White-Collar Crime and Punishment: The Class Structure and Legal Sanctioning of Securities Violations

Abstract

This paper proposes a structural theory of white-collar crime and punishment. The fundamental premise of this theory is that class position, measured in relational rather than more traditional gradational terms, influences white-collar criminal behavior as well as its punishment. Using data collected through interviews with investigators involved in the prosecution of securities violators over a seventeen-year period in Ontario, it is demonstrated that the punishment of white-collar crime is not only a function of class position, but also of the kinds of organized white-collar criminal behavior that certain class positions make possible. This is the first analysis to include data on persons charged under noncriminal as well as criminal statutes, a distinction that proves crucial in understanding the class structure and legal sanctioning of the kind of white-collar crime considered.