Corporate Crime Trends, 2000-2017: An Introduction
Since the study of white collar and corporate crime (WCCC) first emerged in the early 20th century, researchers have argued that it has always been difficult to obtain even basic data on these subjects. The earliest studies to focus attention on the crimes of the powerful did not employ terminology commonly employed today. Instead, for instance, people such as Edward Alsworth Ross (1901) examined people who were criminal-like, as the quasi-criminal (p. 46), who he called criminaloid (p. 48), or the person who commits business and political crimes but does not see him/herself as criminal. Later there was Arthur Kallet and F. J. Schlink’s (1933), 100,000,00 Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Food, Drugs and Cosmetics, which expanded the ideas about the kinds of crimes the powerful committed. Soon thereafter there was Josephson (1934), a journalist, published the book The Robber Baron’s, which popularize the term "robber baron.” Josephson began his book by laying out the “history of a small group of men” who were “members of this new ruling class . . .called ‘barons,’ ‘kings,’ ‘empire-builders,’ or even ‘emperors’.” He added that “They were aggressive men, as were the first feudal barons; sometimes they were lawless; in important crises, nearly all of them tended to act with those established moral principles which fixed more or less the conduct of the common people of the community.” Summing up this idea he stated “These men were robber barons as were their medieval counterparts, the dominant figures of an aggressive economic age.” (p. vii). These were men whose behavior was, Matthewson concluded, determined by economic forces (p. viii). There were many other popular works exposing the crimes of the powerful written by journals called the muckrakers, which included notable authors such as Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, and Lincoln Steffens.
It was not until Sutherland’s (1940) famous essay, originally presented at the meetings of the American Sociological Association in 1939 as his Presidential Address, “White-Collar Criminality,” that academics began to address white-collar and corporate crime in greater depth. The introduction of this idea did not go uncontested, and some argued that there was no need for special terms defining the illegal behavior of the powerful (see the point of view taken by Sutherland [1945], versus the view taken by Tappan [1947]). Here, it is not our purpose to review the long history of research on white-collar and corporate crime, and several excellent works on this subject exist (e.g., Friedrichs, 2010; see various chapters in Rorie, 2019 and van Slyke, Benson and Cullen, 2016; see also articles in the Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime).
To be sure, for decades, limited access to white collar and corporate crime data restrained researchers’ efforts to study these crimes. This data deficiency meant that it was difficult to know more about these kinds of offenses, even in very general terms, since it was an arduous tasks to gain access to and collect WCCC data from individual federal and state agencies that might maintain these data. Even simple questions such as how many corporate or white-collar crimes are known to exist, or how many were prosecuted and sanctioned, could not be easily answered. It could take researchers months to compile data to make even simple estimates of these crimes accessing data from only one agency.
Things were much different for – and remain much different for – researchers who examine street crimes, since those data have been easily accessible for quite some time. By 1930, for example, the Uniform Crime Reports had been created, and police agencies were reporting known crimes and arrests for street crimes to the FBI, who was publishing a compilation of aggregated street crime statistics by state, and for the US as a whole. One could say that the easy availability of that kind of data means that researcher would (and will continue to) be more likely to examine street crimes. Even today, more than 18,000 police agencies across the US report crime data to the FBI, which aggregates and publishes those data. Other available indicators of street crime also emerged. For instance, in the early 1970s, to improve the study of crime and victimization, the National Crime Victimization Survey was created. Today, the UCR now includes the National Incident Based Reporting System, The Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted Program, the Cargo Theft Reporting System, and the Hate Crime Statistics Program. Each of these sources of data focused attention on street crimes and continues to overlook the crimes of the powerful. The latter is true even of some databases which claim to include white collar crime. Often, the crimes claimed to be white collar crimes do not fit the definition of white collar crime and are simply other measures of ordinary crimes that anyone can commit such as various kinds of frauds (e.g., postal/mail fraud).
