Can someone write a Research paper for my Intro to Criminology class? please see attachment and description
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Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
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International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice
43 (2015) 1e16 www.elsevier.com/locate/ijlcj
White-collar crime and first-time adult-onset offending: Explorations in the concept of negative life events as
turning points
Oskar Engdahl*
Department of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg, Spr€angkullsgatan 25, SE-411 23 Gothenburg, Sweden
Available online 1 July 2014
Abstract
The article explores first-time adult-onset offending in cases of white-collar crime where the crime occurs as a consequence of a breakdown, brought by negative life events, in the circumstances that previously kept one from engaging in criminal activity. Criminal cases involving a bank manager and a male options broker working in the Swedish banking and finance sector are analyzed. Negative life events are proposed to offer a useful explanation for first-time adult-onset offending if conceptualized as turning points caused by a chain of life events entailing enmeshment in problems of a scope and kind one has never been forced to deal with in the past, threatening essential aspects of one's identity and life project, and accompanied by perceived loss of previously available social support for one's prioritizings, at the same time as one remains in possession of resources making criminal solutions seem comparatively expedient. Directions for future research are suggested. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Adult-onset offending; First-time offending; Negative life events; Turning points; White-collar crime
* Department of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg, Box 720, SE-405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden. Tel.: þ46 31 786 4497; fax: þ46 31 786 4764.
E-mail address: [email protected]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijlcj.2014.06.001
1756-0616/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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1. Introduction
e Let me ask you something: Have you ever done anything that was illegal or forbidden? Before now, I mean.
e No, definitely not. Not a thing. I've never even shoplifted a candy bar in my life. e So how come you started now?
This brief excerpt of a conversation is taken from a police interrogation of a Swedish bank manager found out to have embezzled the equivalent of at least fifty thousand U.S. dollars from the bank branch where she had been employed for many years. A valued member of the or- ganization, the bank manager enjoyed the high esteem of both her colleagues and superiors and had been promoted several times during her tenure at the bank. By the time her crime was discovered, she was even being considered for the position of branch manager at her bank. She was forty years old and, according to her own testimony and official records, had no criminal history of any kind. As she herself testified, she had never committed even the slightest infraction up until now. Now, however, it had come to light that she, as she also readily admitted, during a period of four years had misappropriated funds from her bank. Considering the blameless life she had led in the past, the police interrogator's question thus begged to be asked: What had induced the bank manager to start breaking the law now?
In posing this question, the officer in charge of the interrogation laid his finger on a tender spot in inquiries about crime and criminality: the issue of adult-onset offending and, in particular, first-time adult-onset offending. In previous research in the field, this issue has often been overlooked as a marginal phenomenon, leaving the area by and large “understudied,” “overlooked,” and even outright “neglected,” with the factors associated with late- or adult- onset offending remaining “not well understood” (Gomez-Smith and Piquero, 2005, p. 524; Harris, 2011, p. 950; Zara, 2012; Zara and Farrington, 2010, p. 258). Consequently, “a pressing research need” in the area has been identified (DeLisi and Piquero, 2011, p. 293). In the recent past, research publications have, indeed, increasingly come to recognize the importance of the issue, yielding evidence on adult-onset offending as perhaps a significantly more common phenomenon than previously understood and calling for intensified research efforts on the topic (see, e.g., Eggleston and Laub, 2002; Gomez-Smith and Piquero, 2005; Harris, 2011; Krohn et al., 2013; McGee and Farrington, 2010; Simpson et al., 2008).
In these calls for further exploration, in particular research on ways in which negative life events specific to adult life affect initiation into crime has been solicited (e.g., Eggleston and Laub, 2002, p. 614; Gomez-Smith and Piquero, 2005, p. 523; Piquero and Benson, 2004, p. 160). Such events may comprise troubled marriages or divorce, precarious family finances, sudden shifts in one's position in the labor market, or adult drug dependencies. The proposition has even been put forth that adult-onset offending be examined as a consequence of a breakdown that negative life events of this kind can cause in the circumstances that previously kept a person from engaging in criminal activity e in other words, as an effect of “negative turning points, which change an individual's noncriminal trajectory to criminal in adulthood” (Eggleston and Laub, 2002, p. 614). While research elsewhere in the area appears to have confirmed the relevance of factors of this kind, making the approach seem all the more promising (for more on this, see below), this proposal has nevertheless gone largely unheeded to date. This, of course, is unsatisfactory, given how clearly the need for further research in the area has been identified and communicated, with prominent researchers pointing out that “we
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are only just beginning to understand how adult-onset offenders can be distinguished from those with an earlier onset of offending” (McGee and Farrington, 2010, p. 534).
The aim of this article is to contribute to the filling of this very research gap. In what follows, I explore the notion of negative life events as negative turning points, considering its usefulness for understanding adult-onset offending and white-collar crime. In the first section of the article, I review previous research addressing adult-onset offending and the need for further work on negative life events and turning points. In the second section, the relevance of the cases of white-collar crime taken up in this study as well as the methods used to study them are discussed. The argument about negative life events as turning points is then presented in the third section. In it, I attempt to show how negative life events and negative turning points indeed can be used to explain initiation into crime in adulthood, provided they are conceptu- alized as a chain of life events that (1) entail enmeshment in problems of a scope and kind never encountered or dealt with by the individual in the past, (2) threaten essential aspects of one's identity and life project, and (3) are accompanied by perceived absence of previously available social support for one's prioritizings, at the same time as (4) the individual remains circum- stantially in possession of resources making criminal solutions seem comparatively expedient.
