Ebbs and Flows of Criminal Careers
In previous chapters, we examined the trajectory of Sam Goodman’s criminal career in burglary and fencing. In particular, Chapters 11 and 12 centered around the theme of Sam’s later, “moonlighting” phase of his criminal career, and discussed the notion of desistance. Sam’s offending declined in scale during this later phase, but we described a mix of rewards, investments, and stakes in fencing that, together, help explain why he never desisted completely.
Sam’s narrative in Chapter 18 addresses pathways into and out of crime, as well as specialization vs. versatility in criminal offending and careers. Sam’s narrative also suggests a pattern of early desistance for “ordinary” property criminals but persistence, with shifts in the type and scale of offending, for a relatively smaller subset of criminal entrepreneurs.
Current treatments of criminal careers have made many useful contributions to our understanding of criminality over the life course. These include improved understanding of types of career trajectories for some kinds of offenders (Blumstein et al. 1986; D’Unger et al. 1998), recognition of both stable criminal propensity and changes in criminality across the life course, better understanding of the careers of street offenders and “bottom-barrel” thieves and hustlers (Jacobs 1999), and to a lesser degree, the careers of mid-level offenders (Shover 1996). But life in general and the world of crime in particular are far more complex and have more “gray areas” than is often recognized in the contemporary literature on criminal careers.
In this commentary, we offer a continuum of ideal types of specialist vs. generalist offenders. Then, we briefly address the rationality of Sam’s criminal activity. After that, we further discuss how Sam’s experience suggests support for themes from labeling theory, as he describes the effects of labeling and doing time on his opportunity structures, sense of self, attitudes, and behavior. We next address themes of continuity and change in crime across the life course, and detail some lessons Sam’s experience and social world teach us about criminal careers and social worlds. We then engage in a critical reading of theories emphasizing developmental damage as the major cause of persistent offending, especially Moffitt’s two-path theory of adolescent limited vs. life-course-persistent offenders. We end our commentary with a listing of what we believe are key empirical and conceptual distinctions to be made between money-oriented crimes and criminals.
Insights from differential association, as well as social learning theory as expanded by Akers, help us to understand dimensions of Sam’s narrative that have to do with versatility and specialization in offending. Both versatility and specialization are congruent with, and in fact predicted by, contemporary differential association/social learning theory (which incorporates notions of opportunity). The key factors in producing either versatility or specialization are (1) differential access to messages and opportunities that encourage or discourage either one or (2) differential payoffs across available criminal opportunities. Switching from crime A to crime B tells us less about the kinds of individual offenders that exist (e.g., “amoral,” “low self control” or “unstable temperament”) than about messages, opportunities, and offender identities (Tremblay and Morselli 2000). Below, we describe some factors that may contribute to offender versatility on one hand, and specialization on the other.
Versatility in crime is often described as evidence for stable individual traits of offenders, such as low self control, developmental deficits, or unstable temperament. However, we can think of four main explanations for criminal versatility besides such individual traits:
Some criminal subcultural lifestyles may be conducive to involvement in a variety of offenses, at least for some offenders.
Transference of skills and contacts—from one kind of crime or setting to another, especially to related kinds of criminal activities.
“Larceny in the heart”—since deviance is defined by conventional standards of behavior, some overlap is expected between general deviance or crime and any particular kind of deviance.
Subcultural norms may exist both for and against criminal specialization.
First, the lifestyles of criminal subculture as whole (Jacobs 1999), and specific types of crime in particular, involve access to settings and people involved in other kinds of deviant activities. A kind of contagion effect may occur in which involvement in one type of crime feeds into involvement in another. This contributes to versatility, or involvement in multiple forms of crime or antisocial behavior. Street criminals in particular are often part of the “partying scene” (Hagan 1991; Jacobs 1999) and come in contact with persons on society’s fringe much more than the average person. However, this factor may not be as important a force for versatility among seasoned, skilled offenders like Sam or Jesse. Sam and his ilk tend to be older, to “run with a different crowd,” and to be far less involved in the party scene than younger, “ordinary thieves.”
Second, some criminal skills and contacts may be transferable from one type of crime to another, which makes a variety of crimes objectively possible, and which encourages versatility. For example, skills and contacts necessary for successful burglary may also be helpful (as they were for Sam) for success in fencing, and the skills and contacts necessary for success in fencing might easily transfer to other kinds of criminal enterprise, such as drug dealing or racketeering.
The subjective acceptability or willingness to offend may also be transferable. For example, “larceny in the heart,” or willingness to violate conventional standards in one area (e.g., burglary), sometimes indicates willingness to violate standards in another area (e.g., fencing, rackets). Having the heart for one kind of crime will contribute to the heart for another type of crime, leading to some versatility. Conversely, one can have the heart for one type of crime but lose it, or not have it to begin with for another type of crime, thus leading to specialization. One’s rationalizations and neutralizations may also foster specialization. Some may try to maintain their respectability by pointing to even less respectable behaviors, crimes in which they do not engage. Sam repeatedly did this (see Chapter 20), as did Jesse and many of the merchants to whom Sam sold stolen goods.
