Criminology

According to Edwin Sutherland, white-collar crime is defined as actions committed by individuals in high social status in the course of their occupation to secure economic gain. Such white-collar crimes include computer crime, bank fraud, falsification of expense accounts or other records, price fixing, embezzling, bribery, insider buying, forgery, and theft of materials (Jacobson and Green, 2002).

Criminologists identify two main types of white-collar crime, including occupational and organizationalcorporate crimes. Occupational crime occurs when crimes are committed to promote personal interests. Crimes that fall into this category include altering books by accountants and overcharging or cheating clients by lawyers. A much more costly type of white-collar crime occurs when corporate executives commit criminal acts to benefit their company. There are a variety of corporate crimes that include the creation of inferior products, pollution, price fixing, tobacco companies that add nicotine to cigarettes, energy crisis, financial crisis, etc.

Stanley Mark Rifkin and Kevin Mitnick were both convicted in occupational type of white-collar crimes committed when Rifkin was responsible for developing a backup system for the Security Pacific National Bank and Mitnick was a computer security consultant. Though, if to compare both criminals and nature of their crimes, it is obvious that their aims are rather different. Rifkins main purpose of the crime was to secure economic gain by stealing 10.2 million dollars via telephone wire transfer, which he later used to purchase 43,200 carats (8.6 kg) of diamonds from a Russian supplier to be sold back in the United States (Time.com, 1978). On the contrary, all the confirmed and alleged criminal acts of Mitnick have never been associated with actual money or bank transfers he was mainly hacking logins and passwords of different systems to gain full administrator privileges, to view source code, to get access to corporate manuals and email correspondence, to make free cell phone local and international calls, etc. In such a way, despite both criminals are related to white-collar crimes category, computer-related (or better to say telephone-related) offense of Rifkin fits more Sutherlands definition of a white-collar crime than the offense of Mitnick since the last one never seek for direct economic gain from his illegal computer-related abuse actions.
    
For his first confirmed criminal act of breaking into the computer network of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Kevin Mitnick was sentenced to twelve months of imprisonment followed by three years of supervised release, which he did not complete successfully by hacking into voice mail computers of Pacific Bell and becoming a fugitive for two and a half years (Jacobson and Green, 2002). Though, being arrested in 1995, Mitnick was sentenced to forty-six months of imprisonment for that crime and twenty-two months for violating the terms of his 1989 supervised release sentence (Rosoff, Pontell, and Tillman, 2002). It was rather fair court decision for the illegal actions Mitnick did. Though, when Rifkin was first arrested and taken to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego, he was soon released on bail, which sounds rather unfair and strange if to consider multimillion-dollar bank heist he organized. Only later when Rifkin tried to target the Union Bank of Los Angeles the court decision for ten years of imprisonment was fair, although after pleading guilty Rifkin was sentenced to eight years in federal prison (Time.com, 1978).