had been the prevailing view of the Department of Justice for decades and it made a good deal of sense, Rakoff says. “Corporations are not robots that go out and commit crimes by themselves.”

The practice changed for a variety of reasons, Rakoff says, but the driving factor was cost. Building a criminal case against a high-level executive is a lengthy and complex process. It can take several years of patiently “flipping” low-level members of an organization to compile enough evidence to prosecute the people at the top. There’s always a danger that the low-level types will lie to save their necks, and there’s no guarantee that the work will result in a prosecution, let alone a conviction.

Quote Corporations are not robots that go out and commit crimes by themselves. Attribution Jed S. Rakoff

But prosecuting a corporation is faster and cheaper, Rakoff says. “Corporations can’t be in a state of perpetual war with the government. The stakes are too high. You know in advance that sooner or later they will come to terms and it will never go to trial.” Plus there’s a bonus for ambitious prosecutors: “If packaged right, prosecution of corporations can be politically appealing.”

As prosecutors changed strategy, they began to use a tactic called “deferred prosecution.” As Rakoff recounted in an article that appeared in the New York Review of Books in 2015, deferred prosecution came into vogue in the 1930s, as a way to help juvenile offenders. Prosecutors could defer prosecution of a juvenile if the young offender agreed to enter a rehabilitation program. Offenders who completed the program would not be charged.

By the late 1990s, prosecutors agreed to defer corporate prosecution if the business agreed to pay a fine and to adopt various measures designed to “rehabilitate the company’s culture,” Rakoff wrote.

Deferred prosecutions averaged 35 a year between 2007 and 2012, the last year for which data are available. According to Rakoff, crimes for which prosecution was deferred “included felony violations of the securities laws, banking laws, antitrust laws, anti-money-laundering laws, food and drug laws, foreign corrupt practices laws, and numerous provisions of the general federal criminal code.”

Deferred prosecution of white-collar crime has been used for some 20 years, more than enough time to see if it has served as a deterrent to crime or encouraged positive changes in corporate culture. It hasn’t, Rakoff says.

He pointed to research by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which found that more than half of the people who committed serious fraud offenses in the last few years were recidivists. That figure suggests “that the practice of going after companies but not individuals has not changed the corporate culture in which most white-collar crimes are committed,” Rakoff says.

But even if deferred prosecution were effective, Rakoff says, “it would not excuse not going after the individuals, because they are still the people who did the crime.”