In addition, people can come to define themselves in terms of specific criminal identities, which is in turn a source of personal commitment to those specific identities. That is, individuals may define themselves in terms of a particular niche in the criminal world, and define themselves in a favorable light in terms of a particular criminal role. For example, one might take pride in being a burglar as opposed, for example, to being (just) a shoplifter. Sam’s associates Jesse and Rocky are examples of such specialized identification.
Norms and status evaluations in some underworld subcultures encourage specialization, while in other parts of the underworld they do not. For example, an all-around hustler or jack-of-all-trades offender is an admired status in some underworld circles, as is a member or associate of cosa nostra who is known as and sees himself as an entrepreneur on the prowl to make money any way he can. On the other hand, a specialized skill or role can also yield high status and value in some criminal subcultures. For example, there is the hack-ground operator (which Sam became to some extent in his later career), who may support or direct a variety of criminal activities. This underworld role is played especially by older offenders who “mature” into the position, at which time being a background operator becomes their specialty.
Mafioso-type criminal entrepreneurs, like Sam’s associates Angelo and Louie, fit both the generalist and specialist distinctions to some extent. They may be better characterized as specialists, in order to distinguish them from the jack-of-all-trades or “snatch-and-grab anything” offender that typifies many street and ordinary criminals. That is, Mafioso-types often specialize as background operators in the context of being entrepreneurs on the prowl, to more or less make money any way they can.
Finally, skills and contacts cannot be infinitely stretched, and while a “good thief” or criminal entrepreneur may be involved in a variety of criminal activities, one can probably only be really good at one or a few types of crime. Similarly, criminal opportunities are constrained by existing contacts and reputations, and these may channel offenders into one or a few types of offending. These factors can produce specialization.
A central point we draw from Confessions is that current discussions often confuse rather than clarify the specialization versus versatility issue, particularly as it was conceptualized by Edwin Sutherland. Sutherland argues that offenders have a line (or main type of crime) for a given period of their careers. He did not argue that this line never changes, that offenders never switch to other kinds of crimes. In view of Sam’s narratives, it appears that criminals tend to move from one line or niche to another within the underworld, according to their tastes, abilities, and opportunities.
Furthermore, many studies and reviews of this issue exist, but they repeatedly rely on only a handful of datasets as the basis for documentation. The issue of versatility vs. specialization is usually examined using arrest statistics, other official statistics, or self-report surveys of criminal activity. Such data are typically limited to juveniles or young adults.
This presents several problems for examining the issue of specialization/ versatility, and these problems would create a bias toward finding more versatility than probably exists. First, younger and less experienced offenders are less likely to specialize, as Sutherland clearly recognized. Second, given the lifestyles of many offenders and their elevated risks of detection (e.g., they are under parole surveillance, on police suspect lists), one would expect some crime mixing in the arrest or conviction records of these offenders. This does not mean, however, that such offenders do not have a main kind of crime that is their bread and butter. For example, if a burglar like Sam’s associate Bowie were arrested and convicted for an assault or for using cocaine (and perhaps not arrested for burglary), arrest records would indicate that Bowie did not specialize in burglary at all, when in fact it was his main criminal activity.
Further, one recent analysis concludes that specialization is more common than many criminologists recognize, even among juvenile offenders (Ryan 1998:86-87). Ryan (1998) argues that his and other research finds that offending patterns of youth are more likely to be patterned and specialized than random and versatile. That is, juveniles tend to engage in primarily one set of related offenses. For example some specialized in “violent and robbery offenses,” others specialized in “burglary and other property offenses,” and still others specialized in status offenses (ibid. pp. 86-87).
Examination of criminal careers up close raises several questions. How do offenders mainly make their livelihood or at least earn a decent income from crime, and is their income from one line of crimes or from a variety? If the bulk of one’s offending is for a specific crime, or one closely related to it, but one occasionally commits another type of offense, does this indicate specialization or versatility? Jesse committed burglary almost exclusively over his entire lengthy career, but he still might occasionally buy or sell stolen goods, or cheat on his income tax. Was he therefore not a criminal specialist? What about Sam, was he a specialist or a generalist? He was certainly more of a generalist than Jesse or Bowie. But even Sam essentially had two or three closely related lines of criminal activity: burglary, fencing, and occasionally conning and antique fraud.
Further, is versatility in offending defined in terms of a very specific offense, or is it defined more broadly to include nearly specific or closely aligned offenses (e.g., burglary, truck hijackings, maybe even auto theft and breaking into motor vehicles)? In addition, besides patterns of actual offending, specialization also involves self-identification as a burglar, a car thief, a cocaine dealer, etc. This self-identification with a specific criminal role should be treated as much more central to the debate about criminal specialization vs. versatility than it currently is.
Sutherland himself depicts professional thieves as developing a preferred line of crime over a period of time. By specialization, Sutherland did not mean that the offender only commits one type of crime over the entire life course, and neither do we.
Below, we propose a continuum of specialization and versatility:
The Complete Specialist: These offenders specialize in only one line of criminal involvement for a lengthy period of time. The main example from Sam’s narratives would be Jesse.
