White Collar Crimes and Deviance

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This was another great article. The author, Gottfredson, sees the reason for these crimes as based on his theory being low self-control, or low impulse control and self-regulation. Basically, the people committing these crimes are just as deviant, and criminally versatile as their blue collar counterparts. Moreover, they are as likely to own a criminal past and a diagnosis of social adjustment disorder, which includes a history of violating the rules as an adolescent that takes us well into adulthood.

Incidentally, there is a deviance hypothesis here in that Gottfredson and Hirschi's compared federal white collar crimes to those convicted or drug related crimes, robbery, and postal forgery. What this revealed was quite significant. The results showed that white collar offenders were 4 more times as likely to have been previously arrested for white collar crimes than non -white collar criminals. This contradicted Gottfredson and Hirschi's versatility hypothesis in the sense that white collar offenders maintained a higher level of specialization than non-white collar offenders.
More importantly, variables that deserved consideration of exploration are that the non-white collar offenders were more dangerous and deviant than their white collar offenders on scales of past problems drinking, drug use, social maladjustment.

As studies reveal, there may be two types of white collar offenders. One group may be indiscernible from the common street criminal, a finding consistent with Gottfredson and Hirschi's theory on low self- control of white collar crimes. The other type of group, then, may be more specialized to the extent that the white collar crimes are less divergent. So, it would make sense that these crimes are perpetrated by people who are different and even separated by thoughts, behaviors, and actions towards crimes.

Results- So, he put this to the test-In this study, in that, white collar offenders without a history of non-white collar crimes ...