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White Collar Crime
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White Collar Crime
Therefore, in some countries, white collar crime can elicit sentences that mirror sentences in violent crime. They have created guidelines which judges must use when making sentencing decisions. Whether white-collar crime should be punished more severely. White-collar criminals should indeed receive greater penalties for the wrongdoings.
Why Do White-Collar Criminals Do It?
How do sociologists explain the behavior of white-collar criminals like L. Dennis Kozlowski? This article explores the factors that influence their decisions, such as social norms, competition, and justification. It also reviews a paper by James William Coleman that proposes a theory of white-collar crime.
Understanding White-Collar Crime, Essay Example
A number of theories have been presented to explain the behavior of white-collar criminals, including Social Control Theory and Organizational Theory (Coleman, 1987). In the end, most of these theories fall short, as there is such a broad number of types of white-collar crimes and white-collar criminals.
White-Collar Crime: What It Is and How It Affects Society
The name "white-collar" crime comes from the button-up white shirts that businessmen traditionally wore (as opposed to blue-collar shirts). Since then, the term has been used to describe a wide range of activities including corporate fraud, securities fraud, embezzlement, money laundering, bribery and cybercrime.
The Annoying Truth About White-Collar Crime
White-collar crime is a term for nonviolent, financially motivated offenses committed by people of respectability and high social status. Learn why it's so hard to prevent and punish, and how it ...
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Jennifer Taub exposes some of the biggest white collar crimes in history, including the 2008 financial crisis and the opioid epidemic. ... Opinion by Jennifer Taub. 2020-10-07T13:07:00Z
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He did so earlier this year for Michael Milken and Eddie DeBartolo Jr., sending a powerful message that white-collar crimes don't really matter, even though white-collar crime in America ...
White-Collar Crime: A Review of Recent Developments and Promising
White-collar crime is one of the least understood and arguably most consequential of all crime types. This review highlights and assesses recent (primarily during the past decade) contributions to white-collar crime theory (with special emphasis on critical, choice, and organizational theories of offending), new evidence regarding the sentencing and punishment of white-collar offenders, and ...
The whiteness of white-collar crime in the United States: Examining the
When this social isolation is combined with financial advantage, it serves to block the development of empathy toward outgroups and increases feelings of individual entitlement, which leads to the formation of crime-specific cultural frames that include neutralizations and justifications for elite white-collar crime.
The Oxford Handbook of White-Collar Crime
This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the definition, causes, costs, and control of white-collar crime. It covers theoretical, empirical, and policy aspects of this complex and global problem that affects the economy and society.
32 Public Opinion and Public Policy on White-Collar Crime
This chapter discusses what ordinary people think about white-collar crime and the proper punishment for it, which was a topic of concern at the U.S. Sentencing Commission's Symposium on Economic Crime in September 2013. Like the commission's previous symposium on this topic in 2000, research evidence on public opinion about white-collar crime was solicited.
White Collar Crime: What It Is and Where It's Going
2014] WHITE COLLAR CRIME: WHAT IT IS AND WHERE IT'S GOING 483 While he gave no formal definition of the term in the speech, he would eventually define white collar crimes as "crimes committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation."3
White-Collar Crime: An Overview Essay (Article Review)
This paper reviews six articles (cases) about white-collar crimes, such as "Health Fraud Takedown", "Denial of Service Attacks on Websites", "A New York Senator Embezzling Funds". ... White-Collar Crime: An Overview Essay (Article Review) ... It must be noted though such a view is not isolated to my own personal opinion but is also ...
White Collar Crime Essay
There are two types of crime that can be considered complete opposites of each other. They are white collar crimes and street crimes. White collar crimes are considered nonviolent crimes committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his/her occupation such as fraud, embezzlement, or bribery. On the other hand,
White-Collar Crimes Causes
The individual perspective is more effective in predicting white-collar crime since it focuses on personal features that have a larger role in characterizing behaviors. References. Hirschi, T., & Gottfredson, M. (1987). Causes of white-collar crime. Criminology, 25, 949-974. Olejarz, J. (2016). Understanding white-collar crime. Web.
Professional Criminals and White-Collar Crime in Popular Culture
Today, white-collar crime is a broad term that applies to a range of activities and has become shorthand for discussions of crimes that involve deception, abuse of trust, and intelligent criminals.Media representations have emphasized these characteristics and portrayed white-collar criminals and con artists as offending elites, both in terms ...
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In American culture, white-collar crime is often portrayed less as evidence of unfettered greed than as a misguided sibling of success. By and large, the country's governing class has encouraged ...
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Mary Jo White, a former U.S. attorney and SEC chair, reflects on her experience with white-collar crime and offers advice on how to prevent and detect it. Learn about the motivations, methods, and ...
White Collar Crime: Causes, Impacts, and the Criminal Justice System
RISE OF WHITE COLLAR CRIME The term "White Collar Crime" was first used by Edwin Sutherland in 1939. Sutherland defined white collar crime as "crime committed by a person of respectability a ... Get Help With Your Essay. ... Van Slyke, Shanna. 2009. "Social Identification and Public Opinion on White-Collar Crime." Order No. 3399246 ...
Public Knowledge About White-Collar Crime
"Public Knowledge About White-Collar Crime" published on by Oxford University Press. ... However, none of the opinion surveys included a direct measure of public knowledge. As a result, it is difficult to determine to which extent U.S. citizens are objectively informed about crimes of the powerful. In fact, only a few studies have focused ...
How to Stop White-Collar Crime
A federal judge argues that fear of prison is the best way to deter bad behavior by executives who break the law. He criticizes the practice of deferred prosecution, which lets corporations off the hook without holding individuals accountable.
White Collar Crime Essays (Examples)
White Collar Crimes he first definition states that this is an illegal act committed via non-physical means by guile to gain personal advantage. his definition's drawback is that it belittles white collar crimes; that harm people physically and psychology and arouses concern in the society. he other is divided into two parts; occupational crime ...
White-collar Crime Essay Examples
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