The Medium Specialist: These offenders have a main line of crime, a type of crime that is their “main thing,” though they will engage in other kinds of crime occasionally. Examples include Sam during the peak of his burglary career, or Rocky, who was primarily a burglar but interspersed burglary with drug dealing as a mid-level importer. The older Beck boys also are examples of medium specialists.
The Medium Generalist: These offenders engage in a variety of crimes as opportunity presents, but consider some crimes “off limits.” Examples include the youngest of the Beck boys, and Mickey.
The Complete Generalist: These offenders engage in virtually any kind of criminal activity. The key example here would be Lemont Dozier.
Complete specialists and complete generalists are probably rare, with most offenders being medium specialists or medium generalists. Such offenders would engage in some variety of crime as opportunity presented itself, but have clear-cut preferences and identities for committing some crimes more than others. In addition, there are “background operators,” some of whom specialize and some who do not. For example, Angelo would be a generalist background operator, while Sam was a specialist background operator in the later stages of his career.
This continuum is consistent with Sutherland’s earlier statements. Differential association and social learning theories predict both specialization and versatility in crime, along with variations within and between offender groups. Furthermore, we propose that the degree of criminal specialization is strongly correlated with:
Age, with older offenders tending to specialize more than juveniles or young adults.
Underworld niche or status, with more professional offenders as well as moonlighters tending to specialize more than the kind of “disorganized” offenders described by John Irwin (1970).
Category of crime, with more specialization among those who commit money-oriented crimes than for other types of crime. Many offenders are willing to commit almost any kind of money-oriented crime, but other crimes (e.g., sex offenses, etc.) might be off limits.
Race and ethnicity. For example, white thieves seem to specialize more than black thieves.
In addition, we note that some offenders specialize as being background operators. These background operators, in turn, may be generalists, operating behind the scenes of many different kinds of criminal enterprises, or specialists who focus on only one or a few related kinds of criminal enterprise.
We agree with Akers (1998) that rational choice and social exchange theories are consistent with and actually are a component of the more general theory of differential association/social learning. Criminal behavior is committed in expectation of results anticipated and valued by offenders (excitement, money, possessions, power, admiration of peers, the defense of interests). Sam’s offending certainly exhibits this kind of instrumental rationality throughout his career. In fact, some kinds of criminal decision-making, like that of Sam Goodman, resemble the kind of rational “strategic analysis” described by Cusson’s (1983) discussion of decision-making.
As we argue in the Chapters 11 and 19, offenders like Sam likely continue in crime (even as moonlighters later in life) because they judge it to be rational. In fact, an individual’s assessment of his/her structural and personal commitments presupposes at least a basic rationality in decision-making (though not necessarily instrumental rationality). As with most realms of human behavior, this kind of rationality is bounded (March and Simon 1958) by limitations such as lack of information, errors in judgment, and availability of attainable options as well as nonrational factors such as personal preferences and moral limitations (e.g., there were activities that Sam refused to engage in, like drug dealing, because of his moral qualms about them, no matter how profitable they were or how available the opportunities were).
For Sam, the opportunities were plentiful, the risks were manageable, the rewards were attractive (e.g., money, excitement, pride in his skill), and the criminal behavior was a part of his sense of self. At the height of his career, Sam (and many of his co-offenders) believed he would gain an attractive income from crime, would not get caught, would not serve much prison time if he got caught (e.g., because his business employs workers who provide economic support to their families), and he was not afraid to serve time because life in prison, while unpleasant, was not threatening to him.
We also reiterate our previous arguments that opportunity is often key for understanding criminal careers and desistance—many offenders may be “driven out” of crime by a lack of attractive opportunities. Alternatively, lack of opportunities for one kind of crime may drive offenders out of that crime into another kind, where pastures look greener. After all, it is hardly remarkable that criminals—like conventional workers—might reach a point in their lives when they seek less arduous careers, choose to move on to less demanding activities, and seek opportunities in related fields (e.g., switching from burglary to fencing, like Sam Goodman did).
It is something of a moot point whether “labeling” and the imputation of self-characteristics (e.g., “I’m a thief”) initiates or causes criminal acts or the furtherance of a criminal career. Our focus is more on the effects of labeling and official sanctioning on self-definitions, attitudes, and participation in conventional society, and less on the issue of whether labeling in itself causes crime or chronic offending (see Lemert 1972:81).
On the one hand, prison was far from a pleasant experience for Sam, and it was not one he really wanted to repeat. The prospect of returning to prison caused Sam significant concern in his later years in at least three ways. First, prison or “doing time” is part of how the criminal justice system “wears down” offenders, as Shover (1983) aptly describes. Sam simply grew tired of the hassles and hardships that another long stint in prison would bring. Relatedly, well into middle age, Sam did riot want his remaining physical capabilities (crime-related and otherwise) to be wasted as he languished in prison. Third, repeatedly getting caught and sent to prison can lead to a “loser” reputation in the underworld, to a loss of prospective partners or accomplices, and to an overall rejection by the criminal community—especially its better elements. One would then have restricted opportunities for pursuing safe and profitable criminal activities as a result.
