The white-collar crime

The white-collar crime is murderous, misunderstood, unpunished.

The term white-collar crime became famous thanks to Sutherland, the United States, in 1939 The head of General Motors had written an 'autobiography under the title Autobiography of a white collar, where he took over the American distinction between white-collar and blue-collar , giving to understand to be a worker, but with the white collar. Sutherland takes the dichotomy, reversing the image until then prevailing and to the effect that the crime was a problem of the working classes. Reversing this stereotype, Sutherland writes a classic of scientific literature which is often said to have received a Nobel criminology immediately if there was such a kind of prize. In a very short time analysis Sutherland become famous and give life to a school.

The term white-collar crime relates principally to the impunity of the top brass of the economy, accused of perpetrating crimes that easily escape the rigors of the law in the performance of many activities typical of white-collar workers, several behaviors would be subject to assessments erroneously lenient, including, innocentiste. Offences typical white-collar crime is tax fraud, commercial fraud, and so on. The lack, at times, a direct relationship of the perpetrator to the victim and the difficulty, at times, to identify a specific victim, are important factors in the evaluation of social crime. A revealing aspect of the low level of social reaction and social censorship is the frequent use of the adjective dishonest, rather than criminal, against the perpetrators of these crimes: they often are not stigmatized as criminals by the community and are not considered criminals.

Three aspects in particular are outlined by Sutherland and scholars who have developed these themes:

1) the white-collar crime is killer, both in the sense that often the consequences of the crimes are no less devastating than with personal violence. Just think of the field of food adulteration or trafficking in toxic waste: this type of crime has undoubtedly murderous consequences and for large numbers of people. In particular, note beautifully Sutherland, this type of crime kills the sense of responsibility and good citizenship: as a personal violence brings together citizens in deprecate what happened and causes them to reaffirm the basic principles of coexistence, white-collar crime undermines confidence in the laws and in the state, destroys the certainty of the law and the motivations of moral action. And 'killer of both our lives and the possibility of being together decently and humanely.

2) the white-collar crime tends naturally to hide, to camouflage, to disguise themselves. Since the white-collar crime is proper to the upper echelons of society (even if widens socially and involves a large number of people), these crimes are hidden in a variety of ways. Those in power have the means to effectively groped to hide their criminality or to present it in a false light, or give erroneous information, or to minimize the sense of true information, or to suppress the possibility of dissemination and circulation of certain information. In conclusion, the white-collar crime is misunderstood.

3) the white-collar crime is unpunished, because despite being misunderstood and often murderous. The reasons are many and also easy to understand. First of all, the opportunity to discover and try out this type of crime is largely possible only to public authorities, which theoretically have the means to scratch the wall of silence, of complicity. protection surrounding this type of crime. The same authorities, however, are largely connected with the same people that they should pursue. The connection is split up into a large number of possibilities, ranging from relationships to real relationships more effective in this context: business in common, reciprocal favors, division of spoils that often comes from fat manger policy and public intervention. The mother's milk for the white-collar crime is collusion with public authorities, so how can wonder that the public power in its many facets (of supervision and control, investigation and repression) does this type of crime often goes unpunished ?

These aspects of white-collar crime, highlighted by Sutherland and by all scholars interested in the topic, they have enormous relevance with regard to the administrative injustice.