White-Collar Offenders and Desistance from Crime

Future selves and the constancy of change

Ben Hunter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317642572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The MPs' expenses scandal in England and Wales and the international banking crisis have both brought into focus a concern about 'elite' individuals and their treatment by criminal justice systems. This interest intersects with a well-established concern within criminology for the transgressions of such offenders. However, up until now there has been little sustained consideration of what happens to such offenders following conviction and little discussion of how they attempt to avoid reoffending in the wake of their punishment.

This study rectifies this omission by drawing upon white-collar offenders' own accounts of their punishment and their attempts to make new lives in the aftermath of it. Detailing the impact of imprisonment on white-collar offenders, their release from prison and efforts to be successful again, this book outlines the particular strategies white-collar offenders used to cope with the difficulties they encountered and also analyses the ways they tried to work out 'who they were' in the post-release worlds they found themselves in.

Representing the first sustained qualitative study of white-collar offenders and desistance from crime, this book will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of white-collar crime, desistance from crime and prison. The insights it offers into a particular group of offenders' experience of criminal justice would also make it useful for criminal justice practitioners and anyone who wishes to understand the challenges faced by a group of offenders who are assumed to have many advantages when it comes to desisting from crime.

1 The challenge of white-collar offenders’ desistance

The study of white-collar crime has, like desistance-focused research, received much attention from academics. However, observations regarding the demographic characteristics of white-collar offenders have rarely been considered with respect to knowledge on desistance. This chapter rectifies this. The first section considers some of the conceptual issues inherent in any attempt to study white-collar crime, along with the observed realities of who the ‘average’ white-collar offender is. The chapter then moves to outline the substantial literature on criminal careers and desistance, noting the developments in this field over the last two decades and the recent emphasis on understanding how those who are attempting to desist experience the process. The final section of the chapter brings together the first two, demonstrating that a consideration of traditional explanations for desistance appears unsuitable for considering desistance from white-collar crime. It is argued that attending to the subjective experience of desisting from crime will help to situate the experiences of those convicted of a white-collar crime within current desistance debates.

White-collar crime

It has become traditional (obligatory?) to begin any discussion on white-collar crime by highlighting the definitional issues that trouble its study. Arising out of a perceived class bias in the way in which crime and criminals were perceived, Sutherland (1940, 1945, 1983) sought to bring the concept of a rather different sort of offender to the attention of social scientists. Definitions of white-collar crime have tended to either focus upon the offender or the offence, with the former following Sutherland (1940, 1983) in prioritising an individual’s social status or respectability as of key importance. The latter are concerned with the offence itself, the manner in which it is carried out and the means of doing so (e.g. Wheeler et al., 1982; Shapiro, 1990). Offender based definitions highlight that individuals of high status may be as crime prone as any other, but bring under their purview the problem that concepts such as respectability are resistant to being measured (Croall, 2001). Simultaneously, the opportunities to commit the types of crime Sutherland (1940) was originally attempting to highlight with his definition are now distributed far more evenly than when the concept of white-collar crime was first raised (Weisburd et al., 2001). Offence-based definitions are troubled by the observation that an extremely wide variety of crime may be included in such definitions. Both crimes by employees of small businesses and war crimes can be identified as ‘white-collar’ under certain definitions Croall (2001).

In any event, and as Weisburd et al. (2001) note, the purpose of the concept of white-collar crime is to highlight a type of crime and a type of offender rather different from those reflected in the literature more generally:

High social status is not a trait that is normally associated with crime, nor indeed is white-collar occupational status. Street criminals often use guns or knives to steal from their victims, they do not rely on paper instruments or computers as methods for committing their offenses. In some basic sense, the different definitions of white-collar crime intersect with one another.

(Weisburd et al., 2001, 9)

This study utilises the definition suggested by Edelhertz (1970, 3) under which white-collar crime is:

An illegal act or series of illegal acts committed by non-physical means and by concealment or guile, to obtain money or property, to avoid the loss of money or property, or to obtain business or personal advantage.