In several ways, Sam’s prison experiences fostered increased sources of commitment to crime (especially structural and personal), for example, by increasing his criminal capital. First, Sam described prison as a “school for crime.” Sam’s narrative in Chapter 4 and elsewhere described the many skills he learned from “good thieves” while in prison, such as safecracking, planning jobs, avoiding detection, and how to treat crime as a business. He also developed less tangible skills from his interactions in prison, such as a sharpened larceny sense, and how to read and “size up” others involved in crime. Second and equally important were the criminal contacts Sam made in prison, which led to snowballing criminal network contacts once he got out. As Sam said, “the name carries,” and his reputation preceded him to American City and, later, Tylersville. Sam’s extensive network of criminal ties would probably not have developed, at least not as easily and elaborately, without his prison reputation and experience.
Third, Sam’s prison experiences (and his learning of the inmate code) reinforced norms operative in both street and thief subcultures. For example, prison reinforced to Sam several lessons. These included that one must take care of oneself and stand up for oneself, one must grab whatever one can, however one can, and one must settle differences with others without recourse to outside authorities. Prison also reinforced and expanded upon Sam’s understanding of the underworld and its pecking order.
Fourth, it is well known that punitive social reactions to crime can erode offenders’ stakes in conformity (Lemert 1951; Braithwaite 1989). Going to prison has negative effects on later conventional employment opportunities and other conventional roles, and these negative effects can add up to a significant cumulative disadvantage in the conventional world (Sampson and Laub 1997). As Sam says at one point, “I did my time but I’m still paying.” Furthermore, after one has been sent to prison once, the concerns about the disapproval of family and friends are diminished. Having “done time” damages one’s conventional reputation and status. Once this damage is done, there is less to fret about in terms of additional stigma.
Fifth, once people have already done serious prison time, they tend to no longer fear prison the way a first-timer would [see Jones and Schmid’s (2000) very fine study of the social, psychological, and emotional changes that follow from a period of imprisonment]. This is clearly evident from Sam. Sam did not like prison, and did not want to return, but he knew that he could manage it both physically and psychologically. In other words, after several bouts of juvenile and adult imprisonment, Sam had learned, in his words, “how to do easy time.” In fact, the correctional literature tells us that some not only leam not to fear prison but find their “niche” in prison and are more comfortable there than on the outside.
Finally, repeated, negative social reaction to deviance tends to be accompanied by a change in view of society and of legal authorities (see Lemert 1972; Sherman 1993; Ulmer 1994), and this certainly was true of Sam. Sam’s experience in and out of prison taught him to see most police as corrupt, and most people as willing to take an edge (“Most people have larceny in their heart”). Sam developed a thorough sense of cynicism toward the criminal justice system and what he perceived as its injustice, unfairness, and inconsistency. Relatedly, even though Sam took pride in his skill and status as a criminal, he was also quite aware of his marginality and his estrangement from the larger society. For example, Sam only truly felt comfortable with other ex-cons, often felt quite lonely, and was only really close to a handful of people in his life.
Clearly, a variety of opportunity structures and social learning processes, as well as personality factors, produced Sam’s criminality. However, it is equally clear that, in Sam’s case, there are several ways in which formal and informal social reaction to his offending entrenched his commitments to crime, his interpersonal involvements with other criminals, and thus his criminal capital.
We sketch here some cautious implications of Confessions for evaluating current developments in the study of criminal careers and crime across the life course in hopes of encouraging more research and discussion on the topic. We want to emphasize strongly that our commentary here focuses on and mainly applies to careers and life course variation in property crimes and crimes of economic gain. Careers and life course variation in violence, aggression, or other antisocial behaviors are likely different from crimes of economic gain, but prior literature often entangles them together in a way that we feel is unwarranted (e.g., Delisi 2003; Wilson and Herrnstein 1985; Gottfredson and Hirshi 1990; Moffitt 1997). The lessons we draw below from Confessions about criminal careers and the life course may or may not apply to violence or antisocial behavior not oriented toward material gain.
We find that much in Confessions supports some prior ethnographic research, such as Shover’s (1996) studies of the ebbs and flows of property criminals’ careers, or Irwin’s (1970) discussion of “disorganized” and “organized” offender types. However, we find that lessons from Confessions clash with other depictions of criminal careers, such as those of Moffitt, who emphasize individual maladjustment and neuropsychological deficits as responsible for crime and its variation across the life course.
The common element among life course models is to explain similarities, differences, and changes in criminal behavior at different ages, stages of development, or periods of life. We agree with Akers and Sellers’s (2004:285) assessment that life course criminology is not a new perspective. That is, it has not introduced any new explanatory variables, nor has it produced a new general theory of crime. Rather, it represents ways of pulling in concepts and ideas from existing theories at different ages or stages of life. In the sense noted above, Sutherland’s differential association theory is a life course perspective, especially when combined with Akers’s social learning theory.
Stability in criminal propensity and change in criminality over the life course are both empirically possible (Akers 1998). On one hand, delinquent behavior developed in early childhood may persist throughout life (Sutherland 1947:7). In other words, exposure to criminal influences in early life can have a long-lasting influence on behavior. Also, exposure to criminal influences over prolonged periods of time has a greater effect on behavior than exposure over more limited periods. Both of these patterns, especially the latter, can be seen in the life of Sam Goodman.
