Paul R Wilson

Medical Fraud and Abuse: Australia, Canada, and the United States

Criminologists have paid scant attention to the issue of crime and abuse in the field of the delivery of health care by physicians. However, largely because of the escalating costs of such services in recent years, government officials and academics have begun to examine this form of white-collar crime. The present paper explores the extent of violations by physicians in the course of their involvement in health benefit programs in Australia, Canada, and the United States. Despite differences in the structure of their programs, the three countries appear to demonstrate similar patterns of offenses, though the precise extent of such violations remains largely a matter of speculation. Similar enforcement problems are also found in each of the countries examined. In Canada, unlike Australia and the United States, control of the definition of violations by the medical associations appears to be responsible for a lesser number of prosecutions and a lesser degree of public concern.

Toward a Cross-Cultural Theory of Aboriginal Crime: a Comparative Study of the Problem of Aboriginal Overrepresentation in the Criminal Justice Systems of Canada and Australia

This article provides a theoretical starting point for the development of a more encompassing cross-cultural theory of aboriginal crime. The authors contend that any attempt to develop such a theory has to proceed on three fronts: (a) through offering a cross-cultural explanation of the problem of aboriginal overrepresentation; (b) through undertaking comparative research aimed at accounting for aboriginal offending patterns that often lie outside the official picture of overrepresentation; and (c) through developing a primarily societal-based (as opposed to individualist) cross-cultural theory of aboriginal criminality that is able to account for identified cross-national patterns of aboriginal overrepresentation and aboriginal offending. As a takeoff point for this series of interconnected and overlapping comparative research efforts, the authors undertake an examination of the state of research and theory about the causes of aboriginal overrepresentation in the criminal justice systems of Canada and Australia. In order to explain the similar patterns of overrepresentation found among aboriginal peoples in Canada, Australia, and other countries, the authors identify and synthesize a number of different cross-cultural theories of crime recently developed by comparative criminologists that can be used in working toward the development of a more encompassing cross-cultural theory of aboriginal crime.