The Reagan administration has argued that people are not concerned about white collar crime but demand action against violent offenders. A similar logic seems to be persuasive in many countries.

Furthermore, this logic argues that the criminal justice system can do something directly about violent crime, that white collar crime does little damage, and a number of other questionable assumptions. After briefly reviewing some fallacies in these assumptions, the paper will turn to the consequences of adopting alternate strategies.

The main theme is that the Reagan administration logic assumes that crime is described by a bimodal curve which allows us to distinguish between minor, unimportant offenders and a distinct group of serious offenders. In fact, the distribution of deviance may better be described as a continuous curve. A further assumption is made that the shape of this curve remains constant and therefore an effective policy to reduce deviance would have to shift the entire curve. This logic would favor greater attention to longer range attempts to reduce family violence as a more effective means of reducing other violence in the future. In addition, the same logic would argue that deviance and crime by the powerful in society does influence deviance and crime by the less powerful. Other implications of these themes will be discussed.