Victim Compensation Policy and White Collar Crime: Public Preferences in a National Willingness to Pay Survey

White‐Collar Crime Is Crime

“…Although official crime reports have only recently started to include the amount and costs of some types of white‐collar crime, the public has long recognized the impact of these crime types on their victims. As such, it should come as no surprise that Miranda Galvin, Thomas Loughran, Sally Simpson, and Mark Cohen (, this issue) have found that there is public support for using tax dollars to compensate white‐collar crime victims, a finding that is consistent with previous work I co‐published in 2010 in a four‐state study of citizens’ willingness to pay to be protected from identity theft (Piquero, Cohen, and Piquero, ).…”

Moving Beyond Punitive Interventions

“…In short, the findings from public opinion studies can help policy makers in creating “ideological space” (Jonson, Cullen, and Lux, ) that may help sustain key criminal justice reforms and encourage them to propose nonpunitive initiatives that may otherwise be seen as politically risky. Miranda Galvin, Thomas Loughran, Sally Simpson, and Mark Cohen (, this issue) bring into the discussion an often‐neglected criminal justice policy: government‐funded victim compensation programs. In their study, Galvin et al.…”

“…In their study, Galvin et al. () analyzed the results of a nationally representative survey about the public's willingness to pay for different programs for financial fraud, consumer fraud, identity theft, and burglary. Respondents in the survey were presented programs with different policy mixtures, including deterrence/punishment, education/prevention, and victim compensation.…”

“…But Galvin and colleagues () went a step further and sought to explore the potential sources of such willingness to pay for victim compensation programs. To do so, they compared the public's willingness to pay for such programs between different groups of individuals using both information about victimization and perceived risk of victimization and different victim frames randomly assigned to the respondents.…”

“…Galvin et al. 's () findings suggest that giving these programs more visibility and expanding their scope to cover victims of other serious and harmful crimes should not come at a cost for politicians. This is especially true for white‐collar crime offenses, which comprise three of the four offenses analyzed in this study.…”