White Collar Crimes
Tip! Few doubt that legalizing most drugs would have a beneficial effect. Crime empires would crumble overnight, users would be assured of the quality of the products they consume, and the addicted few would not be incarcerated or stigmatized - but rather treated and rehabilitated.
White collar crimes cost the average American more than street crimes every year. When a company goes bankrupt due to the unsound practices of its leaders, the hardworking people that are the backbone of the company have a good chance of losing their retirement savings. If this happens in connection with illegal activities, can the innocent recover these losses? In most cases, the answer appears to be "no."
Those who commit white collar crimes are less likely to be hunted down with the same ferocity as street criminals and are therefore less likely to spend time in prison. Without the recent downfalls of perpetrators of white collar crimes such as Martha Stewart and the Enron boys and the overabundance of those stories in the media, the average American would have no idea how much they are hurt by white collar crimes.
Tip! As Martha Steward will testify, bearing false witness to our government is a major crime. She spent five months in the slammer because of that law.
One crime that is generally categorized as a blue collar crime should be reclassified in my opinion because of its prevalence and effects. It is estimated that the vast majority of a retailer's loss goes out the back door and not the front. This means that employee theft is the number one cause of price inflation due to shoplifting. The next time you are in a store or dressing room and notice signs or security systems that are meant to deter shoplifting, remember that you, the customers, are not really the retailer's biggest threat.
Shoplifting may be seen as a cousin to petty theft, but when you add it up, every consumer in America is forced to pay more at the register because employees are stealing merchandise out the back. Is this really all that different from fraud or money laundering or other well-known white collar crimes? The effects are the same in that the innocent have to pay to make up the difference.
Tip! Without going into details, the above report states that corporate crime damages far exceed that of street crimes both in cost to the public and in deaths.
Incidents such as employee theft may not bring about the same level of anger as a situation like Enron warrants, but petty or not, white collar crimes add up and your average, law-abiding citizen becomes the one who has to pay for it. Although shoplifting is categorized as a blue collar crime, thefts that are perpetrated by employees perhaps ought to be viewed as white collar crimes.
Perhaps white collar criminals are not hunted down as much because their crimes do not harm people in the manner that violent crimes do. It may also be that white collar criminals are more difficult to track down in cases such as fraud, money laundering or insider trading. We do not tend to view our law enforcement agencies as paper trail detectives. We tend to think that the police focus their time and energy on the streets and not in the office. Wherever crime occurs, there should be consequences.
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