“Moonlighting” Phase of Sam’s Criminal Career: Shifting Commitments to Crime versus Legitimacy
Sam’s “wheelin’ and dealin’“ involvement in the stolen goods trade in American City ended with his arrest and conviction on charges of receiving stolen property. The subsequent imprisonment marked a turning point in Sam’s life and criminal career. In the next chapter, Sam first describes the sequence of events leading to his “last fall” and then his life after being released from prison, when he eventually settles in Tylersville and where his criminal career enters its “moonlighting” phase. That is, Sam becomes more of a “part-time” or “moonlighting” fence, though one with extensive experience and underworld contacts. Sam runs a legitimate business full time, but still engages in criminal activity.
Shortly after Sam’s release from prison, Steffensmeier asked Jesse whether he thought Sam would fall back into fencing. Jesse mused: “Sam ain’t happy unless he’s pulling something. If the risk ain’t that high, if the opportunity is there, he’ll go for it. Without a doubt.” Jesse’s words proved prophetic.
Sam’s narrative in the following chapter, as well as the commentary and narrative in Chapters 17-20, show that Sam’s career after his last imprisonment was characterized by his longing for some legitimate respectability, on the one hand, coupled with his continuing affinity for criminal activity on the other. In other words, Sam experienced competing pushes and pulls toward and away from theft, fencing, and coaching or tipping off thieves. The scale and frequency of Sam’s criminal activity would wax and wane as Sam would dabble or “moonlight” in fencing on the side, and then would start getting “sucked into” the game more. At times his level of fencing would almost rival his days in American City. Then he would become wary of getting too deeply involved again, put the brakes on, and pull back. Thus, there were other periods in Sam’s career (especially toward the end of his life) when Sam was mostly a legitimate businessman, and he was hardly involved in fencing at all.
After his release from state prison for the last time, Sam becomes a part-time fence or, as he sometimes said, an “in-betweener” dealer, though a skilled and connected one. Sam becomes mostly a legitimate businessman, but “moonlights” at fencing and sometimes other illicit activity. Sam becomes and remains in some ways a “background operator” in the underworld, though he experiences sharp temptations to expand his fencing operation to its former glory and even beyond.
We question the sometimes dichotomous conceptualization of desistance found in much writing on criminal careers (one either desists from crime or not) in favor of a more nuanced and complex approach. In this discussion, we delineate the strong personal and structural commitments to crime and the underworld life that made it difficult for Sam to terminate criminal activity entirely.
In the criminal careers literature, desistance is usually taken to mean “successful” disengagement from criminal behavior. Offenders either desist or not. However, many criminal careers, like Sam Goodman’s, are marked by shifts and oscillations (Adler and Adler 1983). That is, many offenders enter and exit criminal activity repeatedly, or escalate and de-escalate their criminal activity, or shift from one kind of activity to another, or all three of these, over the courses of their lives.
Thus, one lesson from the life of Sam Goodman is that the focus on complete desistance is too narrow. Some offenders do not so much terminate criminal activity, but may instead (1) reduce or slow down the frequency of offending, perhaps even “moonlighting” in criminal activity to supplement their legitimate income, (2) reduce the variety of offending, that is, specialize more, (3) reduce the type or seriousness of offending, or (4) switch to less visible forms of offending, to become more of a “background operator.” Sam Goodman’s later career exhibited all of these patterns. Also, the causes and processes of desistance are likely to vary across distinct offender categories and levels of skill. That is, the desistance process (if there is one) for a professional thief and fence like Sam may be quite different from that of the “bottom of the barrel” thieves Sam describes. Sam’s extensive commitments to criminal activity, fencing, and the underworld way of life made a total exit, or a “clean break” from his criminal career very difficult.
In Chapter 3, we mentioned the centrality of the concept of commitment to the explanation of consistency in lines of activity, and how continuity in criminal careers can be analyzed as dynamics of structural, personal, and moral commitments. Since commitment is an important concept for sociology in general and criminology in particular, then it is important to understand the possibility of different types of commitment and determine whether distinct sources produce them. In other words, we agree with Johnson (1991) that commitment is not a unitary construct, because scholars and laypeople alike use the term to mean several different kinds of experiences (e.g., “I can’t get out of this now, I’m committed” vs. “She has a strong commitment to her religion”).
