NCJ Number
147159
Date Published
1993
Length
46 pages
Annotation
The savings and loan crisis is discussed.
Abstract
The epidemic failure of savings and loan institutions during the 1980s was an important chapter in the financial and governmental history of the United States and an instructive context for discussing the costs of crime and for reconsidering longstanding controversies about causation in criminology. This essay presents the results of a survey of the hearings and literature about the thrift crisis, focusing on what criminology can teach about the crisis and how the data from the current crisis can inform legal and criminological theory. The authors discuss at length the costs of the crisis and how those costs can best be calculated and the variety of competing explanations for the massive failure of thrift institutions. Key issues addressed are the effect of deposit insurance on pressure for mobilization of the criminal law, the relationship between social harm from crime and levels of just punishment, the tendency for causal theories about the savings and loan failure to thrive without any empirical testing, the emphasis on regulatory rather than criminal justice failure explanations, the tendency for free market rhetoric to produce regulatory environments that are more costly than tighter regulation, and widespread support for structural and environmental explanations of savings and loan crime that critics attack as explanations of street crime. References, tables