White-Collar Crime and Criminal Careers: Specifying a Trajectory of Punctuated Situational Offending

• NCJ Number: 205845
• Journal: Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice Volume: 20 Issue: 2 Dated: May 2004 Pages: 148-165
• Author(s): Nicole Leeper Piquero; Michael L. Benson
• Date Published: May 2004
• Length: 18 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Research Paper
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This article reviews the current state of developmental theories with respect to life-course offending patterns, summarizes current knowledge about the intersection of white-collar crime and criminal careers, and suggests ways to modify the current theoretical understanding of crime over the life course to account for white-collar crime patterns.

Abstract

Researchers who have worked in the criminal career and life-course perspective have paid most attention to four interrelated aspects of trajectories in crime: the onset of offending, duration of offending career, desistance from offending, and patterns in the types of offenses committed by offenders while they are active. As a whole, developmental theories attempt to explain crime in the context of the life course; i.e., they build from the assumption that factors affecting offenders change as offenders age. Existing developmental theories of offending behavior provide many useful approaches for explaining involvement in street crime over the life course, largely because they address several of the important dimensions of the criminal career. Despite the various underlying assumptions and number of proposed pathways to crime, the common thread in existing life-course explanations is that the onset or catalyst of criminal behavior occurs relatively early in life. Therefore, these developmental theories do not currently account for the group of offenders who apparently begin offending later in life, namely white-collar criminals. Apparently, white-collar offenders -- who begin offending in adulthood and are already educated, employed, and married -- constitute a unique challenge to life-course explanations of criminal behavior, particularly regarding the onset and desistance of offending. This article argues that a new perspective is needed, i.e., one that focuses on adults and the intersection of occupations, organizations, and white-collar criminal opportunities. It proposes a way of conceptualizing white-collar criminal careers that takes into account the environmentally dependent, opportunistic nature of white-collar offending. 4 notes and 44 references