2. Adult-onset offending: previous research
In the last few years, there has been a burgeoning recognition of adult-onset offending as an all too neglected and misunderstood area of research. Evidence has been put forward to the effect that adult-onset offending may be much more common a phenomenon, and account for a significantly larger share of all adult criminality, than previously believed (Andersson and Torstensson Levander, 2013; Andersson et al., 2012; Block et al., 2010; Eggleston and Laub, 2002; Harris, 2011; McGee and Farrington, 2010; Simpson et al., 2008; but see Sohoni et al., 2014; Wiecko, 2014).1 Research on late- or adult-onset offending has focused mainly on factors in early life that can help predict adult-onset offending. The strongest ones among these have been found to be largely psychological in nature, including, in particular, nervousness, neuroticism, anxiety, and emotional instability (Pulkkinen et al., 2009, p. 132; Zara and Farrington, 2010, p. 269). Characteristics such as these are often considered as of- fering some protection against early-onset offending, especially when combined with a favorable social environment, yet they leave individuals less prepared to handle the challenging experiences and stressful life events associated with adolescence and adulthood (Krohn et al., 2013; Lay et al., 2005; Thornberry and Krohn, 2005; Zara, 2012, pp. 89e90). Thereby, the importance of negative life events in adult life comes into relief, explaining how factors that protect one in early life become risk factors in adult life. The same is suggested by recent studies finding factors closer in time to the outcome of late-onset delinquency to have a stronger
1Since it is not an aim of this article to contribute to the discussion of how widespread adult-onset offending might
actually be, I will not venture further into this particular discussion. The interested reader is instead referred to
Eggleston and Laub (2002), Simpson et al. (2008), Harris (2011), McGee and Farrington (2010), Sohoni et al. (2014),
Wiecko (2014), as well as Gomez-Smith and Piquero (2005), who all who all treat this question more in extenso. See
also, in particular, Andersson and Torstensson Levander (2013) and Andersson et al. (2012). Note, however, that the
discussion about the extent of adult-onset offending has remained highly general in nature and only seldom considers
the possibility that adult-onset offending might primarily be connected to specific types of crime or specific groups in
society such as, for example, white-collar criminals.
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effect than earlier ones; they, too, point to the likely significance of events in adulthood (like becoming unemployed or ending up in poor home conditions and living situations) as expla- nations for adult-onset offending (Carr and Hanks, 2012; Harris, 2011, p. 973; Lay et al., 2005, p. 62; Zara and Farrington, 2010).
In contrast to early-life factors helping to predict adult-onset offending, the question of how experiences specifically related to adult life may influence onset of criminality has been pointed out as particularly poorly understood (Eggleston and Laub, 2002, p. 615; Gomez-Smith and Piquero, 2005, p. 523; Harris, 2011, p. 973). This lack of knowledge has made it difficult to determine whether it is in principle distinct or fundamentally the same mechanisms that stand behind the development of delinquency and crime at different life stages (Laub and Sampson, 2003:588). In their review of research on onset of offending in general, in which they found adult-onset to be far more common than previously thought, Eggleston and Laub (2002) observed that data specifically related to adult life experiences was sorely lacking, leaving analyses dependent on predictors collected from birth to adolescence. Previous research on desistance from crime, however, in showing that even high persistent offenders with early initiation into crime and significant risk factors often end their criminal careers as a result of exposure to positive life events in adult age, in their view suggested that initiation into crime in adulthood could, correspondingly, be linked to negative life events and turning points. These, by bringing about a breakdown in the conditions that previously inhibited crime, could “change an individual's noncriminal trajectory to criminal in adulthood” (Eggleston and Laub, 2002, p. 614; see also Sampson and Laub, 2005). Further research was therefore necessary, focusing on the extent to which criminality might be caused by negative adult transitions (see also Gomez-Smith and Piquero, 2005, pp. 523f.).
While the general connection between crime and negative life events in adulthood (espe- cially drug use, divorce, unemployment, and the like) may be well studied overall, it is only seldom, however, that research has concentrated on the onset of adult offending, and virtually never on factors explaining why individuals commit their first crime in adulthood. A particular problem here, as Harris (2011) has noted, is that adult-onset offenders have thus far been studied as a group without any distinction drawn between those committing their first crime and those committing their later crimes. In other words, one has in practice lumped together “adult first offenders with other offenders who, though they began their criminal activity in adulthood, may now have substantial criminal histories to their credit and may now be much more like juvenile persistent offenders than their first-time counterpart” (Harris, 2011, p. 954). Due to the lengthy expanse of adulthood, to do so can, of course, hide important differences between initiation and continuity in crime. Just as in research on crime and criminality in general, moreover, research in this area has mainly concentrated on average statistical differences be- tween groups and not on situational factors at the time of the crime (see Horney, 2006). As a result, research has been able to provide few clues as to the mechanisms that could explain initiation of criminal offending in adulthood, and, as also Harris (2011) notes, the possible connection between first-time offending in adulthood and negative life events in work and family life has been left practically unexamined.
