Edwin Sutherland

Edwin Hardin Sutherland (1883 to 1950) was an American sociologist and one of the most influential criminologists of the twentieth century. Born in Gibbon, Nebraska, he graduated from Grand Island College in 1904 and took his doctorate in sociology at the University of Chicago in 1913. He taught at several universities, including Illinois, Minnesota and Chicago, and from 1935 until his death at Indiana University, where he founded the Bloomington School of Criminology. Working in the symbolic interactionist tradition, he is best known for differential association, the principle that habitual criminality arises from association with those who commit crime, set out in his 1939 textbook Principles of Criminology, and for defining white-collar crime as crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation. His 1949 book White Collar Crime appeared heavily censored until Yale University Press published the original text in 1983. He was president of the American Sociological Society in 1939.