While most people can recognize that these are examples of
clear wrongdoing, it is not regarded with the same degree of severity as
nonviolent “crimes” against property or drug offences. The latter category of
crime also does not cause direct physical damage to any person but still counts
as somehow damaging enough to society that they are processed through the
criminal justice system as serious offenses warranting imprisonment for
perpetrators. Usually because in cases of white-collar crime, it is hard to
place blame on any individuals (although definitely not impossible), the logic
of imprisonment doesn’t seem to make as much sense in those situations and
because crime is characterized by imprisonment (and vise-versa), it must not really be a crime if we can’t find
someone to go to jail for it (or we just don’t want to).
This also brings into play the racialized and class nature
of all notions of “crime” and “criminality,” since the majority of people in
prison for non-violent offenses are people of color and those most likely to
commit white collar crime are, well, white. The characterization of people of
color, specifically blacks, as more prone to criminality translates to harsher
and more punitive responses to “black crime” by the criminal justices system (most
“black crime” actually being a consequence of lower economic and educational
opportunities) than to stereotypically “white crime” even when the damage to
individuals and society is greater in the latter case.
Constructions of criminality also require an attention to
the individual and not to the systems that produced the individual. By focusing
on black criminality as a trait of individual blacks, society can ignore myriad
systems of racial discrimination and disenfranchisement that result in black
criminality and, instead, use locking individuals up as a way of “handling”
crime. The way the public responds to white-collar crime also displays an
inability to understand criminal behavior in the context of social systems that
produce criminality. By looking (and failing) to find individuals to lock up,
we as a public can ignore entire capitalist systems that are “criminal” or
corrupt that produce criminal and corrupt capitalist behavior as the norm.
Understanding how to address wrongdoings at a systemic
level, not just at the level of the individual, is essential to ridding ourselves
of the carceral logic because prison as a system depends on an individualized
understanding of crime. Part of that is transferring attention away from the individual
behavior of perpetrators and onto the individuals and communities that the wrongdoing
affects. By defining our response to crime as reducing harm, righting wrongs,
and building back broken communities instead of putting some “bad guy” in jail,
we can move from an individualized, racialized, and punitive understanding of crime
to one that acknowledges systemic factors and aims to restore instead of
punish.
