| "White collar" corporate (or, organizational), crime, unlike "street crime," has often historically been associated with lenient sentencing; findings continued in some more recent research. Because of the legal and organizational differences between the sanctioning of personal and property "index crimes" within the criminal justice system, and the enforcement of regulatory law, many legal and organizational analysts have contended that class privilege, lack of public concern, or well-funded corporate defense teams ensure that "white collar" regulatory offenses receive less stringent sanctioning than the criminal penalties incurred by those who commit "street crimes."; In this thesis, I consider two questions regarding the U.S. "social regulatory" agencies, the EPA, OSHA, MSHA, NHTSA, and FDA. (1) To what extent do these agencies have successful federal criminal enforcement programs (i.e., reasonable levels of criminal prosecution, evaluated in historical and cross-agency comparative terms)? (2) To what extent are the agencies' criminal enforcement programs free from evidence of class bias, as indicated by the sentences apportioned to defendants of different social statuses? This thesis draws on a range of empirical sources to examine these questions, including governmental data (numerous regulatory agency records and various federal data sets) obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. |
