Writing the Book on White-Collar Crime
The traditional, pre-Enron, pre-Martha Stewart concept of white-collar crime was summarized in 1939 by criminologist and sociologist Edwin H. Sutherland as follows: “White-collar crime may be defined, approximately, as a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation.”
But according to Sandra Jordan, associate professor in Pitt’s School of Law and coauthor of the newly published White Collar Crime: Cases, Materials, and Problems (LexisNexis, 2005), Sutherland’s definition was flawed even at the time he wrote it—failing to take into account, for example, embezzlement by bank tellers lacking “high social status.”
And the definition, which Jordan cites in her book, is certainly not very useful today, when prosecutors and judges have broadened their notion of white-collar offenses to include not just nonviolent crimes by individuals but also “corporate crime” (a crime committed by a corporation as a whole or by individuals within the corporation to benefit the corporate entity) and when the Enron and Arthur Andersen scandals have convinced America’s lawmakers, legal system, and general public that white-collar crimes, while nonviolent, can nonetheless ruin lives—robbing victims of their life savings and pension funds, for example.
Sandra Jordan
“The whole area of white-collar crime, to me, is so fascinating because it presents a very real dilemma,” says Jordan. “They’re not crimes that would cause physical harm to people—rape, robbery, murder, or street crimes—but they’re crimes committed in board rooms, banks, business offices, where the corporation can be the victim and/or the perpetrator.
“If someone walks into the bank with a gun and a piece of paper that says, ‘Give me your money,’ that person is likely to only get a couple hundred dollars because of all the protections in place,” Jordan points out. “But a person behind the counter can take millions of dollars. Yet, the robber or street criminal is often punished more harshly than the embezzler.”
The disparity in punishments has narrowed in the last two decades, however, according to Jordan, following widespread outrage over a series of high-profile business and insider-trading scandals.
But America still is fine-tuning protections against regional disparities in sentencing white-collar criminals in federal courts, Jordan says, just as the system is striving for uniform sentencing for other kinds of crimes.
She recalls a revealing conversation she had with a Miami-based federal prosecutor about drug-offense sentences in the 1980s, when Jordan was an assistant U.S. attorney in the western district of Pennsylvania and chief of the district’s white-collar crimes unit.
“A colleague of mine, who worked in the southern district of Florida, which is the Miami office of the federal prosecutor, said to me, ‘We have cases down here that we are declining’—meaning that they were not prosecuting them, they had so much illegal drugs coming into south Florida. In any other place in the country, one of those cases they were declining to prosecute in south Florida might have been a huge case,” Jordan says.
The revelation shook Jordan, who recognized that the regional prevalence of particular crimes might well influence judges’ sentencing decisions.
“You have the same disparity in white-collar cases,” she points out. “A defendant convicted of embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars could have received a slap on the wrist or six months in prison, while someone in another district could have received a harsher sentence for embezzling a lesser amount.”
In an attempt to make sentences uniform in white-collar criminal cases, sentencing guidelines were imposed on federal courts in 1987. In effect, sentencing standards were reduced to a mathematical table.
“Some people liked it because you started to see uniformity, but sentencing had some unexpected consequences,” Jordan says. “Judges hated it, mainly because they saw their discretion just whittled away to nothing. And, the unexpected result of the sentencing guidelines was that it [the decision making] all shifted to the prosecutors. No one anticipated that because of the way the guidelines are structured, and because of the power that a prosecutor has to fashion and shape the charges, the prosecutor would end up in control.”
But that probably will change, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling that federal sentencing guidelines will henceforth be advisory.
In addition to writing about white-collar crime, Jordan teaches a course on it here. When she launched the course in 1989, Pitt’s law school was among only five in the country to offer a course on white-collar crime.
“Even if attorneys have no intention of ever practicing criminal law,” Jordan says, “they should have a basic understanding of the operation of the grand jury, money laundering, issues surrounding the Fifth Amendment rights within a corporation, the attorney-client privilege, the impact of corporate compliance programs, and the threat of parallel legal proceedings. Frequently, a civil matter will cross over into the criminal, and lawyers must be aware of this possibility when counseling their clientele.”
A 1979 Pitt law graduate, Jordan was a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office from 1979 until 1988, when she received two job offers: one to join Pitt’s law faculty and the other to work on the Iran-Contra prosecution team. The former offer was made by Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg, then dean of Pitt’s law school.
“I called Mark and said, ‘Tell me what to do,’” Jordan remembers. “And he said, ‘Sandy, you have to go and do this [stint with the Iran-Contra prosecution]. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance. We’ll hold your spot for you.’ It was really wonderful to have that kind of support and encouragement.”
Jordan ended up doing both jobs for a while, shuttling between Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C., when she began her teaching career at Pitt.
At its “Salute to Black Achievers” luncheon in October, Black Opinion magazine honored Jordan for her career achievements. The event was held at the Holiday Inn Select University Center, in Oakland.
—Patricia Lomando White