Scott London was a significant partner for the KPMG group in Los Angelo's. London had more than fifty partners and nearly five hundred professional auditors working under his leadership. London had worked for KPMG for more than twenty years, and he was receiving quite a generous salary. However, he later started hanging out with a fake friend, Shaw, who had negative motives. Shaw was interested in the inside information for the companies where London was a partner. It was a business deal where London would share inside information with Shaw, and then he would receive concert tickets, money, and Rolex watches in return ( Soltes, 2016) . The inside information shared with Shaw would be shared with other competing companies so that their stock prices would rise.
However, the deal wouldn't last forever, and London was caught in the act of sharing the inside information and receiving his share of the deal. London lost his prosperous career at KPMG. London committed an inside trading crime which was against a sacred oath he had taken of confidentiality. Luckily, the only punishment London received was to lose his career despite his crime being a major crime in his job.
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Insider trading is sharing and trading a company's securities and stocks based on non-public information about the company. I believe the best punishment that London would have received is getting a jail sentence of ten years. Besides, London should have received a fine equivalent to the financial losses experienced via stocks and securities by the affected companies. Also, London should have refunded the $70,000 received during the trading. My choice of punishment is based on the fact that Section 10(b) of the Social Exchange Commission passed in 1934 prohibits inside trading. The acts provide that if one is found guilty of committing insider trading, they should serve a maximum of twenty years. Besides, the maximum fine one should receive a 25-million-dollar penalty. Even though my suggestion of the sentence of ten years is less, this is because I believe London was a committed auditor to his job. His intentions as an auditor were to honor his sacred oath of confidentiality, as he also shared with his colleagues, but he fell into the trap of his selfish friend.
Creating the white-collar criminal
The fallout from the burglary of the Democratic National offices brought the attention of the widespread and ongoing white-collar crime. Unlike the earlier decades where white-collar crime was ignored, this time, Stanley Sporkin, the deputy director of the Social Exchange Commission, wanted to dig deeper into this matter and know the companies that were engaged in white-collar crime. For the first time, the FBI annual report listed companies that were involved in white-collar crime. Besides, the FBI had tripled the resource devoted to investigating white-collar crime. The growth of white-collar crime was enormous in the late 1970s. The American judicial system even remarked that white-collar criminal defense was one of the fastest-growing specialties.
Due to the rising white-collar crimes, legislators passed new regulations that restricted corporate behavior that the public felt was unethical and criminal. In 1977, congress passed the Foreign Corruption Practices Act (FCPA). FCPA provided that any bribing of the foreign office was a criminal offense ( Green, 2004) . An executive or manager who would violate the law could spend a maximum of five years imprisonment. At the same time, their company would be fined up to $1 million. Besides, in 1975 the supreme court ruled that executives were responsible for any misconduct that fell outside of their direct supervision, and violating the law was prone to 3 years in prison. The FCPA law was a significant milestone toward convicting white-collar criminals. However, getting to the core of white-collar crimes was hectic. Various approaches were used; for instance, for a company that was flagged for white-collar crime, the executive was to provide evidence of a crime and those whom they engaged with so that their imprisonment years would be lessened. Besides, the subordinate staff was also involved in providing inside information about the crimes. But either way, digging to the core was hard.
Earlier in the 1940s, Sutherland was concerned that three were three issues hindering more aggressive actions towards white-collar crime. According to Sutherland, the first reason was that because of the social status of businessmen and mafias, the law seemed to protect them from recrimination due to their respectability in society ( Weisburd, Waring, & Wheeler, 1990) . However, with time the tendency to prosecute influential executives has changed over time. The sentencing offered in the 90s to white-collar crime was less than three years, but in the 2000s, the sentence had increased by a decade. Thus, the 2000s was named as the worst time to be a corporate criminal. Second, Sutherland was also concerned that even if white-collar offenders were convicted, their punishment wouldn't be as effective as other crimes. However, the modern world has taken the white-collar conviction seriously, where an average executive involved in financial misconduct is sentenced to nearly six years. The last hindrance was the indifference of the public towards white-collar criminals. However, that has changed, and the public is in support of the conviction of white-collar offenders.