On the other hand, criminal careers empirically exhibit both consistency and change, as well as key turning points. As abundant literature shows (see the review in Ulmer and Spencer 1999), many pathways exist into and out of crime across the life course, and criminal propensity is not inherently stable over time. Some of the themes from Sam’s narrative suggest that much change in criminal careers stems from variations over time in differential association processes and in access to attractive criminal opportunities and networks. Furthermore, labeling processes can heavily influence deviant career trajectories, as can luck, and situational and other factors. In addition, the original causes of behavior may not be the same as the later causes that sustain or entrench criminal behavior. There is considerable ebb and flow in (most) criminal careers as offenders adjust to shifts in tastes, abilities, and opportunities. Furthermore, these shifts are often age-related.
Sam’s narratives suggest a broadening of the focus of criminal careers research. Sophisticated quantitative studies of variations in criminal career trajectories like that by D’Unger et al. (1998), well-done and informative ethnographies like Jacobs’ work (1999), and overviews of the literature like that by Benson (2002) are valuable, but tend to focus on lower-level or lower status street offenders (Shover’s [1996; 1983] work is something of an exception to this tendency). This focus ignores empirical material on offenders like Sam, including chronic and serious offenders, whose careers, networks, opportunities, and commitment to crime as a way of life are probably quite different than those of the ordinary, “bottom of the barrel” street offenders that are the focus of most criminology.
In addition to The Fence, studies by Adler and Adler (1983, 1993), Bryant (1974), Letkemann (1973), Prus and Sharper (1977), Klockars (1974), Miller (1978), Ulmer (1994), and Conklin (1994) depart from the usual focus on bottom-level street offenders. In addition, the 1990 Pennsylvania Crime Commission Decade Report on Organized Crime essentially identified and provided mini-case studies of a very sizable number of racketeers, illicit entrepreneurs, professional criminals, moonlighting specialists, and background operators involved in gambling, loansharking, drug-dealing, the sex trade, theft, fencing stolen goods, political corruption, and other illicit scams and hustles. Most had lengthy criminal careers going to back to adolescence or early adulthood, but did not necessarily have much in the way of an official criminal record. Most were between their midforties and midsixties, but some continued to be criminally active and practiced their criminal trades well into their seventies. Similar findings are reported in some analyses of chronic or systematic involvement in lucrative kinds of white-collar criminality (Clinard 1952; Shapiro 1984).
Most criminologists working in the life course tradition ignore almost completely a substantial portion of chronic, serious offenders. These chronic offenders, as reflected in the material from Sam, include white-collar offend-ers and business merchants, secondhand dealers, professional thieves, racke-teers, and corrupt public officials (as well as a variety of “former” thieves and “ordinary joe blow types” who moonlight at crime). By contrast, Sampson and Laub’s (1993) reanalysis of Glueck’s data is sophisticated and valuable, but limited in scope. The Glueck’s data came from very disadvantaged and “cruelly” abused boys who also were mostly “bottom-barrel” street offenders.1 No matter how sophisticated Sampson and Laub’s analysis, it cannot overcome this limitation in skewed sampling, and the resulting problems for generaliz-ability to other kinds of offenders. What is remarkable about their results is the high percentage of these deprived, abused boys who eventually desisted, apparently because of adult social bonds such as marriage and good jobs. However, an alternative explanation is that these men may have been so lacking in criminal skills and sophistication (“losers”), that they owe their desistance to the lack of opportunity to do otherwise (i.e., they were lacking in opportunity for profitable crime or access to networks of reliable or skillful co-offenders).
In any case, the key question we want to raise is whether, or to what extent, findings from contemporary studies of criminal career offending can be generalized to the full population of chronic offenders like Sam Goodman (and a sizable number of his colleagues or co-offenders). To that end, we present some key points from Confessions about criminal careers.
According to many prevailing views, criminal careers begin in early childhood, and have distinct beginnings and endings, and that chronic offending (why one begins and persists) is a function of some personal trait or deficit, such as low IQ, impulsive personality, low self-control, or low self-esteem. Criminal careers researchers differ about how much social experiences, events, and life circumstances influence the onset, unfolding, and ending of a criminal career. A chronic offender or career criminal is often said to be characterized by the following:
social rejection by (conventional) peers;
academic failure;
severe neurological deficits (latent individual traits) such as low intelli-gence, hyperactivity, impulsive personality, and emotional disturbance; and
early onset of offending (stealing, physical aggression, lying) beginning at a very early age (e.g., as early as age two and almost always by age eight). In effect, these theories predict that persistent adult offenders seem to nearly always possess early childhood risk factors.
We focus on what has become perhaps the most popular of these developmental views of criminal careers today, the work of Moffitt. We also suggest this perspective’s major tenets and their implications may not be fully understood by many criminologists who apparently espouse it. We invite readers to consider the tenets of this developmental theory, and consider whether they agree with those tenets in light of the information we have presented in Confessions.
