Deterring White-Collar Crime

This thesis focuses on describing what white-collar crime is, how it impacts our society, the nature of deterrence, and examines the strengths and weaknesses of methods from the twenty-first century used by governmental leaders to deter white-collar crime. After conducting research, I have concluded that the most effective deterrence for white-collar crime is to increase individuals’ punishment severity, increase enforcement through corporate compliance programs and to treat corporations more leniently in turn for implementing meaningful compliance programs. In addition to this, I recommend delegating the responsibility to the Department of Justice to begin recording every single white-collar criminal offense in a public database as well as create a crime index for white-collar crime. This will increase the transparency of how detrimental white-collar crime is to our society as well as provide more substantial statistics to conduct studies on to continue finding the best deterrence to white-collar crime.