Edwin Hardin Sutherland
August 13, 1883 - October 11,
1950
Edwin H. Sutherland served as
the 29th President of the American Sociological Society. His Presidential
Address, “White-Collar Criminality,” was delivered at the organization’s annual
meeting in Philadelphia in December 1939. Upon his death, an obituary for
Sutherland was published in the American Sociological Review (ASR 15:801-3).
In his 1951 book, American
Sociology: The Story of Sociology in the United States through 1950, Howard W.
Odum provided the following biographical sketch of Edwin H. Sutherland (pages
190-194):
Sutherland, like many of the
leading sociologists, as already noted, came to sociology from another field.
Like Odum, he was teaching Latin and Greek in a small college. He had plant to
take graduate work in history, but found that a course in sociology was a
prerequisite for graduate work in history, and consequently he took a
correspondence course in sociology to meet this requirement. From this he
decided to select sociology as a minor while keeping history as a major.
Following his A.B. at Grand Island College in 1904, Sutherland entered the
University of Chicago and took one course in sociology during the summer of
1906. From this he became interested in sociology and decided to make sociology
the major rather than the minor. He completed his Ph.D. degree work at the
University of Chicago in 1913, at thirty years of age.
Sutherland, the twenty-ninth
president of the American Sociological Society in 1939, was born in Nebraska in
1883, thus continuing the succession of sociologists born in the Middle West,
received his doctorate from Chicago and continued his lifework over a long
period of years in the middle western universities. After receiving his Ph.D.
he was professor of sociology, William Jewell College, 1913-19; assistant
professor of sociology, University of Illinois, 1919-25; associate professor of
sociology, University of Illinois, 1925–26; professor of sociology, University
of Minnesota, 1926-29; University of Chicago, 1930-35; head of the Department
of Sociology, Indiana University, 1935-49. He was also visiting professor of
sociology, University of Kansas, 1918; Northwestern University, 1922;
University of Washington, 1942. He was president of Indiana University
Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology; of the American Prison Association;
of the Chicago Academy of Criminology; of the Sociological Research Association.
In addition to Sutherland’s
more than fifty contributed articles to journals, he collaborated in Recent
Social Trends, being author of the chapter on crime; in Social Attitudes, by
Kimball Young; in Prisons To-Day and Tomorrow. His main contributions include
Unemployment and Public Employment Agencies, 1913; Criminology, 1924; An
Ecological Study of Crime and Delinquency in Bloomington, 1937; Principles of
Criminology, 1939; Twenty Thousand Homeless Men (with Locke), 1936; The
Professional Thief, 1937; White Collar Crime, 1949.
Writing for American Sociology,
Sutherland makes clear how his primary interest in theory does not conflict
with his special field of criminology and how his special interest in
criminology is primarily sociological. He says: “The ultimate objective of the
sociologist should be to make universal propositions about society. Preliminary
to this, of course, is a good deal of specific research on society. By ‘society’
here, I mean society in the abstract, rather than a particular community,
region, nation, or other geographically bounded collection of people. I have
selected criminal behavior as the specific area of concentration. My interest
in criminal behavior is not in the control of crime, but rather in the light that
an intensive study of this behavior may throw on society. In the study of
criminal behavior from this point of view, I have been interested primarily in
reaching a general or universal proposition that would at the same time be an
explanation of criminal behavior and be consistent with and related to
universal propositions which would explain other kinds of behavior. Moreover, I
have felt that this explanation should be consistent with the statement . . .
that the sociologist should attempt to understand society. I should like to be
featured as a sociologist who was interested in the general theory of society,
and attempted to assist in developing this general theory by concentrated study
on criminal behavior.”
Sutherland raised some
important questions when he said, “I am somewhat discouraged about sociology
because of the difficulty of formulating research problems that will be
directly and explicitly connected with the general objective I have outlined
above. It is relatively easy to state a research problem that is limited so
that it is practicable for a master’s or doctor’s dissertation, but the
importance of these research projects is generally questionable. This, I
believe, is tending to produce a large number of detached and nonintegrated
research studies, with the principal justification that they give concrete
findings. As an academic discipline, sociology will be more attractive than it
is now if it is linked up with vocational training and vocational
opportunities. It is question-able, however, whether this will contribute
significantly to the development of sociology as a science.”
Sutherland’s presidential
address in 1939 on “White Collar Criminality” was one of the few such addresses
that received front-page publicity in the daily newspapers. It was published in
the American Sociological Review in February, 1940, Volume V, No. 1, and
developed later into the volume on White Collar Crime. Here Sutherland has
analyzed “white collar crime” to augment his hypotheses attributing the causes
of crime to social phenomena rather than to “received” biological and emotional
characteristics within the criminal. In this address the argument was made that
many business and professional men commit crimes which should be brought within
the scope of the theories of criminal behavior. Evidence concerning the
prevalence of such white collar crime was secured in an analysis of the
decisions by courts and commissions against the seventy largest industrial and
mercantile corporations in the United States under four types of laws, namely:
antitrust, false advertising, National Labor Relations, and infringements of
patents, copyrights, and trademarks. This resulted in the finding that 547
adverse decisions were made, branding the behavior in question as illegal, yet
only 49 (9 per cent) of the total were made by criminal courts and were ipso
facto decisions that the behavior was criminal. In his analysis of the
remaining 498 adverse decisions, Sutherland concluded by logical exposition
that 473 of them involved criminality according to abstract criteria generally
regarded by legal scholars as necessary to define crime, namely, legal
description of an act as socially injurious, and legal provision of a penalty
for the act. This differential implementation ‘of the law in regard to the
crimes of corporations in these 473 cases eliminated or at least minimized the
stigma of crime. Sutherland says that it may be excellent policy to eliminate
the stigma of crime in a large number of cases, but that the question at hand is
why the law has a different implementation for white collar criminals than for
others.
An estimate of Sutherland’s
work in relation to sociological theory has been given by Robert K. Merton, in
his article on “Sociological Theory” in The American Journal of Sociology,
Volume L, No. 6, pp. 462-73, 1945. Merton had defined six types of work, often
lumped together, which he says have characterized the recent history of
sociological theory. They are (1) methodology, (2) general sociological
orientations, (3) analysis of sociological concepts, (4) “post factum”
sociological interpretations, (5) empirical generalizations in sociology, and
(6) sociological theory. He cites Sutherland’s studies in white collar crime as
an instructive example of conceptual clarification in his demonstration of an
equivocation implicit in criminological theories that seek to account for the
fact that there is a much higher rate of crime, as “officially measured,” in
the lower than in the upper social classes. These crime “data” have led to a
series of hypotheses that view poverty, slum conditions, feeblemindedness, and
other characteristics held to be highly associated with low-class status as the
“causes” of criminal behavior. But in the light of Sutherland’s clarification
of the concept of crime to include white collar criminality among business and
professional men (criminal behavior which is less often reflected in official
crime statistics than are the misdeeds of the lower classes) the presumptive
high association between low social status and crime may no longer obtain. The
significance of such conceptual clarification, states Merton, “is that it
provides for a reconstruction of data by indicating more precisely just what
they include and what they exclude. In doing so, it leads to a liquidation of
hypotheses set up to account for spurious data by questioning the assumptions
on which the initial statistical data were based. By hanging a question mark on
an implicit assumption that violations of the criminal code by members of the
several social classes are representatively registered in the official
statistics, this conceptual clarification had direct implications for a nucleus
of theories.”
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