White-Collar Crime ─ An Opportunity Perspective

As an instructor teaching white collar crime, are you frustrated by texts which leave your students feeling outraged but helpless about the subject? Assigning this new text by Mike Benson and Sally Simpson can successfully address that problem, because it explains to students why white-collar crime is so prevalent and so difficult to control. Using this text, instructors can show students how these crimes are carried out in ways that make them difficult to discover. Instructors can also show how opportunities for white-collar crimes could be reduced if we were to approach the problem from the perspective of situational crime prevention. The authors address the difficulty of controlling white-collar crime in detail, and speculate on the future of white-collar crime in the rapidly globalizing world of trans-national corporations.

Michael L. Benson is Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. He is a past President of the White-Collar Crime Research Consortium. In addition to numerous journal articles on white-collar crime, he co-authored Combating Corporate Crime: Local Prosecutors at Work, which received the 2000 Outstanding Scholarship Award of the Crime and Delinquency Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

Sally S. Simpson is Professor and Chair of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, College Park. She currently serves as Chair of the Crime, Law, and Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association. She is past President of the White-Collar Crime Research Consortium, and a recipient of the Herbert Bloch Award from the American Society of Criminology.

Part 1: White-Collar Crime and White-Collar Criminals 1. The First Problem: What is White-Collar Crime? 2. Who is the White-Collar Offender? 3. Traditional Explanations of White-Collar Crime Part 2: Opportunity and White-Collar Crime 4. Criminal Opportunities 5. Applying the Opportunity Perspective to White-Collar Crime 6. Industries, Organizations and Opportunity 7. The Symbolic Construction of Opportunities 8. The Distribution of Opportunity: Race, Gender and Class Part 3: Responding to White-Collar Crime 9. Legal Remedies 10. Extra-Legal Remedies 11. Conclusions