Although still broad, this offence-based definition does not place an occupation as being of importance. Simultaneously it recognises that offending may take place to gain or avoid losing non-physical assets i.e. that both potential gain and potential loss may be motivations for white-collar crime (Wheeler, 1992, although see Piquero, 2012 for an empirical test of this ‘fear of falling’). For the purposes of this study, a white-collar offender is anyone convicted of a white-collar offence under the above definition.

Researching white-collar crime

It may once have been fair to say that white-collar crime was a hidden problem largely ignored by criminologists, a fact that Sutherland bemoaned and was behind his original intent when he brought the field’s attention to the concept. However, that is hardly true today. Over two decades ago Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990, 180) suggested that no concept within criminology was more secure. This is not least because white-collar crime and offenders were regularly used as the stick with which to beat supposedly general theories of crime, demonstrating their shortcomings in describing the behaviour of this most complex group of offenders and crimes. Such security is seemingly inviolable now, with Shover and Hochstetler (2006, 4) similarly convinced of white-collar crime as having captured scholarly and lay public attention and being firmly rooted in everyday parlance. Numerous core texts introduce students to the concept (Croall, 2001; Friedrichs, 2009) and edited collections explore its intricacies (Simpson and Weisburd, 2009) or bring together key readings (Shover and Wright, 2001). Journals publish special editions that consider white-collar offending (Karstedt et al., 2006; Benson, 2013), ‘state of the field’ reviews (Simpson, 2013) or articles that organise and rank by frequency of citations the scholars engaged in white-collar crime research (Wright et al., 2001).

Despite this however, it seems that, generally speaking, white-collar crime is a difficult subject for researchers to engage with, notwithstanding Weisburd et al. (2001), who present statistical portraits of white-collar offenders. Shover and Hochstetler lament the lack of statistical data on white-collar offenders’ activities, noting that what is known about white-collar offenders is ‘pale in quality and comprehensiveness beside the bountiful and readily available data on street crime’ (2006, 13). When it comes to studying corporate violations of the law, researchers have emphasised case studies as a means of understanding misconduct by large organisations (e.g. Geis, 1968; Vaughan, 2001). Studies of the lives of individual white-collar offenders are, as Shover and Hochstetler allude to, not particularly extensive. Relatively few and far between are those studies that do provide an informative look at specific situations and ‘varieties’ of white-collar offender (Cressey, 1971; Levi, 1981; Benson, 1985; Jesilow et al., 1993). Perhaps due to the fact that such a diverse range of behaviours can fall under the umbrella of white-collar crime definitions, these provide snapshots of rather specific environments, situating motivation within those confines or having a particular theoretical focus (neutralization theory for example: Copes et al., 2013).

One potential reason for this scarcity is the difficulty of conducting research with those who have either committed or are committing white-collar offences. Levi observes that the ethnographer who chooses white-collar crime as their topic of study may face problems simply being able to afford to share space with those they wish to learn about (1981, 327). Shover and Hunter (2010) note that ongoing legal action and the oft-convoluted nature of their cases, combined with a desire to put the experience of criminal justice behind them once they have been punished means that there is practically no good time to try to elicit interviews with white-collar offenders.¹ These difficulties in collecting research data on white-collar offenders pose significant challenges for researchers and have seen the adoption by some of what may be considered unconventional means. Shover and Hochstetler (2006) for example, draw upon published autobiographical accounts by white-collar offenders for their data.

Maybe because of these difficulties in accessing the white-collar crime experience, explanations for white-collar crime have, generally speaking, been rather lacking within criminological theory (Croall, 2001, 80), particularly where corporate crime is the focus of enquiry (Slapper and Tombs, 1999, 110). The relationship of white-collar crime to more general observations regarding criminal behaviour is patchy at best, with general theories of crime increasingly seen as limited in use for understanding white-collar offending (see Croall, 2001, 79–101 and Nelken, 2012 for an exploration of the relationship between white-collar crime and criminological theories more generally). Nelken argues that what hampers this search for an explanation for white-collar crime may be that causes of crime may vary by offence type and, relatedly, that particular formulations of white-collar crime (e.g. is breach of trust important? can it take place outside of an occupation?) will locate explanations differently (2012). Nevertheless, white-collar crime continues to be considered occasionally with respect to other established frameworks. Of most relevance here is Weisburd et al.’s application of the criminal career approach to white-collar crime, which will be more fully explored below.

