Organization as class bias in local law enforcement: Arson-for-profit as a "nonissue"

Here I discuss the response of local state agencies to the problem of arson-for-profit as a way to address the debates in the white-collar crime literature over the problem of class bias and the political autonomy of state institutions. Arson-for-profit makes for an especially compelling case because of the inherent organizational difficulties involved with controlling this crime and the relationship this crime has to the perpetuation of social inequality in urban neighborhoods. I argue that arson-for-profit has been relegated to a nonissue status by law enforcement. Although this can be explained largely in institutional terms, this outcome suggests a selectivity on the part of the state where arson enforcement is concerned. The findings have implications for our understandings of equity in law enforcement processes and the question of class bias in state processes. There is little dispute among sociolegal theorists over the relationship between white-collar crimes and social harm, both in terms of economic costs and human casualties.l But there are significant disagreements over the extent to which class biases in the legal system aid in the perpetuation of these outcomes. The study of white-collar crime from its inception has been devoted to exposing the wrongdoing and negligent practices of high-status offenders versus common offenders as a way to illustrate double standards in both criminological theory and public attitudes pertaining to the social construction of deviance (Schrager & Short 1980; Sutherland 1983 [1949]). The legal system has been implicated as a major player in allowing for the perpetuation of this double standard because of its "anemic" response to corporate crime (Calavita & Pontell 1994:300). Still, the question of a class-biased state within the white-collar crime literature has always been ambiguous, especially when matters of causation are considered. Whereas some scholars have assumed a class-conflict approach to explain the differential treatment of white-collar offenses (Reiman 1995; Simon & Eitzen 1982),2 others have been more cautious. Even in the most critical literature (e.g., Clinard & Yeager 1980; Coleman 1989; Levi 1987), authors switch between conflict explanations and institutional explanations of social control practices, specifically the "complex nature of this kind of white collar crime, the difficulties in detecting it, and the limits of government resources in pursuing it" (Pontell, Calavita, & Tillman 1994:384). Shapiro (1990:346) has addressed this problem of ambiguity in the literature by seeking to "debunk commonly-held understandings about the role of class bias in the legal system by showing that the leniency accorded white-collar criminals is due to the social organization of their misdeeds and the policing and punishment problems their crimes pose, rather than to their status." Shapiro (1990) challenges criminologists to avoid ideologically charged terms like "white-collar crime" because they focus too much attention on the status of an offender in determining law enforcement responsiveness. She argues that short of evidence of direct influence, there may be little relationship between law enforcement structure processes and (borrowing from the language of state theory) the "demands or interests of social groups, classes, or society" (Skocpol 1985:9). Shapiro (1985, 1990) also argues that Sutherland (1983 [1949]) was incorrect when he identified civil versus criminal mechanisms of control in the processing of corporate offenders as evidence of class bias in legal structures. Shapiro (1990:362) does not deny that "structural sources of leniency" exist in the legal system where business crimes are concerned, but she argues that civil mechanisms are perhaps more effective in their control than are criminal remedies. In short, law enforcement organizations find themselves adapting to environmental constraints that force them to consider alternative and noncriminal law responses to white-collar and corporate offending not because criminalization models, when implemented, control "too much" but because they control "too little" (Snider 1990:381; Braithwaite 1982; Hawkins 1984). …