Edwin H. Sutherland

David Friedrichs, Isabel Schoultz, Aleksandra Jordanoska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315406848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kriminologie

Edwin H. Sutherland is widely identified as the single most important and influential criminologist of the twentieth century. He is especially well-known for his path-breaking criminology textbook (first published in 1924), his promotion of a sociological (and scientific) approach to the understanding of crime and its control, his theory of differential association, and his work over his final ten years on white-collar crime, a term he is credited with having introduced.

This book explores the contemporary meaning of Edwin Sutherland and considers why criminologists today should continue to engage with his work. What can and should Sutherland mean to future 21st century criminologists, those working in the field say between 2021 and 2050, or some one hundred years after the 1921 to 1950 period that encompassed Sutherland's criminological career? Which dimensions of Sutherland's work have best survived the march of time and which are most likely to – and deserve to – survive going forward?

Making the case that Sutherland is important to both mainstream and critical criminologists, to positivistic criminologists and those who study crimes of the powerful, this book is essential reading for both students and scholars interested in exploring the enduring legacy of this key thinker in criminology.

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Chapter 1

Edwin H. Sutherland’s life and career as a sociologist and criminologist

Preface: on Edwin H. Sutherland as an improbable candidate for the status of key criminologist

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Edwin H. Sutherland is quite uniformly acknowledged to be an iconic figure in the development of the field of criminology, and one of its “key thinkers.” His educational background and early career would hardly lead to the expectation that he would achieve such a status (Gaylord and Galliher 1988; Geis and Goff 1982): Edwin Sutherland obtained his college degree from Grand Island College, a Baptist Seminary. When he first applied to graduate school at the University of Chicago it was in the School of Divinity. His first teaching position following receipt of his PhD was at William Jewell College. His initial course assignments included geometry, Greek, and shorthand—but not criminology. During his five years at William Jewell College, Sutherland published a single article, entitled “What rural health surveys have revealed.” In 1921, at the University of Illinois, his department chair thought relatively new faculty members such as Sutherland should take on a major project, and recommended that he produce a textbook on criminology; he certainly did not make this recommendation based upon any special qualifications on Sutherland’s part in relation to this field. At that time Sutherland described his principal scholarly interest as “labor problems.” By the time his criminology textbook was published, in 1924, Sutherland was 41 years old. Some years later, after he had been teaching at the University of Chicago, he was effectively fired in 1935 when his annual contract was not renewed. But he continued to revise his criminology textbook, and it was his fellow criminologist and friend, Henry McKay, who informed Sutherland that he had set forth a theory—subsequently called “differential association”—in a new edition of his book, without being conscious of it himself. By this time Sutherland had settled at Indiana University. One of his students there, Donald Cressey (1983), who became a prominent criminologist and who revised Sutherland’s Principles of Criminology through several editions, characterized him as a terrible teacher; even boring. Cressey described Sutherland as “gentle,” and another student of Sutherland’s at Indiana University, Albert K. Cohen (1983:186), similarly described him as “a simple and a modest man.” Other than a brief trip to England, and a little time working in New York City, Sutherland spent his entire life in the American Midwest. On the basis of his background and early personal and professional experiences, therefore, no reasonable person could have anticipated or predicted when Sutherland began his engagement with the field of criminology in the early 1920s, that over the next quarter of a century or so (roughly between 1924 and 1950), he would establish himself as the leading criminologist of his time: the “dean” of American criminology. Edwin Sutherland has been characterized as the single most important criminologist of the twentieth century by a number of prominent criminologists. John Laub and Robert Sampson (1991:1402) have noted that Sutherland “has been widely acclaimed as the dominant criminologist of the 20th century.” He has been described as “America’s best known and singularly consistent sociological criminologist” (Vold 1951:3), and “the sociological criminologist par excellence” (Cohen 1990:98). In his fine book The Criminological Enterprise Don Gibbons (1979:65) asserted that “The evidence is incontrovertible that Edwin Sutherland was the most important contributor to American criminology to have appeared to date. Indeed, there has been no other criminologist who even begins to approach his stature and importance.” Obviously, any such claims may be disputed, and counter-claims put forth on behalf of some other twentieth century criminologist. But in our judgment the claim on behalf of Sutherland is merited, and our conviction that he was deserving of being characterized as the most important criminologist of the twentieth century was a significant motivating factor in responding positively to an invitation to produce a book about him. However, acknowledging Sutherland’s importance to the field of criminology should hardly be taken as an uncritical endorsement of all his work and his contributions to the field more generally. Accordingly, this book will attempt to delineate quite specifically why the claims on behalf of Sutherland’s supreme importance have been made, but we will also fully attend to legitimate criticism of some dimensions of Sutherland’s legacy and some inevitable limitations on the usefulness of his work within the context of an ever more complex, rapidly evolving twenty-first century world, with some conditions very different from those experienced by Sutherland during the first half of the twentieth century.

