Most people think about thugs and hoodlums as the typical criminal. Our jails are full of poorly educated young men whose violent crimes are constantly flashed across our TV screens and written about in our newspapers. The big-time criminals, the ones who do not get caught, wear three-piece suits and use computers, lawyers, and accountants to separate people from their money. About 20,000 murders are reported to police in an average year. "Nonviolent" white collar criminals probably kill many more people than all the violent street criminals put together. By virtually any criterion, white collar crime is our most serious crime problem. Although it may be impossible to determine exactly how many people are killed and injured annually because white collar crimes, the claim that such crimes are harmless, nonviolent offenses is not true. Business criminals are attracted by stock market scams, fraud, price-fixing, kickbacks, and the making and selling of dangerous goods
             Is Street Crime More Harmful than White Collar Crime? To answer this question we must first understand what a crime is. By general definition, a crime is a wronging, proclaimed by law against society. All acts of disobeying the law are crimes. Be it an assault or embezzlement, running a red light or prostitution, one has committed a wrong. Yet we have learned values and morals from our surroundings, which gave us concepts of the degree of harm pertaining to a particular crime. From our being submerged in a culture, our concept of crime is usually that of a physical one.
             We as a society, generally conjure images of a personal assault on oneself when defining the concept of a crime. Very rarely would ones first connotation of crime be of an executive of a large firm stealing money from the business. We as a society, generally define our concepts by our surroundings.
             Society is more frequently exposed to street crimes. It is very rare that a day goes by tha...