The invention of the internet increased researchers’ abilities to access crime data. Even after the advent of the internet, access to data on white collar and corporate crime (WCCC) remained limited. While access to WCCC data has broadened over time, there are still access limits. Access to WCCC varies depending on the federal agencies, as well as across states. Some states have very good WCCC data and access to those data, and other states have no available data. Moreover, sometimes even if there is access to these data, those data are presented in formats that require extensive filtering and coding before they can be employed. Sometimes, for example, the data is posted on a case-by-case basis, with the case file being either an html or pdf file, requiring extensive hand-coding of materials to build a dataset. Imagine what the literature would look like if things were reversed – that is, if street crime researchers had to access data on a case by case basis and code each case that was described in a html or pdf file, while WCCC data were neatly aggregated and summarized each year, and available in various, easily downloaded formats that could be imported into statistical programs. The world of criminology would be quite a different place, and rather than complains that the crimes of the powerful were ignored, we might be complaining that law enforcement focused too much attention on the powerful, which then would lead to the exclusion of research on the crimes of the powerless. But that, of course, is not the world in which we live, and throughout the history of criminology, things have been quite the other way around.
As noted, over time, access to data on corporate, white collar and environmental/green crimes has increased. At the same time, however, increased access to that type of data has not necessarily made it any easier to measure/count WCCC. To be sure, today, researchers can more easily access corporate/white collar crime data by visiting the website of a particular government agency. For example, if you wanted to determine the number of environmental crimes, there are various places on the US Environmental Protection Agency’s website you would need to visit, such as the EPA’s Environmental Compliance History Online (echo.epa.gov) or EPA’s enforcement webpage (https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/enforcement-data-and-results). But, as anyone who has studied these crimes knows, there are numerous federal agencies that house data related to a wide array of white collar, corporate and environmental crimes. So, while it is now possible for a researcher to visit each of these websites (e.g., Occupational Safety and Health Administration; Food and Drug Administration; National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; Consumer Product Safety Commission; Federal Trade Commission; National Labor Relations Board; etc., etc.,), it still takes time to identify all of the relevant agencies, to collect the data from each, and to aggregate these data to create some indicator or measure of WCCC.
Still, despite increased online access to WCCC agency or state data sources, there is no single-source database – which can be thought of as a one-stop shopping place for WCCC data. There is, in other words, no WCCC database equivalent to the Uniform Crime Report for street crime, that allows easy access to aggregated information concerning white collar and corporate crimes. One can posit that the lack of an easily accessible database or source for WCCC inhibits research on these topics, and also prevents researchers from including charts and graphs about WCCC in manuscripts, and even in introductory textbook discussions addressing the volume of crime in society; the measurement of crime; kinds of crime; the scope of crime; changes in crime over time; and the volume of white collar and corporate crime in society. This subject, in short, might be more prevalent and more widely addressed if data on these types of crime was more easily accessible. Part of the goal of this web-based project on the measurement of WCCC is to facilitate discussions of, the measurement of, and research into WCCC.
Our web-based corporate/white-collar/environmental crime trend data, 2000-2017 helps address some of the issues briefly outlined above. It was designed with the express purpose of providing researchers, teachers and textbook writes will easy access to aggregated counts of WCCC offenses by type over time.
This project presents data on trends in corporate and white-collar crime aggregated by year and by violation type over an eighteen-year time period. The data presented outlines the trends by parent companies, companies, primary offenses, secondary offenses, and monetary penalties from 2000 to 2017. The data is presented both yearly and comprehensively to provide a holistic representation of the crimes and actors involved in WCCC during this time frame. This project further provides an overview of corporate crime, who it affects, and the criminological theories used to explain it. Researchers will be able to use this information and any charts, graphs or other information, and simply need to reference the website site authors. The approved reference for each figure or table can be found under the table or figure. Many of the people who have contributed their time to this project are graduate students who are just beginning their careers, and we hope you support them by using the suggested citations found with each table/figure. In addition to the tables and figures currently presented, future analysis will examine the data in more depth to capture the multinational companies and financial institutions that have caused the most harm to society and the environment, despite not appearing as a top 10 offender from 2000 to 2017.
The Data
The data for this project were collected from the public data files maintained on the goodjobsfirst.org website using the “violation tracker” page. Concerning these data, goodjobsfirst states: “Violation Tracker is the first wide-ranging database on corporate misconduct. It covers banking, consumer protection, false claims, environmental, wage & hour, safety, employment discrimination, price-fixing, bribery and other cases resolved by over 50 federal regulatory agencies and all parts of the Justice Department since 2000 -- plus cases from state AGs and selected state regulatory agencies as well as employment-related class actions. In all: 437,000 civil and criminal cases with penalties of $627 billion. Violation Tracker is produced by the “Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First” (August 18, 2020).
