Downturn and Shift in Population Feed Boom in White-Collar Crime
Even as the rate of murder, robbery, assault and other types of violent and property crimes has declined or flattened in the last decade, there has been a marked increase in accounting and corporate infractions, fraud in health care, government procurement and bankruptcy, identity theft, illegal corporate espionage and intellectual property piracy, federal and state officials say.

With increasing frequency, white-collar corruption seems to be the crime of choice of the baby boom generation.

A week does not go by without news of investigations of blue-chip and start-up companies, the most prominent recently include Adelphia, Enron, Global Crossing, Kmart, Qwest Communications International, Schering-Plough, WorldCom and Xerox. Many of those companies' accounting firms are also facing intense scrutiny, perhaps most notably Arthur Andersen, which is in the middle of a criminal trial in Houston.

Corporate corruption cases are inevitable during the trough of the boom-bust economic cycle, when disgruntled investors and company whistle-blowers work with prosecutors and the support of an outraged public to unveil the excesses of market euphoria. The phenomenon last occurred during the savings and loan crisis a decade ago, but it also happened after a wave of corporate scandals in the 1970's, and to a lesser extent during the Great Depression.

But this wave is different. Some statistics indicate that these fraud cases were actually on the rise during the boom cycle, and criminal law experts say that the nature and types of these crimes differ significantly from those of earlier periods.

And while the sociology of crime is imprecise, experts attribute that changing nature of crime to demographic shifts and economic forces.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/business/02CRIM.html?todaysheadlines