Career
Sutherland's historical importance rests upon his having introduced (in a 27 December 1939 speech to the American Sociological Association, titled The White Collar Criminal) the concept of white-collar crime, a concept which violated existing prejudices that aristocrats can do no wrong (which was famously expressed in the ancient legal view that a king could do no wrong).
After completing graduate studies, he solidified his reputation as one of the country’s leading criminologists at the University of Minnesota, where he worked from 1926 to 1929. During this period, he concentrated in sociology as a scientific enterprise whose goal was to understand and control social problems. In 1930, Sutherland accepted a position as a research professor at the University of Chicago. He then moved to University of Illinois. He finally took a position at Indiana University, where he remained till the end of his career. He founded the Bloomington School of Criminology at Indiana University.
During his time at Indiana, he published four books, including Twenty Thousand Homeless Men (1936), The Professional Thief (1937), the third edition of Principles of Criminology (1939), and the censored first edition of White Collar Crime (1949), his masterpiece. It remained censored until the original text was published in 1983 by Yale University Press.
Sutherland was elected president of the American Sociological Society in 1939, and president of the Sociological Research Association in 1940. If he had not already become prominent within the sociological profession prior to his introduction of the concept of white-collar crime in 1939, one can only speculate whether the seminal concept would have been published, as America's largest corporations threatened to sue the publishers of White Collar Crime. (They were successful, and had all references to the names of litigating corporations removed from the text.) When Yale University Press issued the unexpurgated version in 1983, the introduction by Gilbert Geis noted that Sutherland's concept of white-collar crime "altered the study of crime throughout the world in fundamental ways".
Read more about this topic: Edwin Sutherland
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