Inherently Inferior organisms
Scientists and sociologists have tried to find what causes a human being to commit a crime in society and white-collar jobs or what characters in a person can make one predict a future criminal. Thus, Lombroso conducted research and added that a person's disposition or character could be assessed by examining their physical appearance. Besides, Lombroso added that criminals portrayed various anomalies of a primitive origin, such as hooked noses that look like the beaks of a prey bird. Such characteristics showed that such men are prehistoric evolutionary throwbacks who were unable to abide by modern societal laws, and thus they were born criminals.
Therefore, some of the executives who commit white-collar crime are rotten apples. The executives have innated deviant character that is waiting for the right time to exploit an opportunity. However, society believes that punishment should only be done to the evil-minded and doers ( Benson & Simpson, 2009) . Still, not those born criminals as their lack of control over their biological factors are unjust. But there is also the need to control those born criminal as may cause more significant harm. Thus, rehabilitation was considered the ideal way to deal with born criminals, but it was through rehabilitation that most of the twentieth century's most oppressive societal policies were created. Such as, prisoners were sterilized to ensure they don’t procreate children of their kind.
Lombroso provided a systematic set of causes to identify criminals. More scientists have become interested in venturing into criminology cause. For instance, scientist Goring criticized the perspective of Lombroso on criminals. Goring urged that criminals are not evolutionary throwbacks; instead, they are ordinary people who have a subtle difference in their character and disposition towards committing a crime. Later, Hooton, an anthropologist, criticized Goring's perspective and researched the differences between criminal and noncriminal. From his intensive research, Hooton summarized that not only did he realize the differences between a criminal and noncriminal, but he could also tell the physical difference for criminals convicted of a different crime ( Coleman, 2015) . For example, short fat men were mainly convicted for rape, tall and heavy men were primarily convicted for murder and forgery, tall thin men were most killed and robbed, and short, skinny men mostly stole. However, with time, relying mainly on physical differences to differentiate criminals and noncriminals had declined. And the scientist who continued to believe in this perception was increasingly isolated.
Scientists still believed there was a difference between criminals and noncriminals, but this time, they choose to focus on the internal mind rather than the usual external body. From research, criminologists urged that deficiencies of self-control lead to crime. Criminologists suggested that people with lower self-control have a high tendency to resist temptations and restraining from reckless behavior. Thus, most of them rash into any available opportunity, which could end up in a criminal act. However, using self-control to know a criminal is not adequate because if relapses cause managerial misconduct in self-control, it would be incorrect to categorize deviant managers as bad apples. Thus, the researcher needed to dig deeper inside the human mind to understand why the physiological difference between the executives who engage in misconduct and those who don't.
Hence Raine and Laufer did neurobiological abnormalities research concerning crime. They concluded that white-collar criminals have higher cognitive control, which is an advantage in perpetrating criminal offenses that distinguish them from other criminals. Besides, genes play a significant role in forming most determinants of personality, some of which contribute to criminality ( Wright, Tibbetts, & Daigle, 2014) . Genetic variation affects behavior through its influence on bodily hormones and regulatory biochemicals such as testosterone. High testosterone has been long linked to high aggressiveness and selfish behavior. Thus, researchers found out that more masculine managers are more likely to engage in risky behaviors such as inside trading. Also, the environment and background that one is brought up in are expected to influence their behavior.
References
Benson, M. L., & Simpson, S. S. (2009). White collar crime: An opportunity perspective . Routledge.
Coleman, J. W. (2015, October 15). Toward an integrated theory of white-collar crime . The University of Chicago Press: Journals. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/228750
Green, S. P. (2004). The concept of white collar crime in law and legal theory. Buffalo Criminal Law Review , 8 (1), 1-34. https://doi.org/10.1525/nclr.2004.8.1.1
Soltes, E. (2016). Why they do it: Inside the mind of the white-collar criminal .
Weisburd, D., Waring, E., & Wheeler, S. (1990). Class, status, and the punishment of white-collar criminals. Law & Social Inquiry , 15 (02), 223-243. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-4469.1990.tb00587.x
Wright, J. P., Tibbetts, S. G., & Daigle, L. E. (2014). Criminals in the making: Criminality across the life course . SAGE Publications.
