Help me reply to my classmate post with short comment Underprivileged crime and white collar crime are quite different. I'm not sure that it is fair to say that one is worse than the other. Any type of crime is illegal for a reason. Most of the time that reason is because it hurts people (physically, financially, etc.).

Underprivileged crime is a term that encapsulates the crimes that people who are in poverty commit in order to survive. Some of these people may not have a good education or may not have a job. The lack of a job likely means that they do not have enough money to survive. This can lead to desperation, causing people to commit crimes in order to survive. This can include things like theft, being unable to pay fines that they may have, drug trafficking, etc. A theory that very clearly aligns with this is the strain theory. Underprivileged people experience a strain, which causes them to commit crimes.

White collar crime is a type of crime that includes fraudulence for personal gain. This type of crime is usually nonviolent. People who commit this type of crime are trying not to lose any money or are trying to get an advantage, either personally or for their business. This type of fraud can include money laundering, bribery, embezzlement, etc.

One example of a white collar crime is the college admission scandal involving Rick Singer. He "lured clients with promises to open what he called the 'side door' into schools such as the University of Southern California and Yale, Stanford and Georgetown Universities" (Anderson and Moser, 2023). He planned to have them cheat on their SATs and pose as athletes. Some of the parents who were involved in this scheme got prison sentences, but they were very short - two weeks, two months, and five months. People who commit white collar crimes such as this one seem to sometimes get shorter sentences. This may be because they don't have a previous criminal history. However, it may also be because they are viewed as superior in comparison to people who commit underprivileged crimes. People who commit white collar crimes have more money and advantageous connections than underprivileged people. Therefore, while it may not be fair, it is no surprise that their prison sentences are often shorter. They are also able to pay off their fines and bails, helping them to get out of prison faster and to not get repetitive fines that may cause them to wind up back in jail.

There is certainly hypocrisy when it comes to these crimes - especially white collar crimes. The biggest hypocrisy here is that these people condemn others - mainly underprivileged people - very publicly for committing crimes, yet they also commit crimes. Just because the crimes may be different, because they have the monetary advantage, doesn't mean that they aren't still crimes. They put on a front when they are in public, but in private they are a very different person. Additionally, because their crimes are different from underprivileged crimes, they might be able to rationalize them in a way, because they believe that their crimes aren't as bad as underprivileged ones.

Underprivileged crime and white collar crime are very different types of crimes. I think that people may feel that underprivileged crime is worse than white collar crime because white collar crime is usually nonviolent, which may not be the case for underprivileged crime. In that aspect, I agree that underprivileged crime is worse. However, both types of crime are harmful to people in some way. There is a lot of hypocrisy in white collar crimes, which put on a facade to make people feel as though they are against crime when in reality they are commiting crimes. Both types of crime can hurt people, although white collar crimes may tend to be less violent.