Sociology of Crime

This article from the New York times describes a strange and frightening situation in which a man was kidnapped, threatened, and coerced into handing over blank checks to his assailants.  The back story behind the crime was that a bar owner who was having difficulty paying his rent requested that a rather sizeable man go and kidnap this agent and they would then threaten him with torture and possible death in order to steal his checks.  Police have aprehended the accused parties and they are now being charged with kidnapping and robbery.

This account seems similar to the concept of occupational crime described in Coleman’s book in that the crime was committed in order to further the business.  However, there should be question here of how respectable or “white-collar” the profession involved is.  This leads to a question that Coleman addresses; just how white-collar does the crime have to be in order to be concidered as such? This crime seems to involve a group of thugs extorting an innocent man in order to pay their overdue and expensive rent, but it seems possible to argue that the crime could fall under the category of an organizational crime.  After all, it was perpetrated in order to allow for the criminals to pay their rent and open a bar.

The most important distinction here is that the crime was not perpetrated during ordinary business transactions. The parties involved where not all members of the company and, for the most part, the purposes served by the crime are far more individual than they would be in Coleman’s examples of organizational crime.  While this is an interesting case, it is a much better example of desperate men robbing a person in an attempt to break even. So, I would have to say this isn’t exactly white-collar crime by Coleman’s definition but it does blur the lines between white-collar crime and ordinary street crime. This is a problematic factor in Coleman’s conceptualization of white-collar crime and he acknowledges it. When does a street criminal recieve enough recognition and respect that the crime becomes a white-collar one?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/nyregion/22arrest.html?_r=1