James William Coleman was born in 1947 and grew up in Los Angeles, California. He received an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is currently Professor of Sociology at the California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, where he teaches courses in criminology, global problems, social psychology, and the sociology of religion, and conducts research in the areas of white-collar crime, religion and society, and international development. He is the author of numerous articles on white-collar crime and other subjects, which have appeared in such journals as Social Problems and the American Journal of Sociology. In addition to The Criminal Elite, he is the author of Social Problems (Prentice-Hall, 2005), now in its ninth edition, and The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition (Oxford, 2001).