All in all, there is thus a need to better understand the processes in adulthood that contribute to the initiation of crime and to thereby help develop the area, still widely looked upon as “atheoretical” (Simpson et al., 2008, p. 88). In what follows, the suggestions to this effect are heeded through an analysis of two cases from Sweden, one involving a female bank manager and the other male options broker working in the country's banking and finance sector. In my analysis of these cases, I draw on a concept of negative life events as turning points, which I
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claim can contribute to a better understanding of first-time initiation into crime in adulthood. To be sure, there are undoubtedly multiple pathways to first-time adult-onset offending. In this article, I, however, want to focus on only one of them, proposing it to be a highly probably one at least in the Swedish context; the broader applicability of the argument made is then discussed in the concluding section. In my analysis, “turning points” refer to circumstances and condi- tions that bring about either a gradual or a sudden change in the lives of individuals, making them embark on an entirely different direction compared to their previous history e in this case, leaving behind their lives as law-abiding citizens by taking the step to commit crime for the first-time in their lives.
3. Research methods and data
A key goal of the present study is to develop a concept of negative life events as turning points that influence adult-onset offending and white-collar crime, and thereby help advance theory building in the area. The study is exploratory in nature and its focus is primarily directed towards experiences and situations in adult life that have the potential to cause onset of criminality. To enable a full description of the essential characteristics and the processes leading offenders to commit their first crime, I limit myself to a detailed analysis of only a two pertinent cases derived from one country context (cf. Flyvbjerg, 2001; Yin, 2009). The Swedish banker involved in the first of them committed her first crime at the age of 36 when working as a manager for a branch office of one of Sweden's main banks in the city of Gothenburg, the second largest urban center in the country. The Swedish options broker in the second case, again, committed his first crime as a 30-year-old head of the options division of a prestigious asset management firm in Sweden's capital city of Stockholm. In both cases, the individuals in question were able to continue their wrongdoing undetected for a period of several years before being caught, dismissed, and prosecuted: for the bank manager, this lasted for three and a half years, and for the options broker, nearly five years. Both of them, however, confessed to their crimes immediately upon becoming questioned about their doings at their workplace.
The empirical material collected and analyzed for this study mainly consisted of documents made publicly available through the Swedish criminal justice system in relation to the two cases: investigations carried out by the two offenders' employers, the police, and prosecutors as well as hearings and decisions of courts. More specifically, the materials studied included police interrogation records, internal and police investigation reports, witness statements, court judgments, and other court records, as well as various documents seized by the police, among them accounting records, invoices, contracts, lists of business transactions, e-mails, and per- sonal letters and notes. Altogether, the empirical material examined comprised several thou- sands of pages in each of the two cases. Both cases went through several court instances with the hearings in each lasting several weeks in total.
The analysis of these materials was focused primarily on experiences and situations in adult life that might influence onset of criminality. To clarify the mechanisms and conditions leading to the crimes the bank manager and the options broker committed, the sequences of events of which the criminal acts were a culmination were reconstructed, using different types of data (cf. Miles and Huberman, 1994). In the absence of any possibility for direct observation, the materials were treated as traces of the actions actually carried out, helping one to examine and outline what happened and under what circumstances. The core part of the analysis was con- cerned with the convicted offenders' personal experiences and situational factors influencing the modus operandi of their crimes. Accordingly, it concentrated on how the crime was committed
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(modus operandi), what the money gained from the crime was used for ( following the money), and what these two revealed about the motive of the crime (criminal motivation). The offenders' own stories about their own personal experiences and feelings were thus of importance here. In addition, the analysis focused on the resources used to carry out the crimes in question and the acts and social relations characterizing the different steps of the crime process, to better un- derstand the opportunity structures involved and what the possible ‘negative life events’ in each case were constituted of (a troubled marriage? precarious finances? etc.). The social relation- ships and life circumstances identified as inherently related to the crimes' modus operandi were subsequently reconstructured, with an explanation of how the different events and elements were connected developed as described in the sections to follow (cf. Miles and Huberman, 1994, pp. 110ff.).
The analysis, it should be noted, involves thus no more than two cases of white-collar criminals who committed their first crimes in adulthood. Nevertheless, as has also been sug- gested elsewhere (e.g., Flyvbjerg, 2001, Ch. 6), detailed descriptions of individual incidents of white-collar crime as attempted also here lend themselves particularly well to the kind of theory building purposes this article wants to promote. So far, case studies and “thick” descriptions of white-collar offenders' modus operandi and situational factors at the time of crime have been quite rare, and where such studies have been carried out, they, along with other data on white- collar crime, have not been drawn upon in research on adult-onset of offending e this despite the fact that white-collar offenders tend to generally be older than street-crime offenders when committing their first crime, and that for a considerable number of them initiation into crime takes place when already well into one's adult years (Piquero and Benson, 2004, p. 156; Weisburd et al., 2001, pp. 33e36, cf. Cullen and Benson, 1993).
