America’s Criminal Class
America is experiencing a crime wave. It is, however, a bit more complicated than that. This “crime wave” doesn’t apply to many forms of crime, and rates of all major crimes are well below those of several decades ago. Nevertheless, the data does point to a worrying rise in some types of crime in 2020 and 2021 — most disturbingly murder — alongside record lows in other types of crime. Murder rates have likely already begun to recede but have not reached pre-2021 levels. Further complicating an analysis of crime over the past few years, 2021 happens to be the year the FBI rolled out a new system for measuring crime rates in the United States, one which failed to collect any data from places where two-thirds of the country lives, and only collected a full 12 months of data from about half. Many police departments simply did not submit their data to the system, including in New York City, most of California(including Los Angeles), and essentially all of Florida. Apparently, the images of crime propagated by our media and our politicians are no place for nuance or careful interpretation of the data.
We are bombarded with images of people running into convenience stores, smashing things up, and carrying out large bags of loot. Crime reporting always focuses on shocking violent crimes and is accompanied by measurable racial biases. When we think of crime, the images that often spring to mind are of bank robberies, shoplifting, arson, and other “street crimes.” These images often rely on racist and classist assumptions about the source of crime as something irrational and malevolent, springing from a criminal, disproportionately nonwhite criminal underclass. We do not generally think of well-paid people in comfortable offices calmly and logically breaking the law for their own profit and that of their bosses. From any objective comparison, however, people of relatively high social status who commit crimes to make themselves or the corporations they work for richer consistently make up the vast majority of our crime problems.
White Collar Crime
According to Anthony Walsh and Craig Hemmens in their criminology textbook, Introduction to Criminology, the economic loss from crimes committed by corporations is 17 to 31 times the size of the loss from all street crime combined. Noncorporate white-collar crime losses are on a comparable scale.
Let’s look more closely at what these statistics mean. Take wage theft, for example, which is just one of many examples of white-collar crime. Employers steal over three times as much from their workers every year as all robberies, burglaries, larcenies, and auto thefts put together.
Not only does stealing the wages of the lowest-paid and most vulnerable workers cause economic harm, but it also causes serious harm to their health and well-being in a society where housing and healthcare are not guaranteed. Beyond that, white-collar criminals cause the deaths of huge numbers of innocent people. This violence, though consciously carried out by economic decision-makers, is abstracted away from being something that affects people’s lives in the material world and instead is framed as purely economic decision-making, often carried out collectively by a group of people within a corporation.
One textbook(Walsh and Hemmens introduce white collar crime with it) example of this is the death that resulted from the design of a subcompact car called the Ford Pinto. The Pinto had a gas tank that could easily rupture and burst into flames and as a result, hundreds of people died from such accidents and hundreds more were horribly injured. This outcome was not accidental, given that Ford had already accounted for these accidents in designing the car. The problems would cost $11 per car to fix, which would add up to $137 million when applied to all the Pintos(as well as some other Ford vehicles with the same problem). However, Ford calculated that “only” an additional 180 people would burn to death in these crashes, and about that many would be seriously injured. They calculated that this would cost them about $49.5 million in lawsuits and other claims. Ford chose profitability over human lives and didn’t fix the car.
Ford went on to pay millions of dollars in lawsuits to those who died in these crashes. According to one Ford engineer, 95% of the 700 to 2,500 deaths in Pinto crashes could have been avoided if Ford had fixed the problem. If these numbers are correct, criminologists such as Walsh and Hemmens argue, Ford executives at this time could be among the worst mass murderers in the United States.
Corporate bureaucracies and unclear decision-making processes make it hard to measure the exact effects of white-collar crime, but there are statistics that can be used to get a better picture. In the United States, over 120,000 workers die from diseases and accidents related to their workplaces every year. Around 30,000 people die every year from unsafe consumer products, at least according to some estimates. Pollution has been linked to an estimated 9 million premature deaths globally in a single year, with some fatalities in the United States. Criminologists such as Victor Kappeler, Mark Blumberg, and Gary Potter in their book The Mythology of Crime and Criminal Justice use similar statistics. There’s no good way to measure the human costs of economic white-collar crime, but when poverty is so closely linked to mortality, the large-scale theft from America’s lowest-paid workers is not simply quantifiable in dollars. Still, the abstract relationship between white-collar crime and people’s lives makes it feel less damaging, even when the data implies otherwise.
Two Justice Systems
If we want to understand better the class dynamics of crime, we cannot limit ourselves to white-collar crime. Only those of a relatively high status, with some kind of decision-making power, have the power to commit most white-collar crimes, but “street” crimes are not limited to those with less wealth or power. There is no shortage of examples of violent upper and upper-middle-class criminality for which punishment is slow, disproportionate, or nonexistent, from careless killing to sexual abuse to murder. Even when those with wealth and power commit the types of crime that we typically associate with criminal activity, they are not treated the same way.
This class disparity in the criminal legal system is even true in the university context. Members of fraternities are often privileged and wealthy enough to pay the costs of joining, and they tend to have higher incomes after they graduate. Though they made up just 2% of the men in the United States as of a few years ago, about 80% of Fortune 500 top executives and 76% of our Senators and Congressmen were fraternity men.
It would seem paradoxical given our typical understanding of crime, but there is an association between this disproportionately high-status group of men and violence. Studies have shown that fraternity men are three times more likely to rape women than other men in college. Yet, these men become more economically successful than the rest of us, despite the negative economic repercussions for most people that are convicted or arrested. Sexual assault on college campuses is a far deeper problem than just fraternities or rich people, but the factors that allow abusers to escape accountability often protect men of a higher social class.
Conclusions
Moving somewhat beyond the scope of this article, it is important to recognize that current notions of crime should not necessarily be accepted. White-collar criminals are not “real criminals” when they don’t pay their workers enough, scam their customers, or jack up the prices of things people need. There are many legal things corporations do that are wrong. There are also illegal actions that are completely moral and justified, presenting no good reason to criminalize, such as crimes of survival or marijuana possession. The idea that there is some kind of moral gap between people who are classified as “criminals” and people who are not should be abandoned.
We must also be conscious of the fact that the law is written, in no small part, to reflect the interests of those with power in our society. Yet, their power exists outside the scope of criminal law. Capitalists have direct control over the workplace. Regardless of the kinds of negotiations made in the labor market and the laws regulating it, enforcement of these terms is difficult when one party controls the system of payment, measurement of work, surveillance of workers, and flow of resources into and out of the workplace. One’s career advancement or economic well-being is often at the mercy of those above them in a company. Those of relatively high wealth and social status have or can acquire legal resources, political connections, and assumptions of innocence that shield them from law enforcement. Prosecutors and judges often come from the same backgrounds as white-collar criminals, being disproportionately wealthy, white, male, and well-educated. Even when all else fails for the rich, and they are sent to prison, they can buy themselves relative comfort and even freedom to regularly leave the jails and work their outside jobs.
This criminal impunity of the wealthiest members of our society creates — and is in turn reinforced by — our skewed and unrealistic public perception of crime. We should never ignore or minimize the damage done by non-white-collar crime, nor stop seeking ways to prevent it. Yet, by focusing on this fraction of the crime in our society, we are allowing elite criminals to get away with theft and violence on a massive scale, while directing our resources to the repression and surveillance of the poorest and most vulnerable members of our society. This double standard allows those with wealth and status to reinforce and improve their position, at the expense of the rest of us. Any serious attempt to address the issues of crime and to build a just society cannot ignore the vast majority of crime and allow the existence of a class of people effectively above the law. We can only make progress on these issues if our perceptions of crime correspond to reality.
