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The term “white-collar crime” is attributed to Edwin Sutherland, an American sociologist and criminologist who, in a 1939 speech to the American Sociological Association, used the term to describe professionals’ illegal behavior. Before Sutherland, criminals of all sorts tended to be lumped together, but Sutherland theorized that money-related crimes deserved special attention.
But, as prominently as corporate fraudsters have loomed in the public eye long after Sutherland’s coinage, prosecutions of white-collar crime are actually at a 20-year low. According to statistics compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, the projected number of white-collar prosecutions in 2016 is higher than 6,000; the figure for 1995 was nearly 11,000.
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