Identifying white-collar offenders

Popular stereotype holds the white-collar offender as the antithesis of the street offender. While crime is associated with male youths who experience a large degree of disadvantage (Weisburd et al., 1991), white-collar crime ‘has been linked to advantaged older men from stable homes living in well-kept communities’ (Weisburd et al., 1991, 47).

The reality is somewhat different, notwithstanding the fact that types of white-collar crime differ widely (Croall, 2001). Weisburd et al. (2001), following Weisburd et al. (1991) identify four groupings of white-collar offenders along a spectrum of social and demographic characteristics. Those at the ‘high’ end were more likely to be company owners, have greater resources and were more likely to be graduates. Of those at the ‘low’ end less than half were in full time employment. Additionally, for certain types of offences (e.g. bank embezzlement), offenders were almost as likely to be female as male (Weisburd et al., 2001; see also Levi, 1994). Further to this, white-collar offenders are far closer in terms of demographic characteristics to non-deviant individuals, frequently being married and of ‘average’ socio-economic status (Levi, 1988). Benson and Kerley (2001) make similar observations. In short, white-collar offenders are typically ‘ordinary people leading middle class lives’ (Benson and Kerley, 2001, 129).

Following Weisburd et al. (2001, 26) however, it is worth noting that such observations still fit with the overall goal of white-collar crime research and Sutherland’s (1940) original intention when introducing the concept i.e. to highlight a rather different type of offender than had been conceived of previously. The average white-collar offender presented in the above studies is not the elite corporate executive of popular stereotype. However he or she is still more likely to be married, be of greater average age and have higher socio-economic status than the majority of street offenders (Weisburd et al., 1991).² This observation is curious when considered alongside criminal career research, and desistance from crime in particular. It is this body of work we consider next.

The criminal career paradigm

One means of studying the offending behaviour of individuals has been through an understanding of the concept of the criminal career (Greenberg 1996a; 1996b), identified as ‘the longitudinal sequence of offences committed by an individual offender’ (Farrington, 1992, 521). Expressed formally, criminal careers have an onset, when the first offence is committed and duration, measured as the length of time between onset and the career’s end, when the individual desists from offending (Farrington, 1992). Rather than being a theory of crime the criminal career approach presents a framework within which offending can be studied (Blumstein et al., 1988a). It does not treat ‘crime’ as a unitary construct, permitting differentiation between offence types and allowing different aspects of offending behaviour to be considered in isolation (Blumstein et al., 1988). This allows different aspects of the criminal career to have different factors associated with them (Farrington, 1997). For example, the factors related to onset may be very different from those related to desistance from crime instead of simply being the same processes in reverse (see Farrington and Hawkins, 1991).

Much criminal career research reflects this differentiation between the elements of the criminal career. Methodologically, the criminal career approach utilises self-report and conviction data and longitudinal designs to track patterns of offending over the life course (e.g. Laub and Sampson, 2003, 14–15). Such designs focus on what prompts individuals to start offending, which factors differentiate seriousness and duration of offending for different offenders and what is associated with the cessation of offending (Blumstein et al., 1988a).

Important within the criminal career paradigm is the manner in which age relates to offending. The observation that whether or not one participates in crime is almost inextricably linked to age (Farrington, 1992) drove attempts to uncover the importance of life events and the way in which these might impact upon individuals’ offending behaviour (Greenberg, 1996a). Wolfgang et al. (1972) highlight the importance of a longitudinal methodology for identifying patterns of offending, specifically with relation to age and crime.