4. Negative life events and turning points: an empirical analysis
In this section, I lay out my argument about how the notion of negative life events can be utilized in the interest of a better understanding of white-collar crimes such as those committed by the Swedish bank manager and options broker in this study. It should be emphasized that the four analytically separate elements that make up my argument are to be understood as closely connected parts of one and the same process. The division of the presentation below into four distinct sections is thus primarily to facilitate reading.
4.1. Enmeshment in financial problems, fear of falling, and crime as a crisis solution
In research on white-collar crime, those committing the crimes are often highlighted as a category of offenders showing a basically positive attitude, and in general a clear tendency, towards complying with the prevailing laws and regulations. Overall, they thus show a pref- erence for steering clear of criminal solutions and, even when presented with a lucrative op- portunity for crime, characteristically let pass the chance to take advantage of it. A crisis that threatens something of high value for these individuals may nonetheless provide compelling enough a motivation for them to embrace illegitimate means if no other alternative seems feasible. This kind of crisis may occur as a result of a failed business deal or a lifestyle beyond one's means that brings consequences for one's family life. Those attempting to solve such crises through crime have, consequently, been categorized as “crisis responders” (Cressey, 1973; Waring et al., 1995; Weisburd et al., 2001). The crisis in their cases often gives rise to
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a fear of “losing what you have worked so hard to gain” or to what is commonly referred to as the “fear of falling” (Wheeler, 1992, p. 115; see also Piquero, 2012; Weisburd et al., 1991).
In the case of the Swedish bank manager and options broker, their initial crime had an immediate connection to financial problems in which these individuals found themselves enmeshed. The problems in question were all of a scope and kind that they were not used to handling in front of others. For several years before committing their first crime, they had both enjoyed success in their working and family life, becoming promoted, purchasing new property, and starting a family. Through all this, their responsibilities had increased both at work and in personal life, reinforcing or creating new expectations from their social environment that then became a notable factor contributing to pressure and stress in times of financial difficulty.
When committing his crimes, the options broker was working for a prestigious Swedish asset management firm with the responsibility for the firm's options business. Aged thirty at the time, he committed his first crime following a failed deal he had made on behalf of a client. The losses from it, at approximately one and half million U.S. dollars, were quite notable, being, moreover, caused for a client who was among the wealthiest, most demanding, and most valuable ones the firm had. In the time period leading up to the broker's fatal decision, he and the client had, besides, developed a close working relationship, staying in regular, almost daily contact to discuss the various transactions the broker handled on the client's behalf. The broker, in his own words, thus found himself in “an extremely uncomfortable situation” after the outcome of his bad bet had become clear to him, forcing him to look for ways act on it quickly:
So I thought about it hard … wondering whether I should tell the management about it or whether I should try to fix it all on my own. But … I couldn't muster the courage to go to my bosses and tell them about the losses I'd made … so I decided to try and see if I could straighten out the problem by myself.
The great anguish the broker felt in the situation left him unable to disclose his problem to those around him. What he did instead was to chop up the bad deal he had made into smaller units and move these among various accounts he had access to, to prevent their detection. Soon enough, however, prompted by his initial success in doing so he began to feel encouraged to start making new, hidden deals, hoping to recoup his losses. These ambitions of his nevertheless became frustrated, and within four years' time the broker's losses had climbed up to more than twenty million U.S. dollars.
The way the broker handled the initial transaction thus only aggravated his problem, sending him deeper and deeper on the path of crime. In a comparable fashion, also the bank manager in this study experienced initial financial problems, albeit in her private life, which then kept being compounded by her subsequent actions. In her case, the compounding factor was her inability to stop spending more than what she actually had available to herself, on things like vacation trips and her wardrobe. In due course, therefore, the bank manager fell behind with her bills, having used up her credit limits and overdrawn her bank accounts. At the end, she could no longer even keep up with her monthly contributions to the joint account from which her husband paid the expenses of their house in an affluent neighborhood, causing an overdraft on that account. The bank manager felt ashamed of her actions and began to fear for their con- sequences, not daring to approach her coworkers or family to confide in them her troubles. Instead, she attempted to solve her problem using her work position, through funds obtained by taking out loans in other people's names and embezzling from customer accounts at her bank branch. In this fashion, at the age of thirty-six, she then committed her first crime, involving relatively small amounts at first, which then snowballed into at least fifty thousand U.S. dollars
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over time. Each of the individual amounts she embezzled helped to solve an acute, temporary problem brought on by the broader underlying problem that could nonetheless not be alleviated as long as she continued to live past her means. While it remained her intention to address also that latter situation, she never managed to stop postponing the issue.