These data contain information on corporate violations and fines collected from 61 federal agencies. The data are recorded for 162 crime types.
The data presented on this website are summary of aggregated data. Our primary goal in summarizing these data is to provide some indication of how widespread corporate crime is in the US. Given that some crimes occur rarely, we do not present data for every crime type. Nor do we present data for every federal agency, even though in creating our summaries, we count the cases from every agency. Some agencies produce very few corporate crime cases, and it was beyond the scope of the current project to display counts for each agency individually.
Limitations
The data presented here are summary or aggregated data, and therefore do not include materials from case studies that track the violations of any single corporation. Our goal here was to depict the larger problem of corporate crime in the US. Case studies certainly are important for understanding something about why corporations behave in particular ways. For example, one can refer to recent works by Gregg Barak such as his book Unchecked corporate power: Why the crimes of multinational corporations are routinized away and what we can do about it, or his book, Theft of a Nation: Wall Street Looting and Federal Regulatory Colluding.
References
Friedrichs, David O. 2010. Trusted criminals: White collar crime in contemporary society. Cengage Learning.
Josephson, Matthew. 1934. The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901. NY: Harcourt, Brace.
Kallet, Arthur, and F. J. Schlink. 100,000,00 Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Food, Drugs and Cosmetics. NY: Grosset and Dunlap.
Rorie, Melissa L. (ed). 2019. The Handbook of White-Collar Crime. Wiley.
Ross, Edward Alsworth. 1907. Sin and society: An analysis of latter-day iniquity. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin.
https://babel.ha.thitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433069245391&view=1up&seq=18
Sutherland, Edwin H. 1945. Is White-Collar Crime, Crime? American Sociological Review. 10, 2: 132-139.
Sutherland, Edwin H. 1940. White-collar criminality. American Sociological Review. 5, 1: 1-12.
Tappan, Paul W. 1947. Who is the Criminal?. American Sociological Review 12, 1: 96-102.
Van Slyke, Shanna R., Michael L. Benson and Francis T. Cullen (eds). 2016. The Oxford Handbook of White-Collar Crime. Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank all the members of the USF SPRUCE Lab, who helped clean the data for the Corporate Crime Trends, 2000-2017 project.
Since the study of white collar and corporate crime (WCCC) first emerged in the early 20th century, researchers have argued that it has always been difficult to obtain even basic data on these subjects. The earliest studies to focus attention on the crimes of the powerful did not employ terminology commonly employed today. Instead, for instance, people such as Edward Alsworth Ross (1901) examined people who were criminal-like, as the quasi-criminal (p. 46), who he called criminaloid (p. 48), or the person who commits business and political crimes but does not see him/herself as criminal. Later there was Arthur Kallet and F. J. Schlink’s (1933), 100,000,00 Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Food, Drugs and Cosmetics, which expanded the ideas about the kinds of crimes the powerful committed. Soon thereafter there was Josephson (1934), a journalist, published the book The Robber Baron’s, which popularize the term "robber baron.” Josephson began his book by laying out the “history of a small group of men” who were “members of this new ruling class . . .called ‘barons,’ ‘kings,’ ‘empire-builders,’ or even ‘emperors’.” He added that “They were aggressive men, as were the first feudal barons; sometimes they were lawless; in important crises, nearly all of them tended to act with those established moral principles which fixed more or less the conduct of the common people of the community.” Summing up this idea he stated “These men were robber barons as were their medieval counterparts, the dominant figures of an aggressive economic age.” (p. vii). These were men whose behavior was, Matthewson concluded, determined by economic forces (p. viii). There were many other popular works exposing the crimes of the powerful written by journals called the muckrakers, which included notable authors such as Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, and Lincoln Steffens.
It was not until Sutherland’s (1940) famous essay, originally presented at the meetings of the American Sociological Association in 1939 as his Presidential Address, “White-Collar Criminality,” that academics began to address white-collar and corporate crime in greater depth. The introduction of this idea did not go uncontested, and some argued that there was no need for special terms defining the illegal behavior of the powerful (see the point of view taken by Sutherland [1945], versus the view taken by Tappan [1947]). Here, it is not our purpose to review the long history of research on white-collar and corporate crime, and several excellent works on this subject exist (e.g., Friedrichs, 2010; see various chapters in Rorie, 2019 and van Slyke, Benson and Cullen, 2016; see also articles in the Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime).
