Sutherland's historical importance rests upon his having introduced the concept of white-collar crime, a concept which violated existing prejudices that aristocrats can do no wrong. After receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago, Sutherland was at William Jewell College, Missouri, the University of Kansas, University of Illinois, Sutherland spent a summer at Northwestern prior to arriving at the University of Minnesota in 1925. Sutherland solidified his reputation as one of the country's leading criminologists at the University of Minnesota, where he worked from 1926 to 1929. During this period, he concentrated in sociology as a scientific enterprise whose goal was to understand and control social problems. For several months in 1929 Sutherland studied the British penal system while in England. Also, during 1929–1930 Sutherland worked as a researcher with the Bureau of Social Hygiene in New York City. In 1930, Sutherland accepted a position as a research professor at the University of Chicago. In 1935 he took a position at Indiana University, where he remained till his untimely death on October 11, 1950. He founded the Bloomington School of Criminology at Indiana University. During his time at Indiana, he published four books, including Twenty Thousand Homeless Men, The Professional Thief, the third edition of Principles of Criminology, and the censored first edition of White Collar Crime, his masterpiece. It remained censored until the original text was published in 1983 by Yale University Press. Sutherland was elected president of the American Sociological Society in 1939, and president of the Sociological Research Association in 1940. If he had not already become prominent within the sociological profession prior to his introduction of the concept of white-collar crime in 1939, one can only speculate whether the seminal concept would have been published, as America's largest corporations threatened to sue the publishers of White Collar Crime. When Yale University Press issued the unexpurgated version in 1983, the introduction by Gilbert Geis noted that Sutherland's concept of white-collar crime "altered the study of crime throughout the world in fundamental ways".
Theory
He was the author of the leading text Criminology, published in 1924, first stating the principle of differential association in the third edition retitled Principles of Criminology that the development of habitual patterns of criminality arise from association with those who commit crime rather than with those who do not commit crime. The theory also had a structural element positing that conflict and social disorganisation are the underlying causes of crime because they the patterns of people associated with. This latter element was dropped when the fourth edition was published in 1947. But he remained convinced that social class was a relevant factor, coining the phrase white-collar criminal in a speech to the American Sociological Association on December 27, 1939. In his 1949 monograph White-Collar Crime he defined a white-collar crime "approximately as a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation."
Sutherland, Edwin H. With Locke, H.J. Twenty Thousand Homeless Men: a study of unemployed men in the Chicago shelters, Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott
Sutherland, Edwin H. Development of the Theory, in Karl Schuessler Edwin H. Sutherland on Analyzing Crime, pp. 13–29. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