For both the broker and the bank manager, criminality offered a way to attempt a solution to financial problems that had brought on the critical situation in the first place. Both of the two perceived the financially difficult situation they initially found themselves in as a threat that could be met through short-term fraud, “a temporary taking to be restored as soon as business fortunes turn around” (Weisburd et al., 1991, p. 189). Yet they both failed in this intention of theirs, becoming instead increasingly dependent on continuing offense to maintain their position (Weisburd et al., 1991). Nevertheless, what is of importance here is that, to all accounts, it was not just the financial difficulties as such that the offenders to be were con- fronted with that rendered their situation critical and left them coping with the fear of falling back. For both the broker and the bank manager, the financial difficulties faced were also relational problems in which the social standing one had until then been able to enjoy in the eyes of others was at stake. Their becoming deeply enmeshed in financial problems seemed, for them, to turn their previously supportive and positively experienced relationships into stress-inducing, negatively charged ones. Negative emotions coming from perhaps not going to be able to hold on to and protect one's job, customers, and family then followed in turn. It is precisely this type of strain that in previous research has been identified as being “especially conducive to crime because it frequently involves ongoing difficulties and major changes in lifestyle, which are more difficult to ignore or define away than the inability to achieve economic goals, especially distant goals” (Agnew et al., 2009, p. 43; see also Listwan et al., 2010). In the case of the broker and the bank manager, it was clearly expressed by the circumstance that both of them kept their problems to themselves, attempting to solve these on their own, as will be elaborated further in following section with the help of the notions “distrust in social support” and “non-shareable problems.”
4.2. Distrust in perceived support from the environment and non-shareable problems
As their problems escalated, both the bank manager and the options broker began to develop doubts about the level of understanding and acceptance they thought they could expect their environment to show for their situation if their mistakes and shortcomings became known. For, in the understanding of the two individuals themselves, what their failures indicated was their inability to live up to the (growing) demands and expectations of their environment, under- mining the very foundations on which the support and influence they had thus far been able to enjoy in their social relations was based. What they feared, in a nutshell, was that their key valued relationships had become threatened. At the same time, however, they continued to depend on the recognition and resources of their environment for their ability to maintain their standing in social life, including the status and lifestyle this standing entailed. As a conse- quence, they found themselves in a weakened power position in which the mental and social resources they were accustomed to relying on e and that would have been needed for finding a legitimate solution to their problems e had in their estimation dissipated. What this perception of weakened relationships triggered was a sense of anguish, discomfort, and outright fear (of falling in the status hierarchy) at the thought of telling and having to be open about one's troubles, making them, to use Cressey's terminology, in essence “non-shareable” as problems (Cressey, 1973, pp. 34f.).
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In the case of the options broker, these feelings revolved around the obvious risk of losing one's client, having one's responsibilities reassigned, and thereby losing one's position and prestige at the workplace. The broker's close association with his client had brought him much esteem from his colleagues as well as challenging work assignments, having in this sense played a major role in the strong position that the broker had come to enjoy within the firm. Indeed, he had in effect become the firm's “trusted man” to whom the more complicated tasks and demanding clients that no one else could manage handling were given.
A key aspect here seems to be the fact that the options broker felt he had failed to meet the expectations built into the confidence and status afforded him by his colleagues, customers, and bosses. In the background of his mind, there were also the stories he had heard at the firm of brokers deprived of responsibility for prestigious clients following unsuccessful deals. The same was true of the bank manager as well. She and her husband had always trusted each other in economic matters, which trust she now considered having betrayed by overspending to the point of no longer being able to contribute to the common expenses of their household. The husband himself was meticulous in his manner, conscientious in his duties, and had often spoken of the importance of paying bills on time, even reminding the bank manager of the matter as due dates neared. The irritation caused in him by the account overdraft was thus great, which, to be sure, she well understood. The husband's reaction was, moreover, only magnified by the fact that this all took place in a deteriorating economic climate, with worsening interest rates, increasing living expenses, and stagnating salaries prompting him to often mention the necessity to “tighten the belt” and “live according to one's means.” Neither had the situation been helped by the bank manager's continued insistence in convincing her husband that even now they could afford accepting invitations from their friends to join them for vacation trips, on which she had then paid considerably more than what she had let the husband know. In any case, she started being afraid of her husband's going “nuts” and “ballistic” if he ever were to find out about her doings, daring no longer to come out in the open with her problems.
Similarly to the options broker, the bank manager thus proceeded to make use of the op- portunities availed her in her work position to engineer a solution behind the scenes. Access to other people's money was utilized as a means to avoid emotionally all too straining and risky encounters, providing an alternative solution to the problem when openness and candor were not an option and allowing a way to preserve one's position in social life intact. What all these actions evidence is dependence on the recognition and resources of one's environment. The bank manager and the broker, however, were no longer in a position to themselves influence the terms that governed their status in this relationship. The hidden actions thus appear to be an outcome of a shift in the individuals' power relations, brought about by the emergent problem that relegated these individuals to a more subordinate position, one in which they found themselves increasingly dependent on the goodwill of others for their ability to maintain their relationships on previous terms. To be able to live up to the demands and expectations of their environment even in the future, the problems were then concealed to remove the mistakes and shortcomings from sight. What was central to this response is, to judge from evidence, the weakened power position and dependency that resulted from it (cf. Barbalet, 2001, pp. 123ff.; Kemper, 1978, pp. 58ff.), explaining why crime became a way of solving a “perceived crisis” (cf. Waring et al., 1995; Weisburd et al., 2001). The fact that the offenders in question were forced to deal with their problems before a betrayed party they felt themselves dependent on and potentially questioned by while at the same time seeking this party's recognition, seems to explain their shame reactions along with their desire to pursue possibilities for a hidden so- lution; only that way could they avoid the jeopardizing of their future prospects of maintaining
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the relationship that exposing themselves to others would have inevitably meant (see also Bowen, 1978, p. 478). Since the sense of shame here was clearly related to the process of positive relationships turning into negative ones, these findings should encourage further in- vestigations into the connection between negative emotions and white-collar crime. In this regard, moreover, the present study is also in line with previous research providing support for the notion that crime is related to negative emotions, even if these emotions in white-collar crime have been shown to be “distinct from those experienced by street criminals” (Langton and Piquero, 2007, p. 11).
