If you have been following my guest posts regarding white collar crime and how white collar offenders rationalize their conduct, you likely have noticed that the discussion thus far has been largely theoretical. In this post, I’d like to offer some more concrete uses of rationalization theory and discuss how it may (should?) impact lawmakers and business people.  

But before doing that, I have to explain, just for a moment, a bit more theory. One of the most fascinating things about rationalizations, in addition to how they operate, is where they come from. Researchers have concluded that rationalizations are not created in a vacuum; offenders do not invent them in the spur of the moment. Instead, offenders find their “vocabularies of motive” within their own environments. Donald Cressey suggested that rationalizations are “taken over” from “popular ideologies that sanction crime in our culture.” He pointed to commonplace sayings that suggest wrongdoing is acceptable in certain situations: “Honesty is the best policy, but business is business” and “All people steal when they get in a tight spot.”  (Warren Buffett once called the phrase “Everybody else is doing it,” which is a clear rationalization, the five most dangerous words in business.)  Once rationalizations such as these have been “assimilated and internalized by individuals,” they form powerful constructs that allow illegal behavior to go forward.

Building on this idea, two other criminologists, Gresham Sykes and David Matza, found that offender rationalizations originate from an even more specific location: the criminal law itself. According to Sykes and Matza, great “flexibility” exists in criminal law; even if a defendant commits a bad act, he may avoid punishment if he provides a legally valid justification or defense. Citing defenses to criminal liability such as necessity, insanity, and self-defense, Sykes and Matza viewed application of the criminal law as variable, a circumstance they found offenders incorporate into their psychological processes. Sykes and Matza determined that most unethical and illegal behavior was based on “what is essentially an unrecognized extension of [legal] defenses to crimes, in the form of justifications for deviance that are seen as valid by the delinquent but not by the legal system or society at large.” Put another way, would-be lawbreakers rationalize their behavior in order to fit it within a “defense” to the law that they deem valid, but that society or a court may not.

These finding have important implications for how we consider controlling unethical and criminal behavior in corporations. Our preferred model has been to pass legislation criminalizing conduct in reaction to corporate scandals, e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley after Enron and Dodd-Frank after the financial crisis.  As scandals continue to occur, we look for new ways to make the detection and prosecution of crime easier for the government. Unfortunately, this approach has led to overcriminalization in many spheres, including white collar crime.  There are now over 5,000 federal criminal statutes and as many as 300,000 federal regulatory provisions carrying criminal penalties. While certainly not all relate to white collar crime, many do. In fact, white collar crime underwent the biggest expansion of federal law during the 1970s and 1980s, and it likely took the lead again in the early 2000s. Along with that expansion came reduced mens rea requirements for many white collar crimes, as well as increased punishments, all of which has had the effect of shifting lawmaking and adjudicatory powers to prosecutors. What this means, as many have observed, is that white collar crime suffers from the same ills as other overcriminalized areas of the law—its “depth and breadth” has led to inconsistent enforcement and arbitrary adjudication. (A great example of this is the recent Supreme Court case Yates v. United States, which dealt with a commercial fisherman who was convicted under the anti-document shredding provision of Sarbanes-Oxley for throwing a crate of undersized fish overboard. Yates was subject to at least five partially overlapping obstruction statutes; the prosecutor charged him with the one carrying a 20-year maximum sentence. The Court overturned Yates’ conviction, based partly on concerns of overcriminalization.)

While the arbitrary enforcement of white collar criminal law is problematic for many reasons, the most profound harm it causes is that it makes the law more uncoordinated and illogical, thereby lessening the law’s overall legitimacy.  Why is the lessening of the legitimacy of the law so harmful? The answer comes from the interaction between the perceived illegitimacy of white collar criminal law and rationalizations.  As discussed above, rationalizations are drawn from the white collar offender’s environment, including the law governing his conduct. As would-be offenders increasingly believe those laws to be illegitimate, more space is created for them to rationalize their conduct. They see “defenses” to the law all around them, which they then internalize and incorporate into their own thought processes. Once this occurs, there is little stopping an offender’s future criminal conduct from going forward. Instead of deterring crime, then, adding more criminal statutes and regulations to an already overcriminalized area of the law fosters the very conduct sought to be eliminated. Put simply, more laws aimed at white collar crime may actually be creating more white collar criminal behavior.  (For a more complete discussion of this topic, please see here.)  Lawmakers considering the next round of white collar criminal statutes should be mindful of the role of rationalizations play, or they may be inadvertently creating the conduct they are trying to stop. 

In my final post, I’ll discuss how these same ideas impact corporate compliance efforts.