White Collar Crime Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

White Collar Crime - Essay Example This paper is a review of white collar crimes in an Australian context and will specifically address the collapse of the HIH Insurance Group, considered to be one the biggest corporate failures ever in the country. The study will cover the crime/ misbehaviour, regulatory failure, the existing literature relevant to the area of crime and regulation, and provide a case analysis, explaining how and why the failure of regulation occurred. According to Sutherland, â€Å"white collar crime may be defined approximately as a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation† (The evolution of white-collar crime, n.d.). The book, Encyclopedia of white-collar & corporate crime states that Sutherland implicitly makes it clear that crime results not just out of poverty, but due to other reasons as well. Sutherland developed the theory of differential association primarily to state that criminality includes â€Å"the social and business influences that caused persons of high status to violate the law through occupation† (Salinger, 2005, p. 775) One of the earliest among similar researchers was Edward Alsworth Ross, who coined the term criminals, intentionally done to sound familiar with words like an asteroid, crystalloid or anthropoid. Ross feels that such acts were not seen as serious by the general public and the perpetrators themselves. (Geis, 2006, p. 26). Ross adds that there is a ‘shocking leniency’ by the public towards such crimes and the people who perpetrate or are a part of the crime. What is interesting is that the article which originally appeared in The Atlantic Monthly was written in 1907. Over the years, the term white-collar crime has come to be primarily associated with business alone. Hartung undertook a study on violations in price control of wholesale meat in Detroit in 1950. According to him white collar crimes are those committed by a firm or its agent by the violation of statutes and regulations.