Elsevier

Journal of Criminal Justice

Volume 35, Issue 2, March–April 2007, Pages 151-163
Journal of Criminal Justice

Do perceptions of punishment vary between white-collar and street crimes?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2007.01.003Get rights and content

Abstract

Much has been learned about the relationship between sanction threat perceptions and criminal activity, yet little remains known about the factors that are associated with sanction threat perceptions. Moreover, because most researchers had studied deterrence within the context of street crime, even less is known about the factors that relate to sanction threat perceptions for white-collar crime. This study used data from a national probability sample to examine whether the determinants of perceived sanction certainty and severity for street crime were different from white-collar crime. Using robbery and fraud as two exemplars, the findings indicated that while public perceptions of sanction certainty and severity suggested that street criminals were more likely to be caught and be sentenced to more severe sanctions than white-collar criminals, respondent's perceptions of which type of crime should be more severely punished indicated that both robbery and fraud were equally likely to be perceived ‘on par.’ Additional results indicated that the correlates of certainty and severity were more similar than different, but that the results differed according to whether respondents were asked about the punishment that white-collar offenders were likely to receive as opposed to what they should receive.

Introduction

At its core, the deterrence doctrine hypothesizes that the perceived threat of swift, certain, and severe sanctions will inhibit criminal activity (Andenaes, 1974, Beccaria, 1764, Tittle, 1980, Zimring and Hawkins, 1973). Extant research yielded a great deal of variation with regard to the effect of sanction threats and sanction imposition, but in general this line of research suggested that sanctions and sanction threats did emerge and did inhibit criminal activity (Nagin, 1998), at least for some segment of the population (Pogarsky, 2002).1 Despite this overall conclusion, the specific effects of certainty, severity, and celerity of punishment and in particular their determinants continue to be an unresolved issue in criminological literature, leaving much yet to be learned and understood (see Nagin, 1998).

Ball (1955, p. 351) noted that the underlying assumption of the “deterrent effect of a law obviously depends upon the individual's knowledge of the law and the punishment prescribed.” As such, it seems important to gather information on the public's perception of the existence of punishment terms and legal threats across different categories of criminal offenses. To date, there has been a very limited amount of research on this issue, and much of it occurred over thirty years ago. For example, Zimring and Hawkins (1973, p. 143) reviewed a public opinion poll from Nebraska in the late 1960s that revealed that 41 percent of adult Nebraska men declared that writing checks with insufficient funds would not be criminal if arrangements to meet the obligations were eventually made. In a California study, inmates of adult correctional facilities gave the correct answer more than a quarter of the time to a number of multiple-choice possibilities regarding the specific penalties to the most serious crimes (California Assembly Committee on Criminal Procedure, 1968). This study revealed that the public was generally ill-informed about the legislatively proscribed minimum and maximum penalties for a variety of crimes and that public knowledge of changes in existing minimum and maximum punishments provided by law was also found to be quite low (Zimring & Hawkins, 1973, p. 143). While offenders appeared to have better knowledge about the laws and prescribed punishments than the general public, their knowledge was still limited and lacking. Anderson's (2002) recent study of males who had been imprisoned for a felony, uncovered that only 22 percent of the offenders thought that they knew ʻexactly what the punishment would be' for the crime they committed, while 18 percent reported that they had no idea of the penalty, or ‘thought I knew but was wrong,’ and 35 percent reported that they did not even think about the penalty prior to committing the offense. Tunnell's (1992) qualitative interviews also reported a similar misunderstanding among offenders with regard to the reach of the formal criminal justice system. As can be seen with these examples, information on the public's knowledge base concerning crime and punishment is often based on serious street crimes (see Warr, 1995), leaving white-collar crime, a form of crime that does not generally come to the everyday purview of citizens (Evans, Cullen, & Dubeck, 1993), as of yet, unexplored.

Although there were a handful of studies that had examined general and specific deterrence for samples of white-collar and corporate criminals (Benson and Cullen, 1988, Braithwaite and Makkai, 1991, Geis and Clay, 1980, Hopkins, 1980, Makkai and Braithwaite, 1994, Simpson and Koper, 1992, Stotland et al., 1980, Wheeler et al., 1988), more work needs to be undertaken in order to understand if perceptions of punishment vary across white-collar and street crimes, and importantly, the factors that are associated with punishment perceptions. To provide evidence of these issues, this study used data from a national, random probability sample to examine the perceptions of certainty and severity associated with robbery (a street crime) and fraud (a white-collar crime). In addition to studying perceptions of certainty, it also examined the discord across sanction severity perceptions by assessing whether the results varied according to how punishment severity perceptions are solicited (i.e., the punishment one will likely receive as opposed to the punishment one should receive). This is relevant because what individuals think will likely happen in the criminal justice system may not necessarily coincide with what they think should happen.

Section snippets

Sanction threat perceptions

The deterrence framework has embedded within it two distinct processes, one that pertains to the determinants of sanction threat perceptions and one that pertains to the link between sanction threat perceptions and criminal activity (see Pogarsky, Piquero, & Paternoster, 2004).2

Perceptions of white-collar crimes and their punishments

Research examining public perceptions of white-collar crime had mainly focused on the perceived seriousness of white-collar offenses relative to street crimes (see Evans et al., 1993 for review). Early research suggested that white-collar crimes were not viewed as serious matters or were shown an indifference by the public (Rossi, Waite, Bose, & Berk, 1974), especially in comparison to crimes committed against a person or the public (Geis, 1973, Sutherland, 1949, Wheeler et al., 1988). Still

Current study

While there appears to be a number of different sources from which the public gains information (and forms opinions on) white-collar criminals, what is not clearly understood is how these different sources influence and discriminate across perceptions of white-collar and street crimes. Guided by extant research on public opinion views about punishment for street crimes, the current study attempted to understand how factors associated with sanction perceptions of certainty and severity compared

Data

The data employed in this study came from the National Public Survey on White-Collar Crime that was conducted by the National White-Collar Crime Center (NW3C) (see Rebovich & Layne, 2000). Single-session telephone interviews of U.S. citizens, age eighteen and older, were conducted by trained interviewers using the CATI system during a twelve-week period beginning in January 1999. Random digit dialing was completed on a stratified sample of counties (in order to afford each county a selection

Perceptions of sanction certainty

The survey question addressing perceptions of sanction certainty concerns the robbery/fraud comparison and asked: “Who do you think is more likely to get caught by the authorities, someone who commits robbery and steals $1,000 or someone who commits fraud and steals $1,000?” Response options for this item included: (1) ‘person committing the robbery,’ (2) ‘person committing the fraud,’ or (3) ‘equally likely.’ Since there were very few respondents who indicated that the robbery and fraud crimes

Results

The univariate analyses revealed several interesting findings. First, perceptions of sanction certainty were much higher for robbery (75 percent likely to get caught) compared to fraud (22 percent likely to get caught). Second, with regard to the two severity items, the results were particularly interesting because they differed, contingent on how the question was phrased. When respondents were asked about who would likely receive more severe punishment, the results corroborated nicely the

Discussion

This study set out to examine the correlates of deterrence perceptions (e.g., certainty and severity) in order to assess if similarities or differences emerged across white-collar and street crimes. To accomplish this task, data from a national random probability sample were used. Aside from a traditional measure of sanction certainty, two different approaches to measuring perceived severity were used, what one believes is likely to happen and what one feels should happen. Several independent

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank John Kane and the National White Collar Crime Center for making the data available. A prior version of this article was presented at the 2005 annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology, Toronto, Canada.

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