Moffitt’s theory draws from concepts in neuropsychology and developmental psychology, as well as from a long history in theoretical criminology (dating back as far as the nineteenth century) that attributes persistent criminality to biological inferiority and inherited deficiencies. Moffitt’s theory proposes a taxonomy distinguishing between two types of criminal offenders that represent two distinct causal paths for crime: adolescent-limited and life-course-persistent offenders. Adolescent-limited offenders engage in antisocial or delinquent behavior in their teenage years, desist in their late teens or early adulthood, and probably display no more neuropsychological problems than the overall population. Adolescent-limited offenders are the most numerous type, and most of their misbehavior is due to a “maturity gap” between their adolescent status and desired adult roles and rewards. In addition, adolescent limited offenders may imitate the rebellious or antisocial behavior of life-course-persistent offenders in order to obtain adult rewards (e.g., money, sex, drugs, autonomy) and appear mature in the eyes of peers.
Life-course-persistent offenders represent a relatively small portion of any given birth cohort, but are said to account for a large proportion of antisocial behavior and crime. They display early onset of antisocial behavior due to neuropsychological deficits such as low intelligence, negative emotionality, hyperactivity, and/or impulsive personality. That is, life-course-persistent offenders are marked by behavioral problems as children and begin delinquent involvement at an early age because of neuropsychological problems. In interaction with environmental factors, these deficits result in social maladjustment. For example, low intelligence or weak self control causes difficulties in school, which in turn interfere with the development of conventional human and social capital, which in turn produces disadvantage later in life.
In particular, these neurological deficits can combine with family dysfunction to entrench antisocial behavior patterns, including crime. Peer influence for the life-course-persistent offenders is said to be slight, though it may be strong among adolescent-limited offenders. Community-level factors such as poverty and disorder are said to have little direct effect on their behavior.
The notion of adolescent-limited offending is not distinctive to Moffitt’s theory. The belief that most delinquents do not continue offending into adulthood has been around as long as criminology itself, and is known as the “maturation effect,” or “aging out of crime.” Often, the paths to adolescent “misbehavior” involve prodding by or imitation of delinquent peers, or else conflict with parents or school. They do not become career offenders in adulthood. This viewpoint has been around almost as long as criminology itself (see Lemert 1951).
What is distinctive about the theory are these tenets about life-course-persistent, career offenders:
1. Persistent or career offenders “suffer from” neuropsychological deficits, i.e., are biologically inferior. That is, something already present at or before birth fundamentally preprograms a developmental sequence toward becoming a life-course persistent offender.
2. Life-course-persistent, career offenders are universally early-onset offenders and manifest multiple behavioral problems as children and later as adults.
3. This and similar stable criminal propensity theories imply a distinctive image of human nature and of criminals. That is, “problem” children are bad, they are bad in many ways, they have always been bad, and they always will be bad.2 We will return to this point more forcefully in Chapter 19.
This adolescent-limited vs. life-course-persistent distinction is Moffitt’s answer to the widely accepted finding that most antisocial children and/or adolescent delinquents do not become antisocial adults or adult criminals. If Moffitt and others who espouse similar stable-criminal-propensity theories are correct, then the most chronic or persistent offenders should manifest the lowest self-control and the greatest neuropsychological deficits.
We note two things in connection with this prediction. First, the evidence for biological and early childhood effects on criminal behavior later in life is relatively weak (see Akers and Sellers 2004:284). According to the broader focus of the life course perspective, it makes sense that this would be the case, as Benson argues:
Theoretically the assumption that adult behavior can be predicted in early childhood flows against the central premises of the life course approach. The life course approach is based on premises that development is an ongoing process that unfolds over the entire lifespan, and development involves interactions between the individual and the environment. . . . Predicting the life course of an individual based only on factors present at an early age ignores all of the causal factors that come into play later. (2002:14)
Furthermore, careful reviews of the empirical literature question whether childhood “risk factors” explain much variation in either antisocial behavior or crime later in life. Lipsey and Derzen’s (1998) review and meta-analysis of thirty-four longitudinal studies of the development of antisocial behavior covering the childhood-adolescent period is especially instructive. The list of risk factors that they found to be relatively poor predictors of serious delinquency (all of which are emphasized by developmental damage views in criminology) include: prior problem behavior (other than offending and substance use), development history, medical problems, psychological condition or deficit (including high activity level, impulsiveness, psychopathology), family characteristics (including abusive parents, broken home, parent-child relations in childhood, and family management strategies), and peer rejection.
Instead, the best predictors turn out to be (Lipsey and Derzen 1998; Farring-ton 2003): prior criminal offending (general offense, substance use); peer influence and parental criminality; structural position or background factors like gender, poverty or low family economic status, and minority status; lifestyle (including substance use); and prosocial values and socialization (i.e., messages unfavorable to violation of law). All theories of crime, of course, posit the significance of prior behavior or criminal history as a fairly strong predictor of future criminality. What is important for our discussion here is that the “good predictors” of criminality listed above are strongly consistent with differential association/social learning and the learning-opportunity-commitment framework that we have outlined in previous chapters.
