NCJ Number
161975
Editor(s)
D Hobbs
Date Published
1995
Length
424 pages
Annotation
Twenty-eight papers use a range of sources, including ethnography, life histories, oral histories, biographies, autobiographies, and journalistic accounts, to profile the personal characteristics, criminal careers, crime types, and criminal motivations of those who rely upon crime as a principal source of their income.
Abstract
The introduction emphasizes the need to provide a structural frame for the activities of professional criminals, since, like all economic actors, they operate within a specific cultural milieu that is defined and framed by a coalition of historical precedents. The introduction further notes that urbanization and the subsequent redefinition of economic relations marked the first acknowledgment of the existence of individuals whose lives were linked to providing profit from criminal activities that extended beyond mere subsistence. The first paper discusses changes in deviant careers among upper-level drug dealers and smugglers, followed by a paper on the concept of commitment among habitual criminals. A number of papers focus on the motivations and criminal career patterns of drug dealers. Other papers consider topics related to professional thieves, including the social organization of armed robbery, the pickpocket and his victim, thieves and the inmate culture, the behavior of the systematic check forger, gaining compliance from victims in robberies, the social organization of burglary, and the socially bounded decisionmaking of persistent property offenders. One paper focuses on the neutralization of normative values in the rationalizations of a "hit man," and another considers some aspects of adaptation to failure among professional criminals. A paper also discusses the "Jack-of-all-trades" entrepreneurial professional criminal. Chapter references and a name index