Sutherland, Edwin H. (1893–1950)

Differential Association

Sutherland is best known for his theory of differential association, which focuses on learning from significant others the reasons for violating or not violating the law. Many of his ideas in differential association originated with the intense study of a professional thief, nicknamed Broadway Jones (The Professional Thief, 1937). His 1924 textbook, Criminology, had only rudimentary antecedents of differential association, but his third edition of the text in 1939 (Principles of Criminology) contained seven explicit propositions of the theory. These were expanded to nine in the 1947 edition, the last before his death. Differential association is the most enduring criminological theory of the 20th century, and Sutherland utilized the idea of white-collar crime as evidence for the validity of differential association.

Sutherland was the first to identify white-collar crime systematically, but he was not the first to write about it. He had the benefit of the muckrakers (such as Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell) and of Matthew Josephson's 1934 publication of The Robber Barons. Sutherland was also exposed to the works of Charles R. Henderson, Edward Alsworth Ross, and Thorstein Veblen. Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (1912), for instance, likened captains of industry to typical juvenile delinquents. Sutherland was further anticipated by Albert Morris's “criminals of the upperworld” (1935), which included bankers, stockbrokers, manufacturers, politicians, contractors, and law enforcement officials as examples of the type.

Sutherland's 1939 speech, which was the culmination of his collected materials on white-collar crime over the previous 13 years, had three objectives. Sutherland wanted to emphasize that “white-collar criminality is real criminality” because it is in violation of law. Sutherland also reminded criminologists that poverty-based theories of crime causation—virtually all of the theories popular at that time—were intellectually inadequate because poverty did not differentiate between who committed crime and who did not. The third, and perhaps most important, purpose of Sutherland's speech was to assert that his theory of differential association constituted an approach that explained a general process characteristic of all criminality, including the social business influences that caused persons of high status to violate the law through occupation. It is interesting that Sutherland used white-collar crime primarily as the vehicle to promote differential association, rather than to spotlight white-collar crime.

...