Australian criminologist (1950- )
As infants we have many experiences where minor acts of deviance are associated with smacks, rejection, spells in the corner, reprimands, and other unpleasant stimuli. These experiences attach conditioned fear and anxiety responses to the deviant behavior. Names like 'bad' and 'naughty' also become associated with these unpleasant events and in time also produce a conditioned anxiety response. This verbal labeling is the key to a process of generalization that groups together a variety of types of misbehavior as 'bad' and 'naughty' that all elicit conditioned anxiety; in time the generalization proceeds further, with the more abstract concept of 'crime' being defined as 'naughty' or 'evil'. We will leave it to the psychologists to debate how much the acquisition and generalization of conscience is a conditioning or a cognitive process. The point is that conscience is acquired.
JOHN BRAITHWAITE
Crime, Shame and Reintegration
White-collar crime is fundamentally different from other crime and requires fundamentally different explanations. Being incumbent in a position of power in one's occupation opens up a new range of illegitimate opportunities, such as are not available to most people--the power to embezzle, to defraud, to misappropriate, to abuse safety laws, to engage in price-fixing, and so on. It is possible that if lower-class people were exposed to the same vast opportunities for white-collar crime, they too would engage in the large-scale criminality of the powerful.
JOHN BRAITHWAITE
Inequality, Crime and Public Policy
When individuals are shamed so remorselessly and unforgivingly that they become outcasts, or even begin to think of themselves as outcasts it becomes more rewarding to associate with others who are perceived in some limited or total way as also at odds with mainstream standards.
JOHN BRAITHWAITE
Crime, Shame and Reintegration
Powerlessness and poverty increase the chances that needs are so little satisfied that crime is an irresistible temptation to actors alienated from the social order and that punishment is non-credible to actors who have nothing to lose.
JOHN BRAITHWAITE
Regulation, Crime and Freedom
People who foster dependence on illicit drugs such as heroin are regarded among the most unscrupulous pariahs of modern civilisation. In contrast, pushers of licit drugs tend to be viewed as altruistically motivated purveyors of social good.
JOHN BRAITHWAITE
Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry
For adolescents and adults, conscience is a much more powerful weapon to control misbehavior than punishment. In the wider society, it is no longer logistically possible, as it is in the nursery, for arrangements to be made for punishment to hang over the heads of persons whenever temptation to break the rules is put in their path. Happily, conscience more than compensates for absence of formal control. For a well socialized individual, conscience delivers an anxiety response to punish each and every involvement in a crime--a more systematic punishment than haphazard enforcement by the police.
JOHN BRAITHWAITE
Crime, Shame and Reintegration
It has been argued that imprisonment is a more effective deterrent with white-collar than with traditional offenders because the stigma of prison is more intensely felt by respectable middle- and upper-class people.
JOHN BRAITHWAITE
Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry