Why did Edwin Sutherland create the term white-collar crime?

American criminologist Edwin Sutherland introduced the term white-collar crime in a 1939 presidential address to the American Sociological Association to challenge the prevailing focus of criminology on "street crime" committed by the lower classes.12

Sutherland defined this concept as "a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation". His motivation for creating the term was to address a significant gap in theoretical views of criminality; he observed that while public attention and media headlines were dominated by street-level offenses, widespread illegal activities—such as fraud, price-fixing, and patent abuse—occurred frequently within powerful corporations and went largely unnoticed or unpunished.2

By highlighting that these acts were often treated as civil or administrative violations rather than criminal law matters, Sutherland sought to reorient the discipline to recognize that criminality is not limited to the "downcast" but is also prevalent among the powerful.2