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The context of Sutherland’s remarkable career

Edwin Sutherland’s work and influence needs to be understood in the following contexts: the circumstances of his personal life and his professional career; what was going on within the evolving fields of sociology and criminology during the course of his career; and what was happening as well in the world, in the United States, and in his own part of the country during the course of his life and career. In the opening section of this chapter the basic improbability of Sutherland for his status as the most important American criminologist of the twentieth century, at least in the view of some prominent commentators, was established. In what follows an effort is made to position these improbabilities within the context of his times.

The life and times of Edwin H. Sutherland

Formative years (1883–1910): provincial Midwestern origins

Relatively little is known about Sutherland’s early years and family life. He never produced an account of this personal history, and was apparently disinclined to talk about his early years with his later associates and students. What is known has largely been uncovered by two individuals who produced doctoral dissertations on early criminologists or on Sutherland himself: Jon Snodgrass (1972) and Colin Goff (1982). Edwin Hardin Sutherland was born on August 13, 1883, in Gibbon, Nebraska (Gaylord and Galliher 1988; Geis 2015; Martin, Mutchnick and Austin 1990). He was the third of seven children. His father, George Sutherland (born 1840), was descended from Scots who migrated to New Brunswick in Canada, where he was born. But he migrated to Wisconsin. George Sutherland obtained a divinity degree from the original Baptist University of Chicago, a university in its twentieth century incarnation destined to play a key role in Edwin Sutherland’s professional development. George Sutherland has been described as a religious fundamentalist with a conservative Baptist belief system, which included membership in the Anti-Saloon and Temperance Movement. Sutherland appears to have distanced himself in his adult years from this heritage, and a possible falling out at some point with his father may be a factor in his disinterest in writing or speaking about his early years. As an adult Sutherland embraced habits and activities—including smoking and card-playing—that would have been anathema to his father. But at the same time those who have investigated Sutherland’s early history suggest that he may have internalized some dimensions of the moral “righteousness” and “duty” promoted by the Baptist fundamentalist church. The household in which he was raised, with a relatively large family and the modest income of a Baptist academic, was surely one characterized by extreme frugality and material modesty. It is also not unreasonable to speculate that someone raised in such circumstances would come to view the lavish excesses of high-level, white-collar offenders as especially repugnant.

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Sutherland was quintessentially American, despite having a father who had migrated from Canada. Nebraska and Kansas, where he spent some of his childhood years, have been characterized as part of “the American heartland.” This region of the country in the 1880s was still part of the Western frontier so celebrated in American history and mythology. Jesse James, the legendary outlaw of the Midwest, had been killed in neighboring Missouri only a year before Sutherland’s birth. As an odd footnote here, Robert James, a Baptist minister and the father of Jesse James, was among the founders in 1849 of William Jewell College, where Edwin Sutherland taught for several years. There has always been a certain populist dimension to the American outlaw tradition, that of the late nineteenth century as well as during the Depression years of the 1930s. These outlaws, from Jesse James and the Dalton brothers in the earlier period, to John Dillinger and Clyde Barrow (and Bonnie Parker) in the Depression era, were robbing the railroads and the banks that were widely resented by struggling farmers and ordinary workers. The railroads and banks were viewed by large swathes of “ordinary” Americans as exploitative enterprises; the source of a good deal of misery for many people, and of great wealth for their owners. It is possible that Sutherland in his childhood and youth was influenced by some version of the Robin Hood narrative associated with the American outlaw tradition.

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Sutherland’s father had relocated to Ottawa College in Kansas to teach in the history department there when Sutherland was younger than 2 years old, but he then returned to Nebraska to assume the Presidency of the Nebraska Baptist Seminary, which became Grand Island College. So Sutherland therefore experienced an academic environment and had an academic for a parent, from his earliest years. But the nature of this early academic environment was parochial in a literal sense, and fundamentally different in orientation from that of the academic institutions where Edwin Sutherland both acquired his advanced education and spent his most productive years as a scholar. He acquired his bachelor’s degree (in 1904) at Grand Island College, and played football there. Following graduation, he taught at Sioux Falls College in South Dakota, still another Baptist institution. As noted earlier, Sutherland’s first teaching assignments were Greek, Latin, and shorthand—a far cry from what he ultimately ended up teaching at Indiana University. It is easy enough to understand that Sutherland, with the obvious superior qualities of mind and intellectual curiosity that he was to demonstrate further on in his academic career, did not find either the subjects he was teaching or the institution where he was employed rewarding enough to want to settle in for the long haul. But it seems that while Sutherland was at Sioux Falls College he had his first exposure to sociology, enrolling in a home study course taught out of the University of Chicago.

