At first blush, it seems odd for an American contributor to an international conference on sentencing to focus on high end federal white collar sentencing. After all, federal cases make up a relatively small part of the U.S. criminal justice system. (Between October 2005 and September 2006, about 1,132,290 people were sentenced for a felony in state courts, and 73,009 in federal courts.) Even within the federal system, white collar cases of all sorts are a relatively small part of a criminal docket dominated by immigration, drug, and gun cases, which together comprised nearly 73% of all federal cases in 2009. And the crimes involving fraud, deceit, theft, embezzlement, insider trading, and other forms of deception that accounted for 9.5% of 2009 cases includes a great many offenders and offenses of the middling sort. Moreover, what is meant by high end anyway? Does a vague directional reference allow one to sidestep the longstanding scholarly debate about defining white collar crime