Broadly speaking, we see sources of commitment in terms of “valuables” and costs. That is, some sources of commitment are valued resources, opportunities, relationships, or identities that individuals accumulate based on prior decisions and involvements that they would risk losing if they terminated a line of activity in which they consistently engage. Other sources of commitment represent potential costs or penalties to be paid if one terminates a consistent line of activity, such as missed opportunities, foregone rewards, or negative social reaction from associates. It makes sense to us to conceptualize commitment in all its variation, complexity, and implications.
We draw on Howard Becker’s pioneering work on commitment and primarily on Ulmer’s adaptation of Johnson’s (1991) threefold commitment framework to criminology.1 As noted in Chapter 3, the framework integrates the differing ways in which scholars have seen commitment as being produced by constraints on one hand (“forced behavior” in the words of Stebbins [1971]) or as a product of personal desire or determination on the other (Kanter 1972; Burke and Reitzes 1991). This framework elaborates the commitment concept into three distinct types: structural, personal, and moral. These commitment types can produce continuity in criminal behavior either by fostering a desire for criminal activities and choices, or by constraining individuals from terminating criminal careers.2
We use commitment as a conceptual tool for explaining the observation that offenders, like people more generally, often follow consistent lines of activity for a variety of reasons. An example of a consistently engaged-in line of activity would be a twenty-plus year career in fencing, like Sam Goodman’s. The threefold typology of commitment helps to outline the mechanisms by which past actions create interests and allegiances that link to constraints and desires shaping current decision-making and more long-range life choices. This incorporates a key theme of Becker’s work that engaging in a line of behavior (e.g., deviance) in time produces its own set of causes and of Lemert that the original causes of the behavior may not be the effective or sustaining causes.
We also reiterate Ulmer’ s (2000) argument that many commonalities exist between commitment to conformity and commitment to deviance, and differential association and social control theories depict two sides of the same coin. Just as breaking the law may jeopardize “valuables” such as reputational, economic, occupational, interpersonal, or emotional investments in conformity, so desisting from lawbreaking and turning away from crime may jeopardize those same “valuables” staked to crime. Thus, the commitment framework integrates two theories often seen as opposed, differential association/social learning and social control (see Ulmer 2000 for an extended discussion).
We call an individual’s accumulated and valued interests and allegiances, as represented by his or her structural, moral, or personal commitments, an individual’s commitment portfolio. It is also critical to understand that commitments are not static, but dynamic: they wax and wane, shift and change over the life course.3
Furthermore, both Becker’s work and the threefold framework recognize that people often have conflicting commitments. We see this, for example, in Sam’s desiring and being pulled toward both crime and conventionality. This pattern is vividly illustrated in the following chapter and in Chapter 20.
Structural commitment is mostly what Becker (1960) was talking about in his foundational piece on commitment. It represents sources of continuity in criminal careers flowing from opportunities, knowledge, resources, and network ties to useful and trustworthy contacts. These opportunities, resources, and network ties are therefore important components of the kind of criminal social capital we talked about in Chapter 9.
As we mentioned in Chapter 3, structural commitment involves what Lemert (1951) called external limits, or what we (see also Steffensmeier 1986) called objective availability of criminal and conventional lines of action. Structural commitment is characterized by external constraints of two kinds: (1) those that structure and influence choices between lines of action and (2) those that restrict the termination of a given line of action. Structural commitment is defined by the perception or experience that one “has to” pursue a line of action. It has four sources: (1) the availability and attractiveness of alternative lines of action, (2) hard-to-retrieve investments in current lines of action (what economists might call “sunk costs”), (3) difficulty of processes necessary to terminate a line of action, and (4) social reaction to termination of a line of action.