To be sure, for decades, limited access to white collar and corporate crime data restrained researchers’ efforts to study these crimes. This data deficiency meant that it was difficult to know more about these kinds of offenses, even in very general terms, since it was an arduous tasks to gain access to and collect WCCC data from individual federal and state agencies that might maintain these data. Even simple questions such as how many corporate or white-collar crimes are known to exist, or how many were prosecuted and sanctioned, could not be easily answered. It could take researchers months to compile data to make even simple estimates of these crimes accessing data from only one agency.
Things were much different for – and remain much different for – researchers who examine street crimes, since those data have been easily accessible for quite some time. By 1930, for example, the Uniform Crime Reports had been created, and police agencies were reporting known crimes and arrests for street crimes to the FBI, who was publishing a compilation of aggregated street crime statistics by state, and for the US as a whole. One could say that the easy availability of that kind of data means that researcher would (and will continue to) be more likely to examine street crimes. Even today, more than 18,000 police agencies across the US report crime data to the FBI, which aggregates and publishes those data. Other available indicators of street crime also emerged. For instance, in the early 1970s, to improve the study of crime and victimization, the National Crime Victimization Survey was created. Today, the UCR now includes the National Incident Based Reporting System, The Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted Program, the Cargo Theft Reporting System, and the Hate Crime Statistics Program. Each of these sources of data focused attention on street crimes and continues to overlook the crimes of the powerful. The latter is true even of some databases which claim to include white collar crime. Often, the crimes claimed to be white collar crimes do not fit the definition of white collar crime and are simply other measures of ordinary crimes that anyone can commit such as various kinds of frauds (e.g., postal/mail fraud).
The invention of the internet increased researchers’ abilities to access crime data. Even after the advent of the internet, access to data on white collar and corporate crime (WCCC) remained limited. While access to WCCC data has broadened over time, there are still access limits. Access to WCCC varies depending on the federal agencies, as well as across states. Some states have very good WCCC data and access to those data, and other states have no available data. Moreover, sometimes even if there is access to these data, those data are presented in formats that require extensive filtering and coding before they can be employed. Sometimes, for example, the data is posted on a case-by-case basis, with the case file being either an html or pdf file, requiring extensive hand-coding of materials to build a dataset. Imagine what the literature would look like if things were reversed – that is, if street crime researchers had to access data on a case by case basis and code each case that was described in a html or pdf file, while WCCC data were neatly aggregated and summarized each year, and available in various, easily downloaded formats that could be imported into statistical programs. The world of criminology would be quite a different place, and rather than complains that the crimes of the powerful were ignored, we might be complaining that law enforcement focused too much attention on the powerful, which then would lead to the exclusion of research on the crimes of the powerless. But that, of course, is not the world in which we live, and throughout the history of criminology, things have been quite the other way around.
As noted, over time, access to data on corporate, white collar and environmental/green crimes has increased. At the same time, however, increased access to that type of data has not necessarily made it any easier to measure/count WCCC. To be sure, today, researchers can more easily access corporate/white collar crime data by visiting the website of a particular government agency. For example, if you wanted to determine the number of environmental crimes, there are various places on the US Environmental Protection Agency’s website you would need to visit, such as the EPA’s Environmental Compliance History Online (echo.epa.gov) or EPA’s enforcement webpage (https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/enforcement-data-and-results). But, as anyone who has studied these crimes knows, there are numerous federal agencies that house data related to a wide array of white collar, corporate and environmental crimes. So, while it is now possible for a researcher to visit each of these websites (e.g., Occupational Safety and Health Administration; Food and Drug Administration; National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; Consumer Product Safety Commission; Federal Trade Commission; National Labor Relations Board; etc., etc.,), it still takes time to identify all of the relevant agencies, to collect the data from each, and to aggregate these data to create some indicator or measure of WCCC.
Still, despite increased online access to WCCC agency or state data sources, there is no single-source database – which can be thought of as a one-stop shopping place for WCCC data. There is, in other words, no WCCC database equivalent to the Uniform Crime Report for street crime, that allows easy access to aggregated information concerning white collar and corporate crimes. One can posit that the lack of an easily accessible database or source for WCCC inhibits research on these topics, and also prevents researchers from including charts and graphs about WCCC in manuscripts, and even in introductory textbook discussions addressing the volume of crime in society; the measurement of crime; kinds of crime; the scope of crime; changes in crime over time; and the volume of white collar and corporate crime in society. This subject, in short, might be more prevalent and more widely addressed if data on these types of crime was more easily accessible. Part of the goal of this web-based project on the measurement of WCCC is to facilitate discussions of, the measurement of, and research into WCCC.
