Wheeler, Stanton (1930–)

IN 2003, Stanton Wheeler was a Ford Foundation professor emeritus of law and the social sciences and professorial lecturer in law at Yale University Law School. Although he is well known for his research contributions in areas such as administration of justice, white-collar crime, and sociology of law, Wheeler's research has also included the areas of sports and law as well as music and law.

Wheeler began his education at Pomona College, where he graduated with a B.A. in 1952. Subsequently, he enrolled in graduate school at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he earned a M.A. in sociology in 1956, followed by a Ph.D. in 1958. Before joining the faculty at Yale, Wheeler's professional and academic positions including assistant professor in the department of social relations at Harvard University (1961–63). While employed at Harvard, Wheeler was also a Fulbright research scholar at the Institutes of Sociology and Criminology, University of Oslo, Norway, where he served from 1960 to 1961. Wheeler has also held many official positions related to his research, such as a member of many journals' editorial boards.

Wheeler is the author of numerous books and articles based on his funded research. His major writings on white-collar crime emerged during the course of his direction of the largest-ever research study on white-collar crime, the Yale Studies. For students of white-collar crime, the Yale Studies have provided some of the most influential findings in the field. From 1983 to 1991, Wheeler directed the project, and served as the general editor of Yale Studies in White-Collar Crime, a series of books that reported the major findings from the research project. A series of articles based on preliminary findings from the project were also published, and the data from the studies have been re-analyzed by several other researchers.

The topics of the Yale series books are related, but each investigates a unique area of interest to white-collar crime researchers, such as offender characteristics, theory, and sentencing and punishment. In 1988, Wheeler (along with Kenneth Mann and Austin Sarat) published Sitting in Judgment: The Sentencing of White-Collar Criminals. This book summarizes and discusses comprehensive interviews of federal district court judges. Another significant contribution in the series is Crimes of the Middle Classes: White-Collar Offenders in the Federal Courts, which Wheeler co-authored with David Weisburd, Elin Waring, and Nancy Bode in 1991. Perhaps most notable of its findings, this book revealed that the larger portion of white-collar crime is not committed by upper-class individuals, as commonly assumed, but instead by those offenders who can be described as “ordinary people.”

Examination of the sentencing data showed that common offenders still received harsher sanctions than white-collar offenders, a finding that supported previous ideas. Common offenders were also more likely to lose their jobs after sentencing. The major policy lesson learned from this book is that white-collar crime can be reduced through procedures that reduce temptation and also make it difficult to accumulate debt.