Structural commitment emphasizes (1) the manner in which objective circumstances for achievement or “doing well” (e.g., availability of opportunities for legitimate versus illegitimate endeavors) shape the decisions and life choices people make (both with regard to strategies affecting the general contours of their lives and often in specific situations); and (2) how prior concrete actions or involvements produce an individuar s commitment portfolio. That is, objective circumstances that produce structural commitment include “valuables” like know-how, earnings, contacts, and reputation that are products of prior actions and involvements.
Personal commitment, on the other hand, involves the subjective acceptability of criminal or conventional activity, and is defined by choice driven by internal desire to continue a line of action. In other words, personal commitment refers to individuals continuing a line of action because they define it as desirable, something they want to do. Personal commitment is thus the proper concept to explain circumstances where people continue to engage in a line of activity because they find it enjoyable, emotionally rewarding, exciting, etc. When people are personally committed to an activity, they may even overcome significant practical obstacles in order to continue in it.
Personal commitment flows from three sources: (1) positive attitudes toward lines of action, (2) positive attitudes toward others with whom one engages in a line of action, and (3) self-definitions in terms of identities mobilized by lines of action. For example, Sam enjoyed theft, fencing, and scamming and their rewards; he enjoyed the company of other thieves, hustlers, and underworld types; and he valued his identities as a “good thief,” skilled fence, and a “somebody” in the underworld.
Sociologists have long recognized internal as well as external constraints as important influences on decisions and action (Durkheim [1897] 1951) and as potential factors producing continuity in deviance or conventionality (Lemert 1951; Lofland 1969; Reckless 1973). Moral commitment is a particularly important type of internal constraint, and thus is also highly relevant to the subjective acceptability of criminal vs. conventional activity. It is characterized by the perception or experience that one ought to continue a line of action regardless of whether one wants to or has to. Moral commitment has three sources: (1) perceived moral obligations to others with whom one participates in a line of action, (2) internalization of action-specific norms discouraging termination of a line of action once one has already gotten involved in it, and (3) internalization of general cultural values that encourage consistency in lines of action. We discuss moral commitment and its distinctiveness at greater length in Chapter 19.
The differential association/social learning process described earlier potentially entails developing all of these kinds of commitments, and the concept of structural commitment also embeds the individual in contexts of differential social organization such as neighborhoods, families, friends, and other affiliations that influence moral orientations and criminal involvement (these influences, moreover, are dynamic forces that may vary over time and across contexts). While most of our emphasis in this book is on Sam Goodman’s types of commitment to his criminal career, continuity in conformity over the life course is also explainable by the dynamics of structural, personal, and moral commitment to conventional activities, relationships, or institutions.
As in legitimate careers, the building of criminal valuables or commitments tends to be cumulative. These commitments also tend to be interdependent and reciprocal. For example, having one source of structural commitment or investment to crime will tend to increase other sources of structural commitment to crime.
Furthermore, objective factors like criminal opportunity and structural commitment, and subjective factors like criminal motivation, skills, and personal commitment to crime can obviously feed and complement each other. This was certainly the case for Sam. Critical here is the interplay between Sam’s structural and personal commitment to crime. Sam retained a lot of criminal capital or investments in crime in his later career: skills, resourcefulness, favorable attitudes, a good reputation, opportunity structures, and network contacts. Because of this criminal capital, fencing remained very subjectively attractive and rewarding to him, preserving a strong personal commitment to crime.
Sam’s later life also provides a good illustration of the interplay between criminal and conventional commitments. On one hand, Sam Goodman markedly reduced his offending frequency, roles, and seriousness. His later career therefore shows some support for contemporary portraits of desistance (see Benson 2002; Shover 1996; Sampson and Laub 1993). That is, stable conventional work, a stable domestic partnership, transformation of identity, aging, and tiring of the “wear and tear” or “hassles” of criminal life all built sources of structural, personal, and perhaps moral commitment to conventionality, and thus contributed to his criminal slowdown. On the other hand, Sam never fully desisted from crime, but instead consistently dabbled at it, sometimes at a slow pace, but other times at a fairly fast pace. The continuing pushes and pulls of structural and personal commitment to fencing and the underworld versus conventional life seem to be particularly at work in his later career, with the ebbs and flows of his fencing activity. In other words, Sam experienced competing pushes and pulls: the desire for a conventional life as a respectable businessman versus the lingering opportunities, attractions, relationships, and investments surrounding fencing and the underworld.4
Our discussion here focuses on structural and personal commitment. In Chapter 19, we further examine the importance of personal commitment for Sam’s rewards and preferences for crime, and discuss the role of personal and moral commitment in terms of Sam’s apologia for his criminal career.
