Sutherland’s approach in White-Collar Crime (1949) helped move the field beyond the legal formalism that Sellin critiqued by arguing that regulatory violations could also constitute a type of unlawful, yet not necessarily criminal, behavior – thus justifying a criminological analysis. Considering these unlawful behaviors to be white-collar crimes was important because of their propensity to produce social harms capable of exceeding traditional crime. Indeed, it is the truly social nature of these harms that make them particularly dangerous. As Sutherland suggested, the financial loss from white-collar crime, great as it is, is less important than the damage to social relations. White-collar crimes violate trust and therefore create distrust, which lowers social morale and produces social disorganization on a large scale.FBI's radio outlet echoed this text in a 1952 episode:
Occasionally it is possible to remove the ill after-effects of a crime. When a criminal is apprehended after a burglary, for instance, and his loot is returned intact to the victim, nobody is penalized except the lawbreaker.After quoting Sutherland, the author descends into typical modern ratshit about privileging and social constructs, so the rest of the article is useless.
Such complete restitution is never possible in the case of one particular criminal: the impostor. He usually works with forged credentials or false letters of introduction from well-known people. Even after the impostor is apprehended, he leaves in his wake a wave of suspicion, a feeling by his victims that never again will they be able to believe anyone.
Labels: Constants and Variables, defensible spaces, defensible times
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