American Sociology
Edwin H. Sutherland
Howard Odum
Sutherland, like many of the leading sociologists, as already noted, came to sociology from another field. Like Odum, he was teaching Latin and Greek in a small college. He had plant to take graduate work in history, but found that a course in sociology was a prerequisite for graduate work in history, and consequently he took a correspondence course in sociology to meet this requirement. From this he decided to select sociology as a minor while keeping history as a major. Following his A.B. at Grand Island College in 1904, Sutherland entered the University of Chicago and took one course in sociology during the summer of 1906. From this he became interested in sociology and decided to make sociology the major rather than the minor. He completed his Ph.D. degree work at the University of Chicago in 1913, at thirty years of age.
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Sutherland, the twenty-ninth president of the American Sociological Society in 1939, was born in Nebraska in 1883, thus continuing the succession of sociologists born in the Middle West, received his doctorate from Chicago and continued his lifework over a long period of years in the middle western universities. After receiving his Ph.D. he was professor of sociology, William Jewell College, 1913–19; assistant professor of sociology, University of Illinois, 1919–25; associate professor of sociology, University of Illinois, 1925–26; professor of sociology, University of Minnesota, 1926–29; University of Chicago, 1930–35; head of the Department of Sociology, Indiana University, 1935-49. He was also visiting professor of sociology, University of Kansas, 1918; Northwestern University, 1922; University of Washington, 1942. He was president of Indiana University Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology; of the American Prison Association; of the Chicago Academy of Criminology; of the Sociological Research Association.
In addition to Sutherland's more than fifty contributed articles to journals, he collaborated in Recent Social Trends, being author of the chapter on crime; in Social Attitudes, by Kimball Young; in Prisons To-Day and Tomorrow. His main contributions include Unemployment and Public Employment Agencies, 1913; Criminology, 1924; An Ecological Study of Crime and Delinquency in Bloomington, 1937; Principles of Criminology, 1939; Twenty Thousand Homeless Men (with Locke), 1936; The Professional Thief, 1937; White Collar Crime, 1949.
Writing for American Sociology, Sutherland makes clear how his primary interest in theory does not conflict with his special field of criminology and how his special interest in criminology is primarily sociological. He says: "The ultimate objective of the sociologist should be to make universal propositions about society. Preliminary to this, of course, is a good deal of specific research on society. By `society' here, I mean society in the abstract, rather than a particular community, region, nation, or other geographically bounded collection of people. I have selected criminal behavior as the specific area of concentration. My interest in criminal behavior is not in the control of crime, but rather in the light that an intensive study of this behavior may throw on society. In the study of criminal behavior from this point of view, I have been interested primarily in reaching a general or universal proposition that would at the same time be an explanation of criminal behavior and be consistent with
(192) and related to universal propositions which would explain other kinds of behavior. Moreover, I have felt that this explanation should be consistent with the statement . . . that the sociologist should attempt to understand society. I should like to be featured as a sociologist who was interested in the general theory of society, and attempted to assist in developing this general theory by concentrated study on criminal behavior."
Sutherland raised some important questions when he said, "I am somewhat discouraged about sociology because of the difficulty of formulating research problems that will be directly and explicitly connected with the general objective I have outlined above. It is relatively easy to state a research problem that is limited so that it is practicable for a master's or doctor's dissertation, but the importance of these research projects is generally questionable. This, I believe, is tending to produce a large number of detached and nonintegrated research studies, with the principal justification that they give concrete findings. As an academic discipline, sociology will be more attractive than it is now if it is linked up with vocational training and vocational opportunities. It is question-able, however, whether this will contribute significantly to the development of sociology as a science."
Sutherland's presidential address in 1939 on "White Collar Criminality" was one of the few such addresses that received front-page publicity in the daily newspapers. It was published in the American Sociological Review in February, 1940, Volume V, No. 1, and developed later into the volume on White Collar Crime. Here Sutherland has analyzed "white collar crime" to augment his hypotheses attributing the causes of crime to social phenomena rather than to "received" biological and emotional characteristics within the criminal. In this address the argument was made that many business and professional men commit crimes which should be brought within the scope of the theories of criminal behavior. Evidence concerning the prevalence of such white collar crime was secured in an analysis of the decisions by courts and commissions against the seventy largest industrial and mercantile corporations in the United States under four types of laws, namely: antitrust, false advertising, National Labor Relations, and infringements of patents, copyrights, and trademarks. This resulted in the finding that 547 adverse decisions were made, branding the behavior in question as illegal, yet only 49 (9
(193) per cent) of the total were made by criminal courts and were ipso facto decisions that the behavior was criminal. In his analysis of the remaining 498 adverse decisions, Sutherland concluded by logical exposition that 473 of them involved criminality according to abstract criteria generally regarded by legal scholars as necessary to define crime, namely, legal description of an act as socially injurious, and legal provision of a penalty for the act. This differential implementation 'of the law in regard to the crimes of corporations in these 473 cases eliminated or at least minimized the stigma of crime. Sutherland says that it may be excellent policy to eliminate the stigma of crime in a large number of cases, but that the question at hand is why the law has a different implementation for white collar criminals than for otters.
An estimate of Sutherland's work in relation to sociological theory has been given by Robert K. Merton, in his article on "Sociological Theory" in The American Journal of Sociology, Volume L, No. 6, pp. 462-73, 1945. Merton had defined six types of work, often lumped together, which he says have characterized the recent history of sociological theory. They are (1) methodology, (2) general sociological orientations, (3) analysis of sociological concepts, (4) "post factum" sociological interpretations, (5) empirical generalizations in sociology, and (6) sociological theory. He cites Sutherland's studies in white collar crime as an instructive example of conceptual clarification in his demonstration of an equivocation implicit in criminological theories that seek to account for the fact that there is a much higher rate of crime, as "officially measured," in the lower than in the upper social classes. These crime "data" have led to a series of hypotheses that view poverty, slum conditions, feeblemindedness, and other characteristics held to be highly associated with low-class status as the "causes" of criminal behavior. But in the light of Sutherland's clarification of the concept of crime to include white collar criminality among business and professional men (criminal behavior which is less often reflected in official crime statistics than are the misdeeds of the lower classes) the presumptive high association between low social status and crime may no longer obtain. The significance of such conceptual clarification, states Merton, "is that it provides for a reconstruction of data by indicating more precisely just what they include and what they exclude. In doing so, it leads to a liquidation of hypotheses set up to account for spurious data by questioning the as-
(194) -sumptions on which the initial statistical data were based. By hanging a question mark on an implicit assumption that violations of the criminal code by members of the several social classes are representatively registered in the official statistics, this conceptual clarification had direct implications for a nucleus of theories."