On May 24, David O. Friedrichs protested a “widely held but fundamentally wrongheaded way of thinking about crime,” in a letter to the New York Times. Friedrichs, the author of “Trusted Criminals: White-Collar Crime in Contemporary Society,” was responding to an article on a decline in “major crime” that focused on murder, rape and robbery but made no mention of corporate crime.
A criminal justice professor at the University of Scranton, Friedrichs insisted in his letter, and in a subsequent article in the Corporate Crime Reporter newsletter, that white-collar crime has further reaching, deeper and more lasting impact than street crime. “Although it is far more challenging to measure [white-collar] crime,” he wrote the Times, “there are reasons to believe it may not be in decline, and may well be rising.”