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The United States during Sutherland’s formative years: 1890–1910

Sutherland’s youth—from the ages of 7 to 17—was spent during the last decade of the nineteenth century. A historical overview of this decade identifies a few of the key events and developments in what is labeled “The Beginnings of Modern America” (LaFeber, Polenberg and Woloch 1986). First, modern industrial corporations were rapidly becoming an increasingly dominant force in American life during this period; and they were increasingly consolidating their power in the form of huge trusts. During this period “The Robber Barons helped corrupt politics, undercut laws, and stifle competition” (LaFeber, Polenberg and Woloch 1986:8). Of course, Sutherland was to make the crimes of such trusts and industrial corporations the focus of his final, major contribution to criminology. Second, a major economic depression, following earlier severe economic crises in the 1870s and 1880s, peaked in 1893. The historical memory of this depression is far more limited than that of the Great Depression that occurred in the 1930s, but it was by any measure severe, with unemployment rising to as much as 25% among industrial workers in some places, and a quarter of the railroads going bankrupt. There was much visible suffering during this period, and Sutherland can hardly have avoided knowing of this and very possibly witnessing some of it directly. Bitter uprisings and strikes, often with violent consequences for laborers, occurred during this period—with the Homestead Strike outside Pittsburgh and the Pullman strike in Chicago the best known of these. An “industrial army” (known also as Coxey’s Army) marched on Washington in 1894 to protest the relative absence of effective government action in response to the economic crisis. The small businessmen and farmers of the Midwest certainly endured much suffering as well, and large numbers of people abandoned their farm and small-town life to migrate to the big cities. At least some members of the farming community chose to fight back, organizing political movements to fight for their interests: the Grange, the Greenback party, and the Populist party. Of course, other significant developments were occurring during this period, including the expanding status of the United States as a world power (exemplified by military campaigns in the Philippines and in Cuba), the ongoing repression of native Americans and people of color, the growing influx of foreign immigrants to American cities, and some remarkable technological advances (e.g., the growing use of electricity). But for Sutherland it seems likely that the economic developments made the greatest impression on him.

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The first decade of the new (twentieth) century has been characterized as “The Progressive Era.” Sutherland lived through this decade from age 17 to 27. During this decade, reformers directing their attention at various perceived threats to core, traditional American values and lifestyles, became more conspicuous. Journalists who came to be known as “muckrakers” (among them Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, and Lincoln Steffens), wrote about the hugely harmful practices of major corporations and big businesses, and municipal corruption. Sociologist Edward A. Ross, in 1907, published Sin and Society, which among other things called for recognition of those responsible for “social crime”: the “criminaloid.” “To Ross, the person who granted railroad rebates was no better than a pickpocket, the person who adulterated food no different from a murderer, the person who employed children on much the same level as the slaveholder” (LaFeber, Polenberg and Woloch 1986:44). Ross’s “criminaloid” is quite widely regarded as having anticipated Sutherland’s “white-collar criminal” by more than thirty years, although the term, adopted from Lombroso, never really caught on. In a letter to his friend Luther Bernard, in 1916, Sutherland noted that “last night, I talked to a county Sunday School convention, along the lines of Ross’s idea of modern sin,” and some ten years later, writing to the same friend, he identified Ross as a “principal influence” on him (Gaylord and Galliher 1988:32; Geis 2015:10). But for whatever reason he did not cite Ross’s concept of “the criminaloid” in his work on white-collar crime.

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It was also during the first decade of the twentieth century that Theodore Roosevelt put himself forth as a “trust buster,” in a politically calculated response to the widely diffused public anger at the big corporate trusts. During this decade as well, other significant developments were occurring, including resurgent nativism and nationalism, an emerging women’s suffrage movement, and growing concern over conditions in urban slums. But there is little evidence in Sutherland’s work that he was much focused on these developments, as opposed to those in the economic realm. At age 30 (in 1914) he wrote to a friend that “My interests are confined almost entirely to investigation of such things as farmers’ organizations, trade unions, socialism, and similar movements of ‘the people’ to improve themselves” (Gaylord and Galliher 1988:48). These interests were surely inspired, at least in part, by what Sutherland experienced during his formative years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Middle years (1910–1935): University of Chicago and a peripatetic academic career

Sutherland’s enrolment at the University of Chicago, in 1906, marked the real beginning of his intellectual development and growth. He took a break from graduate studies (1908–1910) returning to Nebraska to teach at Grand Island College. Although he initially enrolled in a divinity program at the University of Chicago, and then history, he ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Edwin H. Sutherland
• Routledge Key Thinkers in Criminology
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Edwin H. Sutherland’s Life and Career as a Sociologist and Criminologist
• 2 Sutherland on the Field of Criminology and Criminological Theory
• 3 Sutherland on Crime, on Types of Crime, and on the Criminal Law
• 4 Sutherland Among Others: His Contemporaries and Competitors
• 5 Sutherland’s Followers and Critics
• 6 Criminology in the Wake of Sutherland and his Enduring Legacy
• Index