White collar crimes and blue collar crimes are two distinct types of criminal activities. White collar crimes refer to financial crimes such as embezzlement and privileged information trafficking, while blue collar crimes refer to street crimes such as assault, robbery, and drug-related offenses. At first glance, blue collar crimes may appear more violent because they involve physical harm to another person. However, white collar crimes can be just as damaging and can affect entire groups of people.
White collar crimes involve the transfer of resources, such as money or intellectual property, but do not cause direct bodily harm to the victim. For example, income tax evasion will result in the white-collar criminal having more money at the cost of governments not receiving their taxes properly, but it will not cause direct harm to anyone. Manual crimes, on the other hand, often cause direct harm to the victim and are committed directly. A crime such as physical assault will involve direct bodily harm to the victim of the crime.
These crimes usually have shorter sentences than white-collar crimes since they are considered less serious, but they also carry a greater risk of physical harm and are easier to investigate and prosecute. The terms “white collar” and “worker” originally referred to different types of jobs. The term workers' crime was originally coined to refer to crimes committed by someone from the working class or lower class of society. Red-collar crimes are often investigated and prosecuted by law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI or the Department of Justice.
The term black collar was coined to represent high-level white collar crimes committed by higher levels of society, such as corporate executives and government officials. White-collar crimes are generally defined as non-violent crimes committed by business or government professionals. Nowadays, blue collar crimes are often those crimes that are considered to be driven by passion, anger, or other emotions, compared to those that are carefully calculated and executed. A white-collar criminal is a criminal who works in this field and commits a crime related to that field.
These labels are still common because they describe how each crime is investigated and prosecuted differently. One of the biggest differences between white collar crimes and other types of crimes is that white collar crimes are usually non-violent. These crimes are often investigated and prosecuted by local law enforcement, and carry shorter sentences than other types of white-collar crimes. Federal white-collar crime guidelines are generally used at the state level when it comes to passing sentences.
Red-collar crimes are a type of white-collar crime that involves official corruption and violence to detect or prosecute crimes committed.