Structural commitment is about the objective availability of crime. Two of the four sources of structural commitment seem especially important and intertwined in keeping Sam “moonlighting” at fencing in his later career: (1) the availability and attractiveness of criminal vs. conventional alternatives, and (2) hard-to-retrieve investments or “sunk costs” in crime. Sam’s particularly important investments included knowledge, reputation, contacts, and earnings.
We argue that differences in access to crime opportunities, especially safe and profitable ones, play a key role in explaining desistance or continuation in crime. The greater the criminal opportunities that become or remain available, the greater is the inclination to continue in crime. In other words, if older offenders like Sam continue to have attractive criminal alternatives presented to them, they are likely to pursue them, even if they do so intermittently or on a smaller scale than they once did. From the time he was released from prison for the last time until his cancer hit, Sam had ample, relatively lucrative criminal opportunities available to him, often with relatively few risks. From his perspective, it was simply foolish not to take advantage of them.
Relatedly, Sam had invested considerable time, energy, and even money throughout his life acquiring the skills, building the networks, and attending to the business of being a profitable criminal entrepreneur. He had learned the burglary trade inside and out, he had learned what it took to become a successful business fence, and had put in long hours making the contacts and building up the business to make his enterprise work (and rebuilding it after imprisonment). His active investments, in turn, opened up attractive criminal alternatives, and kept them open. Given his personal commitment to crime, which we discuss next, Sam would have thought that it was just plain stupid to waste all his prior experiences and efforts by failing to pursue attractive criminal opportunities when they practically fell in his lap.
This quote from Sam captures these key elements of his structural commitment “pulls” toward crime:
Many times I have wished I was back in it [in Tylersvillel, all the way like it was before fin American City]. To tell you the truth, I would’ve liked to have gotten a younger guy to be the fence but I would be in the background, more supervising. Say Rocky or Kevin ‘cause he has a good head on his shoulders. My knowledge to somebody is worth quite a bit. I put a lot of hours in getting the contacts, running to the auctions and meeting people. Just like if you’d say, “Fuck it, I’m gonna quit teaching. I want to be a fence.” Well, I’d be a great help to you. The contacts, knowing how to get the confidence of someone, to read people. It takes hours and hours, a lot of time consumed to get all that.
On the other hand, the range of roles, legitimate or illegitimate, that some offenders like the Beck boys, a Lemont Dozier, a Danny Turner, or a Chubby could satisfactorily fulfill are limited. They lacked the requisite skills, contacts, and knowledge to execute more exacting forms of thievery or criminal enterprise, and they also tended to be excluded from professional or organized criminal pursuits. Their conventional occupational roles are also reduced because of a stigmatizing criminal history and because of their lack of conventional education or skills. However, such offenders may exhibit continuity as petty thieves, hustlers, low-level drug dealers, errand runners, or hangers-on. The “valuables” in their structural commitment portfolios do not augur well for success in either legitimate or illegitimate pursuits. Instead, their structural commitment circumstances may contribute to “default” life choices, and a survival strategy characterized by fluctuations between less lucrative crime and low-level legitimate jobs.
Structural commitments from opportunities and investments may thus go a long way in explaining continuity in crime among offenders like Sam, and less sustained careers among others who lack such opportunities and investments. For example, some people may very much want to become or stayed involved in particular theft or hustling or racketeering activities, but unless they have been or are able to make contacts with the “right people,” their chances of realizing their ambitions are diminished considerably. Sam encountered any number of thieves and burglars who wanted to make the “big time” through criminal activities. They did not, however, have the criminal capital necessary for involvement on a more sustained and lucrative basis. Prus and Irini (1980:247) found a similar situation among thieves and hustlers. Many of them did not really “make it” in crime, but instead sought the lifestyle they desired and then settled for what seemed the “best available approximation.”
