White-Collar Criminal Careers, 1976-1978:  Federal Judicial Districts

This study examined the criminal careers of 1,331 offenders
 convicted of white-collar crimes in the United States District Courts
 to assess the relative effectiveness of court-imposed prison sanctions
 in preventing or modifying future criminal behavior. The white-collar
 crime event that was the central focus of this study, the
 "criterion" offense, provided the standard point of entry for sample
 members. Researchers for this study supplemented the data collected by
 Wheeler et al. in their 1988 study (NATURE AND SANCTIONING OF WHITE
 COLLAR CRIME, 1976-1978: FEDERAL JUDICIAL DISTRICTS [ICPSR 8989]) with
 criminal history data subsequent to the criterion offense through to
 1990. As in the 1988 study, white-collar crime was considered to
 include economic offenses committed through the use of some
 combination of fraud, deception, or collusion. Eight federal offenses
 were examined: antitrust, securities fraud, mail and wire fraud, false
 claims and statements, credit fraud, bank embezzlement, income tax
 fraud, and bribery. Arrests were chosen as the major measure of
 criminal conduct. The data contain information coded from Federal
 Bureau of Investigation (FBI) criminal history records ("rap
 sheets") for a set of offenders convicted of white-collar crimes in
 federal courts in fiscal years 1976 to 1978. The seven federal
 judicial districts from which the sample was drawn were central
 California, northern Georgia, northern Illinois, Maryland, southern
 New York, northern Texas, and western Washington. To correct for a
 bias that can be introduced when desistance from criminality is
 confused with the death of the offender, the researchers examined the
 National Death Index (NDI) data to identify offenders who had died
 between the date of sentencing for the criterion offense and when data
 collection began for this study in 1990. This data collection contains
 three types of records. The first record type (Part 1, Summary Data)
 contains summary and descriptive information about the offender's rap
 sheet as a whole. Variables include dates of first entry and last
 entry on the rap sheet, number of separate crimes on the rap sheet,
 whether the criterion crime was listed on the rap sheet, whether the
 rap sheet listed crimes prior to or subsequent to the criterion crime,
 and date of death of offender. The second and third record types are
 provided in one data file (Part 2, Event and Event Interim Data). The
 second record type contains information about each crime event on the
 rap sheet. Variables include custody status of offender at arrest,
 type of arresting agency, state of arrest, date of arrest, number of
 charges for each arrest, number of charges resulting in no formal
 charges filed, number of charges dismissed, number of charges for
 white-collar crimes, type of sanction, length of definite sentence,
 probation sentence, and suspended probation sentence, amount of fines,
 amount of court costs, and restitution ordered, first, second, and
 third offense charged, arrest and court disposition for each charge,
 and date of disposition. The third record type contains information
 about the interim period between events or between the final event and
 the end of the follow-up period. Variables include date of first,
 second, and third incarceration, date discharged or transferred from
 each incarceration, custody/supervision status at each incarceration,
 total number of prisons, jails, or other institutions resided in
 during the interval, final custody/supervision status and date
 discharged from incarceration for the interval, dates parole and
 probation started and expired, if parole or probation terms were
 changed or completed, amount of fines, court costs, and restitution
 paid, whether the conviction was overturned during the interval, and
 date the conviction was overturned. A single offender has as many of
 record types two and three as were needed to code the entire rap
sheet.

Tags: arrest-records, career-criminals, crime-prevention, criminal-histories, disposition-legal, imprisonment, offenders, prisons, sanctions, sentencing, white-collar-crime
Organization: Department of Justice