D.C. Although the program showcased 503 sessions, fewer than 10 of them dealt with issues of white-collar and corporate crime. Laureen Snider, a Professor of Sociology at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, attended the conference. When academia does study white-collar crime, it doesn't examine crimes committed by corporations. Such offenses fit easily into a power structure that rewards ideas supportive of the corporate domination of society while punishing those who would question that domination. Snider is one of the world's handful of corporate criminologists academics who focus primarily on the study of corporate crime.
Corporate crime does far more damage to society than all street crime combined.
Friedrichs cites corporate crime's complexity and the absence of a broad-based social movement against it as defining factors. That corporate crime is given little attention by media, academia, and government has more to do with the simple reality of corporate power than with anything else. Big corporations have marinated our formerly independent institutions in corporate cash and influence. Ever since it was first invented by Edwin Sutherland, the concept of white-collar crime, and specifically corporate crime, has been actively resisted. Corporations have argued if they have had to face up to the idea at all that corporate executives are not criminals.