4.3. Identity and emotional involvement
In the circumstances in which the bank manager and the options broker found themselves enmeshed in problems whose dimensions and type were entirely new to them and entailed their subordination in dependency relations, doubts about the value of previously available resources connected to their social relations were a prominent feature. In the absence of additional factors, the situation might have then equally well led to paralysis and resignation instead. Two conditions help to explain why this nonetheless did not happen: strong emotional involvement with a project or an identity (discussed in this section) and perceived access to a hidden-action space where problem solution out of sight became possible (see the next section). What emerged as a joint effect of these two factors was a sense of self-efficacy counteracting any tendencies for inaction and apathy.
For both the bank manager and the broker, the problem at hand entailed a risk of being divested of responsibilities, authority, powers, and relationships holding high value for them. All these, moreover, represented for them achievements on which the meaning of their life's project and even identity had come to be founded. Their involvement with these projects and identities was so deep and emotionally so charged that the needs and desires of others became frequently relegated to the background. Thereby the possibilities for successfully reversing course or falling back on something else when their own resources to go forward with their project had been depleted or found wanting were curtailed e and to plan for alternatives was nonetheless difficult. Instead, there was a tendency for them to morally cut themselves off from others, adding to their propensity for criminal behavior as the obligations towards others that are implied in any stakes in conformity and normally act to inhibit crime were weakened (cf. Merton, 1968, p. 195; Scheff, 1997, p. 77).
In the case of the bank manager, it was the fear of losing highly valued social relationships that urged her on in her desire to spend money to be able to dress classy, continue to live in an affluent neighborhood, and go on trips. She spent liberally only so as to be able to meet the expectations she felt were set on her by her coworkers, her husband, and her friends and ac- quaintances. As she herself explained it:
It's hard when you socialize with people who … constantly push you to join them for trips now to one place, now to another place. And you do, of course, want to keep hanging out with these people whom you like so much. It affected my whole life … my entire way of being …. I sort of felt I had to be with these people and we have to go on trips with them, or otherwise they don't want to socialize with us and whatnot.
The bank manager, in other words, was afraid of losing her friends if she were to decline their invitations to join them on vacation trips. This fear holding her in its grip was, further- more, only magnified by the friends' brusque dismissal of every suggestion she made for more
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affordable alternatives better suited for her and her husband's budget. In the case of the options broker, again, it was the future of a highly valued professional career that was at stake, with the continuously increasing independence and responsibility it entailed him in his assignments. For him, work was everything: it was “fun” and provided interesting “challenges,” experienced as a “24/7-kind of thing” that his “whole life rotated around.” In both of the two cases, it was thus a question of individuals unable to extricate themselves from a lifestyle built around, or an identity bound up with, one's work, coworkers, and friends.
4.4. Hidden-action space and self-efficacy
As the above two examples suggest, criminal behavior in the kinds of cases discussed here might best be understood as a defensive response: it is aimed at safeguarding a position, a set of social relationships, or a lifestyle that, after having been attained through significant investment of time and effort, has now come under threat owing to problems whose disclosure seems likely to lead to rejection from the environment and a negative transformation of one's (social) identity. It results from exposure to problems of a scope and kind that one is not used to handle (i.e., non-shareable problems), while being emotionally all too involved with one's projects e and dependent on the resources and recognition of one's environment for the preservation and continuation of these projects e to be able to respond to this exposure in a candid and open fashion. The cases investigated for this study involved individuals who were not prepared to give up the life they were leading, and for that reason lacked either the social or the mental readiness to address the problem in the full glare of publicity. In these circumstances, crimi- nality provided a way to avoid giving up major parts of one's self, presenting itself as an alternative whose attractiveness and even perceived necessity only increased as the risks involved in not committing the crime became more obvious in the situation.
The particular concatenation of ambitions and problems exemplified by the options broker and the bank manager, combined with their position enabling them access to other peoples' money, constituted an instance of what Shover and Hochstetler have termed “lure,” or appealing arrangements or situations that “turn heads” (2006, p. 27). Nevertheless, as the au- thors make a point of noting, lure as such is not criminal opportunity but only becomes one in the absence of credible oversight: “Lure makes the tempted and criminally predisposed sen- sitive to whether or not their actions are being monitored and how oversight might be defeated. Part of the attraction of many types of lure is the apparent ease of exploitation” (Shover and Hochstetler, 2006, p. 28). In the examples considered above, however, one should neverthe- less be mindful of the fact that the individuals involved in them perceived there to be an op- portunity for a criminal solution to begin with, and that they possessed perceived self-efficacy in their own area and operating environment (cf. Bandura, 1997), amounting to something like the presence of illegitimate means and “criminal self-efficacy” in these cases from early on (cf. Agnew, 2006, pp. 97e98; Cressey, 1973, pp. 77ff.). For these particular white-collar of- fenders, built-in opportunities for crime were included in very nature of their work as banking and finance sector employees entrusted with not only administrative responsibilities, but also the financial and technical tools to effectively manage those responsibilities (cf. Agnew et al., 2009, pp. 50e51, Benson and Simpson, 2009). In addition, the bank manager and the broker in question had acquired specialist knowledge and technical skills that made overseeing and monitoring their activities more complicated as a challenge, and had both been given relative freedom in attending to their duties, resulting in factual “lack of credible oversight” (Shover and Hochstetler, 2006). At their workplaces, moreover, the instructions given them had
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generally been insufficient and the standard for administrative routines lax, with the day-to-day control and supervision frequently compromised or entirely lacking, either out of pure prag- matic considerations or owing to priorities centered on business expansion and firm-level profit margins.