Second, as we stated earlier, according to the logic of Moffitt’s developmental theory, the most chronic, persistent offenders should most manifest neuropsychological deficits and early onset. The material in Confessions is incompatible with this prediction. We do not have neurological data on any of the research subjects in this book, but our impressions are that the biographies, behaviors, and social relationships of Sam, Jesse, Rocky, Steelbeams, Bowie, Angelo, and others do not seem to show evidence of neuropsychological deficits or early-onset maladjustment.3 We find little suggestion of obvious neuropsychological deficits (including “developmental damage”) among even the “run of the mill” or mid-level offenders like the Beck brothers, Lemont Dozier, Mickey, Danny Turner, or Andy. And it is glaringly apparent that the most persistent offenders in Confessions, like Sam, Jesse, Angelo, Phil, Rocky, Steelbeams, Bowie, Puddy, Woody and others are the least likely to manifest low self-control, neuropsychological deficits, or other maladies like early problems in school or peer rejection.
Our point is not that developmental or other stable criminal propensity theories are completely inaccurate, but that they may be much more limited in scope than they imply. We have no doubt that some persistent, long-term offenders accurately fit the picture painted by these theories in terms of neuropsychological deficit, early onset, or low self-control. However, Confessions suggests that these perspectives are seriously limited in that they may not apply to a substantial and important set of life-course-persistent offenders.
In conclusion, we want to suggest some key empirical and conceptual distinctions between crimes and criminals that will help criminology to better sort through the confusion that surrounds debates about specialization versus versatility in crime, the skill level and loyalty or lack thereof of criminal offenders, and persistence or desistance in crime. These distinctions can serve as guides for theory and analysis aimed at bringing about a fuller understanding of the patterns and dynamics of criminal careers and illegal enterprise. All of these distinctions are found throughout Sam’s narratives—they are distinctions he himself made, and they ordered his perception of the many different types of offenders he encountered.
Our focus is on money-oriented crimes, although its application may be relevant for crime more generally. In the real world, of course, gradations and mixtures across our distinctions will often exist. Most real offenders, like real people more generally, just do not fall neatly into uniform patterns. We offer the following six distinctions.
1. Juvenile and adult offending and offenders are quite different. Sam made this distinction repeatedly whenever he talked about thieves, crime, or the underworld. This distinction is an obvious one, but it is often ignored in crim-inological discussions of versatility versus specialization in offending, skill levels of offenders, degree of planning of offenses, criminal rewards, scope of criminal opportunities, and commitments to crime and/or conventionality.
2. Key differences exist between strictly predatory or more market-oriented or entrepreneurial types of crime. Predatory offenses (e.g., simple robberies) are much less business-like (if they are business-like at all) than market oriented crimes. Also, predatory crimes do not require an offender to build an ongoing network or working environment in which an efficient use of contacts enhances monetary outcomes. Predatory crimes are more likely to be event-based and may often also require the temporary but close, co-present involvement of co-participants.
Market-oriented or enterprise-type crimes are more consistent with businesslike environments in that they often are designed around transactional settings and support networks, where co-offenders may participate in ongoing criminal activities or enterprises either directly or indirectly at a distance. These kinds of crimes require some level of interpersonal and business skills (especially on part of central individuals or group leaders).
3. Relatedly, there is a tendency today for criminologists to focus only on the discrete criminal event, rather than recognizing that the event is often part of a sustained involvement or a chain of decisions and circumstances. This discrete event-based focus, however, contains a bias in favor of assessing an offender’s actions as being relatively unskilled, impulsive, and as providing only short-term benefits. Instead, we suggest that criminologists more fully locate the criminal event in its trans-situational context, and in its interactional history. A crime may look impulsive, present-oriented, and requiring of little skill when viewed as a discrete event. However, that same crime might sometimes be part of a larger chain of events where “one thing led to another,” and it might be part of an ongoing relationship with criminal associates, and the offender might possess other criminal skills that the present event did not require.
4. Market-oriented crime styles of ghetto blacks and whites appear to differ. Sam’s narratives suggest that black ghetto hustling is more “dog eat dog” or “anything goes” compared to white market-oriented crime or hustling. While the exploitation of others is a central feature of much criminal entre-preneurship and hustling more generally, the black ghetto hustler role seems to involve a more significant lack of reciprocity with other hustlers, and less “playing by the rules” than characterizes the white hustler role (and perhaps of some other race-ethnic groups like Hispanics). Such a distinction is important for understanding, for example, the degree of offender specialization (i.e., ghetto hustlers will tend to have less specialization) or loyalty to an underworld code (ghetto hustlers will tend to show less adherence to such a code).
Other literature also argues that black hustlers or thieves appear to be less tied in their hustling activities to an ideology of loyalty and group norms than to financial incentives and other forms of self-interest (see Malcolm X 1965; Liebow 1967; Anderson 1990; Jacobs 1999). Relevant here is Anderson’s (1990) characterization of ghetto crime and social interaction as often involving a constant struggle for respect in which individuals try to gain symbolic status advantages by attacking or challenging or exploiting others. Similarly, Jacobs (1999) describes ghetto hustlers and drug dealers as clever men (and a few women) with few norms and rules. Trust is rare and there is little in the way of collective obligations.
5. As we described at length in Chapters 5 and 13, it is important to distinguish between offenders on the basis of their status in the underworld. The careers, skills, opportunity structures, and commitment portfolios of “doper thieves,” “asshole thieves,” or “roughhouse thieves,” will be quite different from other offenders, such as mid-level to high-level thieves, as well as criminal entrepreneurs.
