Economic Crime

From Conception to Response

Mark Button, Branislav Hock, David Shepherd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000573121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatik
• Subtopic: Soziale Aspekte in der Informatik

This book is the first attempt to establish 'economic crime' as a new sub-discipline within criminology. Fraud, corruption, bribery, money laundering, price-fixing cartels and intellectual property crimes pursued typically for financial and professional gain, have devastating consequences for the prosperity of economic life. While most police forces in the UK and the USA have an 'economic crime' department, and many European bodies such as Europol use the term and develop strategies and structures to deal with it, it is yet to grain traction as a widely used term in the academic community. Economic Crime: From Conception to Response aims to change that and covers:

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• definitions of the key premises of economic crime as the academic sub-discipline within criminology;

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• an overview of the key research on each of the crimes associated with economic crime;

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• public, private and global responses to economic crime across its different forms and sectors of the economy, both within the UK and globally.

This book is an essential resource for students, academics and practitioners engaged with aspects of economic crime, as well as the related areas of financial crime, white-collar crime and crimes of the powerful.

Chapter 1Economic crime and economic criminology

DOI: 10.4324/9781003081753-1

Introduction

In the midst of the summer of 2021, Boris Johnson’s government in the UK published a crime plan (Home Office, 2021). A few days earlier the Office for National Statistics (ONS) had released the latest crime statistics from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW). This had shown a 36% increase in fraud and computer misuse offences, which now accounted for the clear majority of crimes – 6.3 million of the 11.1 million estimated crimes (ONS, 2021). One would have expected a flourish of media interest and comment on the plan, particularly as it contained a whole chapter on fraud and online offences, on what the impact on fraud might be. The media, however, were much more interested in other aspects of the plan:

Boris Johnson pledges to target crime and anti-social behaviour – BBC News

Freed burglars to wear 24-hour tags under Prime Minister’s Crime Crackdown – Telegraph

Thieves tagged 24-hours a day and crooks forced to clean streets in crime crackdown – Express

Typical of much of the commentary was the focus on aspects of the plan dedicated to traditional crime problems. Given the plan included replacing Action Fraud (with a new reporting system) – an organisation steeped in controversy in the UK, this might seem doubly surprising.¹ This typifies the media’s attitude to economic crime: apathy unless a story contains sensationalist infotainment value (Levi, 2006; van Erp, 2013).

Apathy is not restricted to just journalists: economic crime has attracted little serious attention in academia and policing practice. While the study of traditional volume crimes such as robbery, burglary and theft have received a great deal of attention by criminologists, economic crimes such as fraud and bribery have largely been ignored (Brooks, 2016; Levi, 2008a; Rider, 2015a). Be it the complexity of these crimes or an erroneous perception that economic crimes are victimless crimes, academics and practitioners have not paid sufficient attention to the unique practical and theoretical problems of economic crimes. Economic Crime: From Conception to Response fills this gap by introducing the origins and development of economic crime as a subject of social science research.

This chapter explores the term ‘white-collar crime’, the traditional home for the study of most economic crimes, and the term ‘corruption’, and illustrates their strengths and theoretical and practical limitations for the study of contemporary economic crime problems. The chapter then builds the case for the concept of economic crime, constructing its key components, definition and offering insights into the origin of the crime. The link to corruption – which has attracted more interest amongst scholars and practitioners – is also explored. The chapter will then argue that economic crime deserves far more attention, setting out the case for what the authors call ‘economic criminology’, a new paradigm within criminological research, study and practice. The chapter will end by outlining the rest of the book.

White-collar crime and corruption

White-collar crime

White-collar crime has become the ‘lingua franca’ for encapsulating many of the economic crimes that will be considered in this book. It is not a legal term for a specific offence: a person cannot be charged with white-collar crime. Rather, it is a social science concept originally coined by Edwin Sutherland, a prominent American criminologist:

White-collar crime may be defined approximately as a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation.

(Sutherland, 1949, p. 9)

Sutherland (1940) devised the phrase to represent a group, or typology, of offending behaviours that share common offender and contextual characteristics:

• White-collar criminals are respectable offenders.
• Their offences involve an abuse of trust.
• Their criminal activities are integrated into their professional work routines.

Sutherland sought to bring attention to the hidden financial crimes and immoral practices of corporations and the professional elite, including fraud, bribery, false advertising, price-fixing and intellectual property crime. In doing so, he exposed the stark contrast in attitudes towards white-collar crimes and the physical ‘street’ crimes of violence, vandalism and theft. He noticed how policymakers, criminal enforcement agencies and academics paid scant regard to the very substantial crimes of the wealthy, preferring to focus their efforts on the far more modest crimes of the disadvantaged. He argued with some passion that the immunity of white-collar criminals to prosecution is due to class bias in the courts and the power of the privileged class to influence the administration of the law (Sutherland, 1940). This led to his central conclusion that the propensity to commit crime is essentially the same in the upper and lower classes, but the types of crimes differ due to opportunity.

Edwin Sutherland’s original concept was not just concerned with financial crimes. It also encompassed financially motivated physical crimes, such as labour abuses, health and safety violations, environmental harms and even financially motivated war crimes (Friedrichs, 2002, 2010; Sutherland, 1945, 1983). Sutherland used the crime label loosely so as to include non-criminal wrongdoing, which was typically handled by regulatory authorities or litigated through the civil courts, but which he believed should be regarded as criminal and prosecuted as crimes.

Debates about the definition and scope of white-collar crime have continued since Sutherland coined the term (Geis, 2016). Arguments and definitions have emerged that either narrow or expand its typological scope. Some maintain a purely legalistic view, that the term white-collar crime should only be applied to acts which have been prosecuted and proven in criminal courts (Tappan, 1947). Others have a completely contrary view, claiming that the acts are matters for regulators, not the criminal courts (Dinitz, 1977). Shapiro (1990) argues that the concept’s narrow focus on the offender, the respectable professional, hinders our understanding of the offence. Shapiro called for the concept to be liberated from the constraints of the offender’s characteristics in order to focus research attention on the deviant behaviour. She maintained that the defining characteristic of white-collar crime is the abuse of trust element of Sutherland’s concept (ibid.).

Later academics followed Shapiro’s call to focus on the offence and expanded the scope of white-collar crime to include ‘blue collar’ and non-occupational offenders who commit fraud (Weisburd et al., 1994, 2001). From a feminist criminology perspective, Daly (1989) argued that Sutherland’s definition is gender biased because corporate white-collar workers are predominantly men. Daly broadened the concept to include anyone, including blue-collar workers and unemployed persons, who violate trust or commit fraud. Some commentators have criticised this downward trajectory that trivialises white-collar crime...