White Collar Crime and Offenders: a 20-year Longitudinal Cohort Study

This book is a landmark in the study of white-collar crime and is the largest study of its kind ever conducted. This book will serve the needs of criminologists, policy-makers and the public as well. It will address the issue of what white-collar crime is, how social scientists have grappled with its definition, and report on the results of a 20-year longitudinal study of white-collar offenders. The frequency of their criminal conduct is analyzed and compared to other types of offenders. The study involved retrospectively analyzing the data on the criminal careers on a very large cohort of more than 17,000 offenders. The purpose of the study was to:(1) test hypothese about white-collar and street crime offenders, (2) evaluate and critique theories of crime in relation to both types of offenders, (3) determine the extent of chronic offending among white-collar and street crime offenders within the career criminal paradigm, and (4) measure the degree of offense specialization found among all the offenders in the study.