Law and Society Review

A sample survey of 800 Oregon adults showed that nearly one in four admit they practice evasion. Higher percentages were found for people who were young, with low income, male, and who believed their chance of getting caught was low. Occupational prestige and belief that the tax system is unfair were unrelated to noncompliance. Differential opportunities to practice evasion is a promising explanation, and the deterrent effect of penalties seems uncertain. The evidence suggests conceptualizing tax evasion as a white-collar crime by the nature of the violation and not by the characteristics of the offender.

That the American culture contains criminogenic elements leading to blue-collar crime, white-collar crime and noncriminal exploitation has been recognized by sociologists. Sutherland (1949: 9) defined a white-collar crime as one “committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his legitimate occupation.” White-collar crime included such acts as false and deceptive advertising, mislabeling of goods, price fixing, selling adulterated goods, violating weights and measures statutes, performing illegal operations (by doctors), fee-splitting (by lawyers), and others. Thus crime could no longer be defined solely as the illegal activity of blue-collar, low-class and pathological persons, but extended to all classes, with the prestige group at the top setting a pattern of lawlessness reflected and emulated by subgroups.

Gang crime and resulting public fear became a major policy focus during the 1990s, yet few studies specifically focus on fear of gang crime. Guided by social disorganization theory, we test three theoretical models about the individual thought processes leading to fear of gang crime. Using structural equation models, we find that each of these three theories—diversity, disorder, and community concern—is an important predictor of gang-related fear. In addition, we find that the indirect relationships between demographic characteristics, theoretical variables, and fear depend upon which model is tested.

In this article, we use a Bourdieusian framework to theorize the relationship between cultural capital and legal consciousness, and in turn to consider how variation in legal consciousness contributes to the creation and maintenance of legal hegemony. We investigate how cultural capital shapes the ways people navigate situations that force them to mediate between state-conferred rights, on one hand, and requests from state authority, on the other. Specifically, we analyze open-ended responses to a series of vignettes about constitutional rights in the criminal procedure context. We find that high cultural capital gives rise to a greater sense of self-efficacy in police–citizen interactions. This finding parallels the literature on the influence of cultural capital in the education context and may point to a more general pattern of self-advocacy within the juridical field. People with high cultural capital also evince a more salient sense of entitlement, understanding their own needs and desires as paramount. The social processes we identify may make people with limited cultural capital more vulnerable to investigative authority, and thus more susceptible to arrest and prosecution. Even if knowledge of a right and the opportunity to assert that right are equally distributed, meaningful access to that right remains inequitable.