Our web-based corporate/white-collar/environmental crime trend data, 2000-2017 helps address some of the issues briefly outlined above. It was designed with the express purpose of providing researchers, teachers and textbook writes will easy access to aggregated counts of WCCC offenses by type over time.
This project presents data on trends in corporate and white-collar crime aggregated by year and by violation type over an eighteen-year time period. The data presented outlines the trends by parent companies, companies, primary offenses, secondary offenses, and monetary penalties from 2000 to 2017. The data is presented both yearly and comprehensively to provide a holistic representation of the crimes and actors involved in WCCC during this time frame. This project further provides an overview of corporate crime, who it affects, and the criminological theories used to explain it. Researchers will be able to use this information and any charts, graphs or other information, and simply need to reference the website site authors. The approved reference for each figure or table can be found under the table or figure. Many of the people who have contributed their time to this project are graduate students who are just beginning their careers, and we hope you support them by using the suggested citations found with each table/figure. In addition to the tables and figures currently presented, future analysis will examine the data in more depth to capture the multinational companies and financial institutions that have caused the most harm to society and the environment, despite not appearing as a top 10 offender from 2000 to 2017.
The Data
The data for this project were collected from the public data files maintained on the goodjobsfirst.org website using the “violation tracker” page. Concerning these data, goodjobsfirst states: “Violation Tracker is the first wide-ranging database on corporate misconduct. It covers banking, consumer protection, false claims, environmental, wage & hour, safety, employment discrimination, price-fixing, bribery and other cases resolved by over 50 federal regulatory agencies and all parts of the Justice Department since 2000 -- plus cases from state AGs and selected state regulatory agencies as well as employment-related class actions. In all: 437,000 civil and criminal cases with penalties of $627 billion. Violation Tracker is produced by the “Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First” (August 18, 2020).
These data contain information on corporate violations and fines collected from 61 federal agencies. The data are recorded for 162 crime types.
The data presented on this website are summary of aggregated data. Our primary goal in summarizing these data is to provide some indication of how widespread corporate crime is in the US. Given that some crimes occur rarely, we do not present data for every crime type. Nor do we present data for every federal agency, even though in creating our summaries, we count the cases from every agency. Some agencies produce very few corporate crime cases, and it was beyond the scope of the current project to display counts for each agency individually.
Limitations
The data presented here are summary or aggregated data, and therefore do not include materials from case studies that track the violations of any single corporation. Our goal here was to depict the larger problem of corporate crime in the US. Case studies certainly are important for understanding something about why corporations behave in particular ways. For example, one can refer to recent works by Gregg Barak such as his book Unchecked corporate power: Why the crimes of multinational corporations are routinized away and what we can do about it, or his book, Theft of a Nation: Wall Street Looting and Federal Regulatory Colluding.
References
Friedrichs, David O. 2010. Trusted criminals: White collar crime in contemporary society. Cengage Learning.
Josephson, Matthew. 1934. The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901. NY: Harcourt, Brace.
Kallet, Arthur, and F. J. Schlink. 100,000,00 Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Food, Drugs and Cosmetics. NY: Grosset and Dunlap.
Rorie, Melissa L. (ed). 2019. The Handbook of White-Collar Crime. Wiley.
Ross, Edward Alsworth. 1907. Sin and society: An analysis of latter-day iniquity. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin.
https://babel.ha.thitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433069245391&view=1up&seq=18
Sutherland, Edwin H. 1945. Is White-Collar Crime, Crime? American Sociological Review. 10, 2: 132-139.
Sutherland, Edwin H. 1940. White-collar criminality. American Sociological Review. 5, 1: 1-12.
Tappan, Paul W. 1947. Who is the Criminal?. American Sociological Review 12, 1: 96-102.
Van Slyke, Shanna R., Michael L. Benson and Francis T. Cullen (eds). 2016. The Oxford Handbook of White-Collar Crime. Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank all the members of the USF SPRUCE Lab, who helped clean the data for the Corporate Crime Trends, 2000-2017 project.