The case of the options broker provides a good illustration in all of these respects. The firm's interest in the broker's ability to make quick deals, generate profits, and that way help it expand its operations was as pronounced as its concern for controls and administrative efficiency and procedure was unapparent. This general attitude was expressed in no unclear terms when the broker's supervisor, in reviewing his work on new administrative tools for options traders, told him to “Screw the paperwork! You are here to do business.” The scant interest in management and procedures affected the quality of supervision and monitoring regarding the broker's ac- tivities. The issue was, moreover, only compounded by the fact that the type of transactions under the broker's responsibility, as was well known in the firm, was exceedingly complex in nature, with the result that the broker could soon begin to boast superior knowledge and un- derstanding of the field in the company of his colleagues, superiors, clients, and auditors alike. While the latter had access to all records related to his transactions, they never fully understood the illegal nature of some of the deals he made. Aided by the deficient controls in place at the firm, the broker could thus utilize his unique knowledge and experience to conduct transactions whose nature those around him would never fully understand. This presented an opportunity that he then also took advantage of, attempting to hide the transaction that had caused his problem in the first place. At that point still, he had no doubt that he would succeed in his efforts, too e a confidence he shared with the above-reported bank manager in this study. Absence of controls and access to necessary technical skills allowed a situation to arise in which they both could feel themselves capable of gaining access to unguarded space e a “back region,” in Goffman's terminology (see Engdahl, 2009) e where there was room for hidden actions enabling a con- cealed solution based on the means and resources entrusted in their hands. In consequence, the costs of this solution, involving the risk of being caught and the mental strain and exertion that implementing it entailed, were estimated to be relatively insignificant compared to the risks and the emotional ordeal that had followed from being open about the problems.
5. Discussion and conclusions
In this article, I have laid out an argument proposing that first-time adult-onset offending can profitably be understood in terms of turning points brought by negative life events, and that the key elements defining such negative life events are enmeshment in problems that threaten essential aspects of one's identity and life project and a perception of being without the social support that could previously be mobilized and harnessed for one's life prioritizings, while being in possession of resources making criminal solutions seem comparatively expedient. This conclusion, however, needs to be treated with caution, due to the fact that the study was explorative in nature and relied on just two cases of white-collar crime. It remains for future studies to confirm whether its findings can be extended to other cases involving a comparable group of criminals and, perhaps, to other groups of criminals as well.
Regarding the former possibility, it is worth noting that both of the cases included in this study e that of the bank manager and that of the options broker e represent examples of what have been categorized as “crisis responders” in research on white-collar crime. These are estimated to make up a substantial proportion of all offenders sentenced for white-collar and economic crimes, and have been given relatively much attention in studies of white-collar
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crime (Waring et al., 1995; Weisburd et al., 2001, pp. 59e64, 218; Piquero and Benson, 2004; Piquero and Weisburd, 2009, p. 157). It is also essentially this category of offenders that features in the studies by Cressey (1973) and Zeitz (1981) on embezzlement cases (but see also Pogrebin et al., 1986; Robin, 1970). Very little, however, has been said about how the perception of a crisis and the readiness to commit crime evolve and grow decisive in the matrix of the personal relationships and social networks enveloping these individuals. Crisis re- sponders, embezzlers, and different kinds of white-collar criminals are, moreover, also ex- amples of groups that in general seem to come to crime relatively late in life. It therefore seems likely that future research on adult-onset offending has much to gain by focusing on these groups in particular.
Regarding the applicability of the findings from this study to further groups of criminals, an important question is whether the mechanisms identified above indeed manifest themselves similarly orewhich seems more likelye variously in different cases. Is, for instance, what first- time adult-onset offenders in general have in common that they simply have become enmeshed in problems whose scope and kind they never have been forced to deal with before, although the particular type of the problem may vary? The bank manager and the options broker in this study were both part of the established society and typically held high-status positions of trust.2 The problems they were facing prior to committing their crimes were essentially caused by their failure to live up to the trust, expectations, and status bestowed on them by an environment with which they wanted to maintain their relations intact, suggesting something like “unique class- based causes of white-collar crime” in their case (Benson and Moore, 1992, p. 268).
