Instead, the casual factor was “the social and interpersonal relations which are associated sometimes with poverty and sometimes with wealth.” Wealthy people are less likely to get caught or convicted, since they are “more powerful politically and financially.” The system does not treat upper class crimes as criminal acts, but as civil ones, and therefore statistics disregard them. Sutherland proved that there is no direct line between poverty by itself and delinquency. Sutherland claimed that social or personal pathologies are not “an adequate explanation of criminal behavior,” because in fact crime is not more prevalent among the lower classes compared to the middle and upper classes. Existing theories emphasize personal pathologies (abnormality) or social pathologies (poverty) as the cause of delinquency. Building upon his new social theory of criminality, Sutherland now argued that contemporary criminology is too absorbed with lower class criminality, neglecting other kinds of crimes. Sutherland once again criticized existing beliefs in criminology. One survey even selected his 1949 work as “the most important study of the decade (1940-1950).” Sutherland’s theory was revolutionary and widely discussed. In 1949, Sutherland completed his monograph on this subject. In the last decade of his life, his scholarship focused on what he termed “white-collar crime,” a term that since has been integrated into our daily lexicon. Sutherland’s work at Indiana University continued to be pathbreaking. The title page from the original 1949 edition of White Collar Crime. Previous theories had mainly been borrowed from Europe. In relation to this theory, scholars Gaylord and Gallier stated in 1988 that “among sociological students of criminal behavior, there is considerable agreement that this is the single most important innovation during the past fifty years.” These scholars also noted that this was the first major original American theory in criminology. This had significant implications for prevention and penalization of crime, for example by stressing the need for the humane treatment of identified criminals, and the uselessness of racial or biological profiling. Sutherland’s differential association theory, on the other hand, “conceive of criminality as participation in a cultural tradition and as the result of association with representatives of that culture.” In other words, Sutherland contended that criminality was a learned behavior, thus shifting the scholarly focus into social and cultural realms. Influenced by the consequences of the Great Depression, this theory aimed to replace biological, economic or psychological-genetic explanations of criminality known generally as “born criminal,” all of which emphasized the individual’s abnormal personality and inheritance as precipitating factors for crime. In 1939, in the third edition of Principles of Criminology, he formulated the “differential association” theory which was a ground-breaking explanation of crime causation. Most of Sutherland’s innovative scholarly contribution to the field of criminology was produced during his time at Indiana University. This textbook was revised numerous times by Sutherland before his death and then by others, and dominated the field for decades. Then in 1924, he published a well-received criminology textbook, (Principles of) Criminology, the first comprehensive textbook in the field. While at Illinois he decided to specialize in criminology, which was not considered as an inherent part of sociology at the time. Before arriving in Bloomington, he served as a professor of sociology at Chicago University, the University of Illinois and the University of Minnesota. Professor Sutherland came to IU in 1935, as the head of the newly independent department of sociology. Witnessing poverty, criminality and other urban plights of Chicago motivated him to study methods of improving social conditions. He graduated in 1904 from the Grand Island College in Nebraska and received his PhD in 1913 from the University of Chicago. Courtesy of IU Archives, P0034426Įdwin Hardin Sutherland was born in 1883 in Gibbon, Nebraska, to a deeply Protestant family of seven children. By Asher Lubotzky, Bicentennial Intern, Class of 2022, Doctoral Student, History, Bloomington Edwin Sutherland, 1941.
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