Personal commitment is about the subjective availability of crime, including both the willingness and/or the desire to commit it. In short, fencing and the underworld life remained subjectively acceptable, even desirable, to Sam throughout his life. He never lost the “larceny in his heart.” We single out here how Sam’s personal commitment to crime had three continuously reinforced sources. We later return to Sam’s personal and moral commitment to crime in Chapter 19.
First and most important, Sam maintained positive attitudes toward fencing, burglary, and skilled criminal entrepreneurship throughout his life. These attitudes were partly the product of the differential association—or criminal socialization—processes he participated in earlier in his life. His later life experience perpetuated and reinforced these attitudes. He continued to enjoy fencing, antique fraud, and various scams. Moreover, he was quite good at these things, which further contributed to his enjoyment, since one enjoys what one is good at. He also enjoyed the material rewards—the money and the idea of making and having money. In fact, in Chapter 20, Sam expresses sincere regret that he did not take advantage of the opportunity to “go really big time” and make even more money from criminal enterprise.
Second, Sam maintained ties with and positive attitudes toward other criminal actors. His continuing relationships with people like his burglary partner Jesse, as well as Rocky, Steelbeams, and dozens of other thieves, underworld figures, and semilegitimate businesspeople, were not only network ties that provided and facilitated criminal opportunities, but they were also friendships or at least positive relationships that Sam valued. Furthermore, Sam was proud of his contacts with local organized crime or mafia elements. He held respect and not a little envy for such men. These positive attitudes toward and even friendships with other criminals were also a source of continuity in Sam’s criminal career.
Finally, in his later life, Sam’s definition of himself was still partially tied to a criminal identity. It is true that he did increasingly nurture and value his identity as a legitimate businessman in his later years, but his sense of self was still partially wrapped up in his image of a “good thief,” a successful fence, and an “operator” in the underworld. These remained salient, valued identities to Sam, and they fostered continuity in Sam’s criminal behavior. After all, a reputation as somebody who is “solid” or is a “good safeman” or is a “wheeling and dealing” fence is difficult, if not impossible, to transfer to a conventional world role.
We do not want to overstate Sam’s involvement in crime in later life. We do want to emphasize, however, that he never fully desisted. Relative to earlier years (e.g., his thirties and forties), his criminal activity did drop off substantially. But relative to a standard of conformity, Sam was quite criminally active. We suspect that hardly a week went by that he was not involved in at least some criminal activity: fencing, antique fraud, giving tips to thieves, etc. Furthermore, there were weeks here and there in Sam’s later life when he was very active, running several deals or schemes at once.
Indeed, Sam was hatching schemes while lying in bed with cancer or right up until he died (see the passage in Chapter 20, where Sam bakes porcelain salt & pepper shakers in his oven with coffee grounds to make them look like antiques not long before his death). Several key sources of structural and personal commitment inhibited his full desistance from crime and perpetuated his criminal career, even though it continued at a lower level and smaller scale than in his prime. Overall, Sam’s career and our discussion encourage a more complex view of continuity and desistance in criminal careers than the dichoto-mous view found in some of the criminal-careers literature. We also propose a useful set of conceptual tools, structural, personal, and moral commitment for probing that complexity.
In conclusion, we briefly suggest seven ways that sociological criminology could capitalize on the contributions of this commitment approach:
1. Properly understood, commitment is a processual, dynamic concept. It thus can provide useful keys for understanding criminal-career variation, especially the contingencies, transitions, and turning points involved in maintaining criminal pathways, in changing their criminal behaviors (e.g., slowing down or switching to another crime), or turning away from crime.
2. Commitment helps us better understand how past behavior conditions future behavior. In this regard, commitment dovetails nicely with social learning theory’s notion of criminal reinforcement. Past actions lead to weaker or stronger commitments or “stakes” in criminality (or conformity). Furthermore, commitment helps to explain the old observations of Lemert and Becker that involvement in criminal activity itself may in time produce its own set of causes.
