Federal White Collar Sentencing in the United States – A Work in Progress

Abstract

INTRODUCTION At first blush, it seems odd for an American contributor to an international conference on sentencing to focus on "high end" federal white collar sentencing. After all, federal cases make up a relatively small part of the U.S. criminal justice system. (Between October 2005 and September 2006, about 1,132,290 people were sentenced for a felony in state courts,' and 73,009 in federal courts.) 2 Even within the federal system, white collar cases of all sorts are a relatively small part of a criminal docket dominated by immigration, drug, and gun cases, which together comprised nearly 73% of all federal cases in 2009." And the "crimes involving fraud, deceit, theft, embezzlement, insider trading, and other forms of deception" that accounted for 9.5% of 2009 cases includes a great many offenders and offenses of the middling sort. 4 Moreover, what is meant by "high end" anyway? Does a vague directional reference allow one to sidestep the longstanding scholarly debate about defining "white collar crime?" 5 The provisional answer is "yes," at least when broadly speaking of sentencing policy. One need not be either rigorous or comprehensive in defining the relevant class of cases to appreciate the outsized role that the

Examining Federal Criminal Sentencing of White-Collar and Common Property Offenders: The Case of Embezzlement and Larceny

“…. ” (cited from Richman, 2013, p. 55). Using data from 10 federal district courts, Hagan and colleagues (1980) found white-collar offenders of higher income levels received more lenient sentences than common offenders in the federal courts examined.…”

“…First, the lack of research on the punishment of white-collar offenders during the postsentencing guidelines era is problematic as the appropriate levels of punishment for white-collar offenses continues to generate attention among criminal justice practitioners and policy makers with the past three decades marked by numerous changes to federal and state sentencing guidelines targeting white-collar offenses specifically. 1 Indeed, several formal changes have been made to sentencing guidelines in recent years to address concerns of relative leniency and ensure that sentencing for white-collar crimes appropriately address the harm to the victims, individual offender culpability, and the offender’s intent (see Bibas, 2005; Richman, 2013).…”

“…(c) Several policy changes implemented by the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC) have sought to change the punishment levels for a number of white-collar crimes, including embezzlement to be statutorily equivalent to larceny (Bibas, 2005; Richman, 2013; see also U.S. Sentencing Guidelines Manual § 2B1.1).…”

Perceptions of white-collar crime registries

“…Research on public perceptions of crime is important in determining sentencing for offenders (Miethe, 1982;Richman, 2013), helping to set social norms for responses to crime (Douhou et al, 2011;Haugh, 2015), and could have implications on policies (Burstein, 2003;Dodge et al, 2013;Richman, 2013). One such policy used to manage public opinions regarding offender registries.…”

To Control or Be Controlled: Predicting Types of Offending in a Corporate Environment Using Control-Balance Theory

“…The distinction between these deviance categories is further manifested in their disparate prosecution and sentencing characteristics (Coleman, 2005;Reiman & Leighton, 2002;Richman, 2012;Simpson, 2013). For this and other reasons, few crime theories are formulated to explain or predict both street and white collar crime, with street crime accorded the bulk of theory development.…”