RT Article
T1 White-collar crime and the justice department: the institutionalization of a concept
JF Crime, law and social change
VO 17
IS 3
SP 235
OP 252
A1 Poveda, Tony G.
LA English
YR 1992
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1884467342
AB The sudden and unexpected incorporation of white-collar crime as a top investigative priority of the U.S. Justice Department of the 1970s is the focus of this inquiry. This pursuit of white-collar crime is especially problematic for instrumentalist and structuralist variants of conflict theory, which generally view the origins of law in terms of the interests of a ruling or capitalist class. This apparent contradiction between official concern for white-collar crime and instrumentalist and structuralist theories of law creation is examined in the context of the "discovery" of white-collar crime by the Justice Department. It is noted that in the process of operationalizing white-collar crime, the Justice Department transformed the traditional (Sutherland) definition of white-collar crime so that targeted offenders are not limited to the economic and political elite, but instead are drawn from all social classes. This modification of the definition has far-reaching implications for assessing the nature of the Justice Department's response to the problem of elite crime and provides insight into the ongoing theoretical debate on the origins of law.
K1 International Relation
K1 Social Classis
K1 Structuralist Theory
K1 Structuralist Variant
K1 Theoretical Debate
DO 10.1007/BF00179750