6. As we mentioned in connection with offender specialization versus generality, it is important to distinguish between upfront offenders versus background operators.
7. As we discussed in Chapter 11, it is important to distinguish between full-time career offenders versus moonlighting career offenders. Moonlighters can be further distinguished on the basis of frequency of involvement and the degree of planning and risk involved. For some, moonlighting at crime is fairly constant and is done on a careful, planned basis. For others it is more sporadic, but still planned and done carefully. For still others it is sporadic and relatively unplanned and risky. Moonlighting can also fluctuate between periods of inactivity and high activity.
Finally, we draw on the material in Confessions to suggest the following points for broadening our understanding of criminal careers and the criminal landscape, and as a corrective against the overgeneralization of stable criminal propensity theories like Moffitt’ s developmental perspective.
Stability in deviant behavior over the life-course is more likely produced by cumulative commitment processes stemming from stable social relationships and social contexts than by individual predispositions. Furthermore, we are attracted to Lewontin’s (2000) argument that all human behavior is produced by a very large number of weakly determining biological and environmental forces. If this is true, then criminal careers are also a product of multiple influences, none of which are strongly deterministic, and can ebb and flow with the complex interaction of those influences.
Confessions points to different pathways and trajectories of offending careers (i.e., short- or long-term offending, intermittent or sporadic offending, high- vs. low-rate offending, early vs. later starters). Furthermore, each stage in the life course (childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle-age) presents factors that are conducive to or inhibit criminal behavior. Conducive factors include (1) cumulative economic and social disadvantage; (2) the learning of skills and attitudes favorable to crime in general or specific kinds of crime; (3) situational pressures and circumstances due to changes in one’s financial situation or social relationships (as Sam. says: “When people get in a financial pinch, you’d be surprised at how much larceny they have in their heart”); (4) criminal oppor-tunities, which in turn may shrink, expand, or change across the life course; and (5) finding crime rewarding because it provides money, status, excitement, a sense of accomplishment, and self-satisfaction with one’s abilities (including, perhaps, the satisfaction of avoiding detection and punishment).
Factors that inhibit crime or foster desistance include the development of commitments to conventional life, such as marriage, family, children, employment, conventional hobbies, shrinking criminal opportunities, and tiring of the physical, social, and psychological wear and tear of a criminal lifestyle. However, criminal behavior itself, as well as incarceration, can have negative effects on factors that foster desistance, like conventional employment and marriage, and positive effects on factors that encourage persistent offending, like criminal skills, attitudes, and opportunities.
We suspect that desistance owes as much to diminished access to crime networks and lessening attractiveness of crime opportunities as it does to access to legitimate work or family roles. This is a point that seems to be often ignored in discussions of persistence and desistance. Perhaps many offenders who were chronic at one life course stage desist from crime later because they lack decent opportunities for doing otherwise. Furthermore, Sam’s narrative suggests that chance or “luck” plays a role in the ebb and flow of crime across the life course. Finally, Sam’s material suggests that a lot of vacillation back and forth may occur in criminal careers. Sam’s (and others’, like Jesse’s) offending waxed and waned over the course of decades. Thus, we suspect that, contrary to the picture painted by most of the quantitative criminal careers literature, criminal careers often do not have a clear-cut, definitive beginning or ending (except death). We also suspect that the quantity and normalcy of who qualifies as a “persistent” or “career” offender would be far greater if our knowledge-base better encompassed the criminal landscape.
Each of the factors listed above that are conducive to or unfavorable to crime or desistence from crime, in turn, implicate sources of structural and personal commitment to crime or conformity. Our learning-opportunity-commitment framework, described in Chapters 2, 8, 10 and elsewhere, provides an integrated and more complete way of understanding mechanisms that underlie criminal offending and criminal careers, coupled with a theory of illegal enterprise. Together, the elements of this learning-opportunity-commitment framework recognize the complexity and scope of the criminal landscape and its embeddedness in the fabric of the larger society, including its criminal justice system.
1. See Jerome Miller’s (1991) analysis of the Lyman School during the 1940s and 1950s, the time period when the Glueck subjects were incarcerated as young teenagers. Miller’s depiction of extreme physical punishment, psychological intimi-dation, sadistic discipline, and verbal humiliation experienced by Glueck’s subjects is both heart-wrenching and difficult to comprehend. Indeed, the resiliency of many of the subjects (as evidenced by their fairly high rate of eventually exiting from crime/delinquency) in the face of such treatment is somewhat remarkable.
2. By extension, the Moffitt framework implies that persons without neuropsychologi-cal deficits are basically “good,” so that, while some straying from the norms may occur (especially during adolescence), they are more or less destined to avoid chronic antisocial behavior to any serious degree. That is, they are virtually immune from becoming life-course persistent offenders regardless of their life history or circumstances.
3. For Moffitt, the life course persister (e.g., a Sam, a Jesse, a Louie, a Rocky) ought to have distinct traits such as cognitive deficits and personality disorder. These offenders have low intelligence, do poorly in school, have fragile mental health, have inadequate social skills, and have inadequate self-control.