3. The commitment framework we use here recognizes explicitly the individual’s agency in making decisions and life choices (as opposed to a view of people as overly determined by “outside” or “inside” forces, or that they simply respond to associations and events). It can help us better understand criminals’ decisions about their lives and activities, especially in the face of aging and time. The framework views people, including entrepreneurial offenders, as actively involved in transforming their relationships into social capital and their experiences into human capital (conventional or criminal).
4. The commitment framework also helps to integrate concepts from seemingly disparate theories, like social learning/differential association, opportunity, social control, or labeling. Such theoretical integration is something many criminologists see as desirable because it leads to greater parsimony in our concepts and theoretical explanations. That is, the three types of commitment and their sources encompass or imply the ideas indexed by a large array of concepts that are used to explain continuity in crime or conformity, such as path dependence, cumulative advantage or disadvantage, allegiances, stakes, opportunities, attachments, investments, side bets, strategic interests, or incentive structures.
5. The commitment framework is very much a sociological approach. It positions the primary causes of continuity in behavior squarely in social structure, culture, and social interaction, and not stable individual traits. It therefore leads away from models of crime that emphasize pathological individuals, and that thus avoid confronting how crime is woven into the fabric of our society. In fact, one could say that the commitment framework rests on a fairly optimistic view of human nature.
6. Commitments can also be seen in the context of achievement. That is, assessments of potential payoffs or rewards are influenced by the degree of achievement one has enjoyed in either conventional or criminal pursuits in the past. At issue is whether one goes upward, downward, or stays on an even keel. Criminals, like ordinary folk in general, are often motivated (and particularly as they age) not only or so much by greed and the desire to attain more money or status but also by fear of falling below their current positions.
7. We believe this framework provides the seeds for a general theory of crime and desistance. We would call this a “learning-opportunity-commit-ment” conceptual framework, in that it blends themes from social learning and opportunity theories of crime with the three-fold commitment typology.4
We turn now to Sam’s account of his life following his “last fall” when he grappled with “falling back into fencing in a much deeper way.”
1. Johnson’s work in turn builds on and integrates the conceptualizations of commitment by Howard Becker (1960, 1963), Erving Goffman (1967), Amitai Etzioni (1964), and Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1972).
2. The framework incorporates symbolic interactionist conceptions centering on the dialectical relationship between choice and constraint, or agency and structure. It is thus compatible with Giddens’ theory of structuration and his notion of “duality of structure,” as well as Bourdieu’s (1977) conceptions of “field” and “habitus.” As Hall (1997 and Martin (2003) describe, interactionism, structuration theory, and field theory view structure (whether at the micro-, meso-, or macrolevels) as both constraining and enabling. Furthermore, all three theories hold that actors’ decisions and actions are constrained by external structures and internalized norms, but they also emphasize that human agency constructs, reproduces, strategically manipulates within, and changes those constraints.
3. In addition to linking with explicit uses of commitment in the criminological literature (e.g., as a “stake in conformity” in social control theory, or as entrenched involvement in deviance in the social learning and labeling traditions), the framework we apply here also implicitly incorporates or links with many related concepts bandied about in research and theory on criminal careers, such as investments, path dependence, strategic interests, or social capital (including criminal social capital). The concept of continuity in behavior over time and factors that explain it are also of obvious relevance to life course perspectives on criminal involvement [see Ulmer (2000) and Ulmer and Spencer (1999) for extended discussions].
4. Another intriguing possibility, but one beyond the scope of our discussion to explore, is to examine the potential relationship between the threefold commitment framework and rational choice theory. Additionally, it would be equally useful to explore the mutual contributions between the commitment framework and the soci-ology of emotions. Research should investigate the likely important role emotions play in different kinds of commitment, and their sources, and in decision-making about whether to persist in or terminate a line of action. Johnson’s work has briefly explored these points in the context of research on personal relationships, but so far no one has done so for criminology.