A Case Control Study: White-Collar Defendants Compared With Defendants Charged With Other Nonviolent Theft

Came across an interesting article entitled A Case Control Study: White-Collar Defendants Compared With Defendants Charged With Other Nonviolent Theft from the March 2006 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. 

The article reports the results of a study in which the authors examined the clinical, criminal, and sociodemographic characteristics of all white-collar crime defendants referred to the evaluation unit of a state center for forensic psychiatry.  The study ultimately compares the profiles of 70 embezzlers against the profiles of 73 defendants charged with other forms of nonviolent theft.  The embezzlers were found to have a higher likelihood of white race, more years of education, and a lower likelihood of substance abuse than the control group.

The complexity of the statistics is probably beyond most readers, but for those interested, you can access the full article here.

New Book: Lying, Cheating, and Stealing: A Moral Theory of White-Collar Crime

The White Collar Crime Prof blog recently posted about a new book from Professor Stuart Green, the Louis B. Porterie Professor of Law at Louisiana State University, entitled Lying, Cheating, and Stealing: A Moral Theory of White-Collar Crime.  Professor Henning praises Professor Green for his clear writing style and thorough analysis, and calls the new book an important contribution to the literature on white collar crime. See the full post here, including a link to purchase the book on Amazon.

A Guide to White Collar Crime Prisons

The White Collar Crime Prof Blog in a post here linked to an interesting article here in the Kansas City Star that references Alan Ellis' The Federal Prison Handbook 2005 . Among other things, the handbook offers snapshots of the 178 federal prisons categorized by the four security levels — high, low, medium and minimum. It also covers prison resources such as recreational facilities, vocational programs, drug and alcohol therapies, and libraries, and provides a list of hotels and motels nearby where relatives can stay.

For David Letterman fans, the book also lists the top 5 prisons in Ellis' professional opinion.

It also notes that out of a prison population of 189,097 inmates, 1,001 inmates are currently incarcerated for embezzlement, counterfeiting, and other financial crimes.

Anyway, this is one guide we hope you never need.

White Collar Crime Survey

The American Criminal Law Review (ACLR), published by the law students of the Georgetown University Law Center, is one of the nation's premier journals covering criminal law. Each year, the ACLR publishes the highly regarded Annual Survey of White Collar Crime in its spring edition. Peter Henning, at the White Collar Crime Prof Blog, has provided a list of the topics covered in the Spring 2005 Survey.

Learn more about the ACLR, here. The contents of past issues can be reviewed here.

University of Pittsburgh's Sandra Jordan Writes the Book on White Collar Crime

Sandra Jordan is an associate professor in Pitt’s School of Law and coauthor of the newly published White Collar Crime: Cases, Materials, and Problems (LexisNexis, 2005).

White collar crime used to be defined, she notes, as "a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation.”  However, Jordan explains, this definition fails to take into account embezzlement by bank tellers lacking “high social status.”

For a long time, there was a disparity between sentences for white collar crimes and more violent crimes.  As Jordan notes it used to be that “if someone walks into the bank with a gun and a piece of paper that says, ‘Give me your money,’ that person is likely to only get a couple hundred dollars because of all the protections in place. But a person behind the counter can embezzle millions of dollars. Yet, the robber or street criminal was often punished more harshly than the embezzler.”

Read more about Jordan's book and her insights into evolving attitdues towards white collar crime.