Understanding White-Collar Crime: An Opportunity Perspective (Criminology and Justice Studies)

Unlike other books of its kind, Understanding White-Collar Crime: An Opportunity Perspective uses a coherent theoretical perspective in its coverage of white-collar crime. Using opportunity perspective, or the assumption that all crimes depend on offenders having some sort of opportunity to commit an offense, allows the authors to uncover the processes leading up to white-collar crimes and offer potential solutions to this rampant issue, without being reductive in their treatment of the topic. With this second edition, Benson and Simpson have greatly expanded their coverage to include new case studies, substantive materials, and an annotated appendix of online resources to make this a core book for courses on white-collar crime.

Michael L. Benson is Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. He is a past President of the White-Collar Crime Research Consortium. He has published extensively in the areas of white-collar crime, intimate partner violence, and life course criminology. With Francis T. Cullen, he authored Combating Corporate Crime: Local Prosecutors at Work, which received the Outstanding Scholarship Award in 2000 from the Crime and Delinquency Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. The second edition of his book Crime and the Life Course: An Introduction was published in 2013 by Routledge. He is currently working on a book on emotions, choice and crime.

Sally S. Simpson is Director of the Center for the Study of Business Ethics, Regulation, and Crime (C-BERC) and Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the Principal Investigator (with Peter C. Yeager, Boston University) on a Bureau of Justice Statistics grant to build a federal white-collar offending statistical series and is working with Mark Cohen (Vanderbilt University) and colleague Tom Loughran on project funded by the National Institute of Justice to study the public willingness to pay for white-collar crime control. She has authored/edited 5 books and over 70 articles, chapters, and reports―many on the subject of white-collar/corporate crime.

In 2013, Simpson was awarded the Gilbert Geis Lifetime Achievement Award by the White-Collar Crime Research Consortium. She is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology and, in 2008, was named Distinguished Scholar by the Division on Women and Crime, American Society of Criminology. Simpson has served as President of the Association of Doctoral Programs in Criminology and Criminal Justice, is former Chair of the Crime, Law, and Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association and past President of the White-Collar Crime Research Consortium. Recipient of the Herbert Bloch Award from the American Society of Criminology, in 2010 Simpson was named Woman of the Year by the President's Commission on Women's Issues at the University of Maryland.