Discuss the definitions and characteristics of White Collar Crime - Essay Example

White collar fraud does not carry any act of violence with it. The chief trait of this fraud is to beguile the victims and making them the ‘ insects towards lamp’. Perpetrators are not easily caught and punished, since most of the victims do not make a complaint of their loss at an early stage. By the time the victims realise their plight of being cheated and try to make the issue open to the society, the perpetrators either vacate the scene or gain still more strength of popularity that shields them from the punishments.

Naturally neither an individual nor a group of people award punishment for the lapse of the self. At the point of realisation, the question of awarding punishment to the self disappears. Thus analysis of crime and awarding punishment are always carried out in second person only and not in first person. The power of punishing is usually vested with people of higher status of socio economic arena. Crime is simply human. Status difference are not actually correlated to what is termed activities of crime.

But since, the powered people are capable of making and breaking the rules, crimes committed by them are generally not treated as violent as the crimes of blue collar people. Sutherland’s definition of white collar crime goes this way: ‘white collar crime is the crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation”. Hazel Croall, (2001), has scrutinised this definition and found some deficiencies in it. He has pointed out that Sutherland’s definition is silent on the issue of identifying the activities of white collar crime.

He was very much concerned about the miniature mentioning of white collar crime in many research findings and the low tone in the expressly declared results. The Marxist approach of criminology, which used to control the activities of the low powered or powerless, did keep