ABSTRACT
One of Sutherland’s professed goals in writing about white-collar crime was to reform criminological theory. In the 1930s, when Sutherland began working in this area, criminological theory was dominated by the view that crime was concentrated in the lower social classes and was caused by the personal and social pathologies that accompany poverty. Sutherland contended that this approach was wrong on two counts. First, it does “not even explain lower class criminality” (Sutherland, 1940, p. 10). As he correctly pointed out, many—indeed most—poverty-stricken people are not criminal. Therefore, poverty and the pathologies associated with it cannot be general or sufficient causes of criminal behavior. Second, theories that use data taken from the poverty-stricken classes are based on “a biased sample that omits almost entirely the behavior of white-collar criminals” (Sutherland, 1940, p. 9). Specifically, they ignore the many serious crimes committed by individuals in the upper social classes in the course of their occupations—in other words, white-collar crime. A truly adequate criminological theory should account for or explain crime in all its different forms (Sutherland, 1940). Accordingly, Sutherland proposed a theory of white-collar crime based on his famous differential association theory.
