the.com/white collar
Crime in a suit: steal millions, call it a strategy, keep the pension.
means Relating to office or professional workers (and especially their style of non-violent, paperwork-based crimes like fraud and embezzlement) rather than manual laborers.
from Coined in the early 20th century as literal shorthand for dress codes: office workers wore crisp white dress shirts, while factory and manual laborers wore sturdy, grime-hiding blue shirts ('blue collar'). The criminologist Edwin Sutherland popularized 'white-collar crime' in a 1939 speech, naming a category of offenses — fraud, embezzlement, bribery — committed by respectable people with clean collars and official titles, not back alleys.
- origin
- term coined by sociologist Edwin Sutherland in 1939
- term meaning
- office workers once literally wore white dress shirts
- sentencing gap
- average fraud sentence far shorter than comparable theft
- favorite tool
- spreadsheets, not crowbars