Perceptions On White Collar Crime

Question Three:
The most common perception of white collar crime in the public’s eye is that it is driven solely because of the general lack of awareness and education of the matter. The public’s perceptions on white collar crimes can be caused directly from none only than the media, and therefore the public may view white collar crimes as nearly invisible. The media tends to focus their footage solely on the most serious crimes occurring such as murders or robberies and shy away from stories pertaining white collar crimes. The factual reality in this case is that when white collar crimes to gain somewhat of an attention, the people or corporations who committed that fraud are able to pay the media high sums of money and completely control

Another factual reality is that “a lack of awareness and education about white collar crime prohibits the public from understanding how they are being victimized mainly because the media doesn't present stories of elite corruption in an unbiased manner to the public” (Unpunished Criminals, 2014).The public obtains a lack of awareness of white collar crimes which can be derived by the factual reality of the Unified Crime Reports (UCR). When a crime is committed that involves several offenses, only the most serious crime (murder, for example) is reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigations and therefore the attention is completely deflected on the fact that other illegal acts have occurred (white collar crime, for example). The UCR contains the hierarchal rule and therefore almost puts white collar crime on the backburner and makes it nearly invisible even though the act of fraud occurred. In general, another common perception of white collar crime is that “historically, a commonly held view is that the American public perceives white-collar crime to be relatively harmless compared to violent crime” (Public Perceptions, 2008). Since the public already views white collar crime as nearly invisible, they may perceive the crime as one that does not physically

To start, the conflict theory according to Chapter 3 of the lecture slides “holds that administration of the criminal justice system reflects unequal distribution of power in society; more powerful groups use the system to maintain a dominant position and repress groups that threaten their position” (Chapter 3, 2017) . In the case of white collar crimes, those individuals or corporations have enough money to pay the media, as stated before, to shut down their stories and not display them to the public. By doing so, those who commit the white collar crimes are therefore maintaining their dominant position since their stories are left hidden. In relation to that of a violent crime, it is very unlikely that the individual who committed that crime such as murder or rape is able to pay off the media to not display it to the public. This in turn leads to that of economic inequalities. It is commonly known that in general there is a very large gap between those that are rich and poor. There may be a case of an individual being arrested for dealing a certain drug versus an individual who has been taking money illegally from a bank or an employer. However, the individual committing the white collar crime has the upper hand and can pay the fine and avoid their sentence while the drug dealer may not have that option due