In the 1980s the criminal career paradigm was challenged, most vociferously by Gottfredson and Hirschi (1986, 1987, 1988) who denied the theoretical and methodological use of the approach. Criminology seems to have moved on from such debates, not least thanks to the valuable contributions that longitudinal studies have made towards understanding the different aspects of the criminal career (see below for desistance-focused examples). Those interested could return to Gottfredson and Hirschi’s original critique and Blumstein et al.’s rebuttal (1988a, 1988b). There is no desire to repeat them here. Instead this chapter will now focus on a particular aspect of the criminal career: desistance from crime.

Desistance from crime

There has been a steady rise in desistance research over the last two decades. Numerous studies have led to special editions of journals (Farrall and Maruna, 2004), review articles (Laub and Sampson, 2001) and edited collections (Farrall, 2000). Even a cursory glance at this work reveals that the study of desistance has many conceptual, definitional and measurement related issues inherent in it. Overviews of the field are available elsewhere (Laub and Sampson, 2001; Farrall et al., 2014). The following review is concerned with the aspects of desistance that are of most relevance to the study of white-collar crime.

Defining and conceptualising desistance

Attempts to identify desistance must deal with the realities of observed offender behaviour. Most individuals who might be termed offenders spend large proportions of their time not offending (e.g. Clarke and Cornish, 1985) and ‘lulls’ in an offending ‘career’ can potentially be quite substantial (Barnett et al., 1989). Related to this is the problem of the length of time an individual must be ‘crime free’ before they can be characterised as a desister, based upon the realisation that truly knowing someone has desisted from crime is not possible until their death (Farrington, 1992).

Specific definitions of desistance cannot and should not be developed in isolation from a particular research question (Laub and Sampson, 2001). Nevertheless, desistance (however so defined) has in recent years increasingly come to be viewed as a ‘process’, distinct from the termination of offending, itself identified as an ‘event’ (Maruna, 2001; Bushway et al., 2001; Laub and Sampson, 2003). In clarifying the distinction between termination and desistance, Maruna (2001, 26) suggests that while a study of termination of offending asks the question ‘why’ – e.g. why did that person not offend again – the study of desistance directs us to ask ‘how’. For example, how do individuals live in a manner consistent with decisions to live a crime free life? How do they cope with challenges to the maintenance of an identity as an ex-offender?

Maruna and Farrall (2004), in identifying desistance as a process term it ‘secondary desistance’, distinct from the ‘primary desistance’ which is characterised by any ‘gap’ in offending behaviour. Secondary desistance represents:

the movement from the behaviour of non-offending to the assumption of a role or identity of a non-offender or ‘changed person’.

(Maruna and Farrall, 2004, 174)

Secondary desistance is therefore concerned with change within the offender of who they feel ‘they’ are and a shift in priorities away from those which are congruent with offending. To emphasise desistance as a process is to emphasise that the move from ‘offender’ to ‘non-offender’ is a gradual one, through which the individual comes to take on the latter self-identity (Maruna and Farrall, 2004). The focus of this conceptualisation of desistance is upon the opportunities offenders engage with to achieve a ‘state’ of non-offending (Maruna, 2001; Giordano et al., 2002; Farrall et al., 2014). For example, an offer of employment may be accepted because it offers the opportunity to gain money which would otherwise be obtained through crime.

More recent work on desistance reflects this concern with understanding how individuals come to desist from crime and the interplay between subjective experiences and active attempts to move away from crime. Such work will be considered in a later section. First, some of the generally accepted correlates of desistance are noted.

Why do people desist from crime?

Desistance research has identified several correlates of desistance, placing the most emphasis on the process of aging (e.g. Shover, 1983, 1985), gaini...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: white-collar offenders and desistance from crime
• 1 The challenge of white-collar offenders’ desistance
• 2 Searching for the self
• 3 Autobiography and the search for ‘truth’
• 4 Imprisonment and the assault on the self
• 5 Who am I? Self and identity in the post-punishment world
• 6 The journey to self: success, failure and change
• 7 Becoming who one was: professional-ex roles
• 8 Becoming who one is: religious conversion narratives and desistance
• 9 An existentially informed understanding of desistance
• Appendix: bibliography of white-collar offenders’ autobiographies
• References
• Index