collar' offences were invariably reserved for embezzling clerks rather than leading businessmen. He argued that another factor caused such leniency:- "Another reason frequently given for the lenient sentencing of most white-collar criminals was that the shame and social disgrace attendant on criminal conviction were punishment enough for middle-class persons. Exclusion from polite society was viewed as a more serious penalty than imprisonment ... For white collar criminals, prison was seen as ancillary to their personal sense of shame and loss of social status" I wanted to test how effective this social exclusionary factor would be for a financial practitioner found guilty of a crime. My research set out to establish how financial practitioners would respond to the news that one of their social and commercial circle had first been suspected of, and then convicted for committing offences of insider dealing (a regulatory issue in their eyes), as opposed to the offence of theft (a criminal offence in their eyes). In doing so I wanted to test Sutherland's assertion that regulatory offences were considered less important than criminal offences and would not carry the same degree of social and commercial exclusion. In the course of a questionnaire which was completed by 93 financial services practitioners, I posed the following questions. "A person in another company who you have known socially for a long time and with whom your company has done business for many years has been reported in a serious newspaper as being suspected of Insider Dealing. How would this