Corporate Crime Does Pay! The Relationship between Financial Crime and Imprisonment in White-Collar Crime

Abstract

White-collar crime is financial crime committed by white-collar criminals. Sensational white-collar crime cases regularly appear in the international business press and studies in journals of ethics and crime. Many of these scholars apply anecdotal evidence to suggest what might be included and what might be excluded from the concepts of white-collar crime and white-collar criminals. On contrast, with a larger sample, we can study white-collar crime convictions using statistical techniques to identify relationships between variables. For example, it has been suggested that the amount involved in the crime (fraud, corruption, etc.) is an important factor when the judge decides the length of the prison sentence. In our sample of 255 criminal cases we identified 88 corporate criminals and 167 occupational criminals. Age when convicted was 47 years for occupational criminals and 49 years for corporate criminals. Furthermore, occupational criminals served 2.2 years in prison, while corporate criminals served only 2.1 years. This is particularly interesting, when the amount of money that was involved in the crime is taken into account. While occupational criminals on average abused 26 million Norwegian kroner, corporate criminals on average abused as much as 121 million Norwegian kroner. So, even if the magnitude of the financial crime in terms of money was substantially and significantly larger for corporate crime, occupational crime was nevertheless judged more severely in terms of imprisonment.