Individual Differences and White-Collar Crime

Michael Levi

White-collar crime traditionally has not been an issue that has interested biologists or psychologists. Rather, it has served as a sociological battering ram with which to falsify conventional wisdoms such as the link between crime and poverty, low social class, youth, impulsivity, bad genes, and so on. The search for individual differences between “criminals” and “the rest of us” that characterized 19th- and early-20th-century criminology was never applied to white-collar criminals because people of respectability and high social status were not the imprisoned social deviants whose persistent misconduct had to be explained. Similarly, in the more recent criminal careers literature, late onset and non-violent offenders have been neglected. Longitudinal studies tend to start at age 8 to 10 and to end before major white-collar crime opportunities present themselves. Where fraud has been included in such studies—for example in Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi's general theory of crime—the focus has been ...

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