Here it is possible, however, to readily conceive of a host of also other kinds of problems that can with equal effect influence initiation into crime. One may, for example, have been exposed to acts of violence, provocation, or humiliation or denied one's rightful status in such a way as to prompt one to resort to violent means in an attempt to deal with the problem. The reaction can naturally be strengthened in the presence of feelings of isolation when there are misgivings about the support and help available from the environment, leading to the crime's being committed as a form of self-help in what amounts to more or less of an act of desperation. Accordingly, Simpson and her collaborators (Simpson et al., 2008, pp. 102e103) were able to establish that women in their study who began to offend as adults had had a fairly stable lifestyle and exhibited few of the traditional risk factors, something that conforms to the findings of the present study as well. These women had, however, to a significant degree been exposed to violent victimization (rapes, robberies, assaults) in adulthood. The authors therefore recommend that future research pay close attention to the possible links between adult-onset and experiencing “a traumatic event,” a concept very similar to “negative life events” and “negative turning points.” In a similar fashion, Carr and Hanks (2012) have recently analyzed criminal offending among a small group of incarcerated female adult-onset offenders as a result of specific experiences in adulthood, such as of, first and foremost, growing demands or bur- dens of social and economic caretaking (e.g., providing material goods or income to significant
2This is in line with research showing late- or adult-onset offenders to be largely characterized by absence of criminal
lifestyle factors (such as deviant companionship), but contrasts with studies suggesting them to have a weaker
connection to the labor market and poor home conditions at the time they commit their crime (Harris, 2011, p. 25; Zara
and Farrington, 2010). Research on this type of offenders tends in general, however, to be based on data about “the usual
suspects” of crime in the lower strata of society, pointing to the value of also using data about white-collar criminals
(cf. Cullen and Benson, 1993).
14 O. Engdahl / International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 43 (2015) 1e16
others like one's own children), major personal loss (e.g., of a significant other), and drug addiction e experiences that can very well be understood in terms of the chains of events used to conceptualize negative life events and turning points in this article.
This study, however, also makes available valuable data about individual experiences con- cerning the commission of a criminal act and the situational factors and events leading to it. This is donewith the objective of furthering theory building in an area where such data have previously been rare. Of vital importance, however, is that future research succeeds in combining data to simultaneously capture the significance of situational, background, and foreground factors. This is necessary to obtain sufficient evidence for the question of whether some individuals might in fact be more prone than others to respond with criminal behaviors when exposed to negative life events, and to what factors the tendency should in these cases be attributed (see Benson and Simpson, 2009, pp. 44e51; Cressey, 1973, pp. 142e145; Ragatz and Fremouw, 2010).
A striking feature of the bank manager and the options broker in the present study was their paralyzing fear about sharing their problems, which then led them down a criminal path, while at the same time remaining confident in their ability to commit crime undetected to solve these problems. This rather paradoxical combination of characteristics is interesting in light of recent research that shows adult-onset offenders to be distinguished by their higher orienting sensi- tivity, social desirability, success-orientation, and combination of high self-confidence (trust in one's power) and a low sense of self-worth (shame about perceived incompetence) (Pulkkinen et al., 2009, pp. 132f.), and in view of the finding that nervousness, neuroticism, anxiety, and an emotionally unstable personality are strong early-life predictors of late-onset offending (Pulkkinen et al., 2009, p. 132; Zara and Farrington, 2010, p. 269; see also Listwan et al., 2010). All these discoveries support the suggestion that late-onset offenders have deficits that could also cause offending during early years, while they also possess resources that serve to buffer them from the effects of these deficits during childhood and adolescence. These, as Thornberry and Krohn (2005, pp. 195e196) have argued, may have to do with reduced human capital (such as, in especial, lower intelligence and lower academic competence that leave some individuals less successful than others in building social capital) and supportive family and school envi- ronment, respectively. Upon entering adult life with its demands for an ability to cope on one's own without the previous protective environment, these deficits can then become a serious disadvantage, opening a pathway to crime especially where the loss of buffering factors is coupled with an accumulation of a different kind of group pressure or life stressors. This hy- pothesis appears plausible and will likely help to explain a considerable number of adult-onset offending cases. The basic assumption behind it e that crime is actualized as a consequence of withdrawal of social support while the individual is being exposed to life stressors e is also well in line with the findings of the present study. The offenders included in the analysis above, however, were a bank manager and an options trader committing their first crime all too late in life and in all too high a professional position for any reduction in human capital and buffering factors per se to have had a major effect. Further research on the topic is therefore warranted.
Acknowledgments
The author of this article is grateful to the anonymous reviewers and Timo Lyyra for their valuable comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. The article was written as part of the research project “Crime Prevention in the Financial Markets,” funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), grant no. 2007-2179.
15O. Engdahl / International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 43 (2015) 1e16
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- White-collar crime and first-time adult-onset offending: Explorations in the concept of negative life events as turning points
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Adult-onset offending: previous research
- 3. Research methods and data
- 4. Negative life events and turning points: an empirical analysis
- 4.1. Enmeshment in financial problems, fear of falling, and crime as a crisis solution
- 4.2. Distrust in perceived support from the environment and non-shareable problems
- 4.3. Identity and emotional involvement
- 4.4. Hidden-action space and self-efficacy
- 5. Discussion and conclusions
- Acknowledgments
- References