Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture by Nicole Rafter & Michelle Brown

Author:Nicole Rafter & Michelle Brown [Rafter, Nicole & Brown, Michelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: law, Criminal Law, General, Media & the Law
ISBN: 9780814776513
Google: ISEVCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2011-09-15T00:10:43.845523+00:00

Sutherland and the Cinema: Life Histories and White-Collar Crime

We have been discussing cinematic examples of subcultural theory, movies that extend the work of Sutherland and other Chicago school scholars. In the next section we discuss ways in which film has extended two other aspects of Sutherland’s research, his life-history approach to the study of crime and his innovative research on white-collar offending.

Criminal Life Histories

The life-history approach to understanding criminal behavior began in 1930, when Clifford Shaw, a leader of the Chicago school, published The Jack-Roller, the biography of a young parolee (called Stanley in the book).31 Delinquency specialists had been collecting case histories for many years, but The Jack-Roller was a unique and riveting work. It validated a new method in criminological research—the “own story” approach to the study of delinquency—and it was inherently sensational: a jack roller supports himself by assaulting homosexual men and stealing their money. Stanley had been arrested twenty-six times by the age of ten for offenses including truancy, begging, “bad sex habits,” and shoplifting as well as jack rolling. The Jack-Roller offered what came to be dubbed “sociology noir,” a work of gritty immediacy and underworld allure.32 Shaw saw a number of advantages to the life-history approach, including the light it could throw on the causes of delinquency and the guidance it could provide for individualizing treatment.33 The Jack-Roller remains a high-profile memoir; in 2007 the journal Theoretical Criminology ran an entire issue of articles on Shaw’s classic.34

Seven years later, Sutherland published The Professional Thief: By a Professional Thief—Broadway Jones, to whom Sutherland gave the pseudonym Chic Conwell.35 Although The Jack-Roller doubtless gave Sutherland a sense of direction, he was less concerned to produce a biography than to study the phenomenon of professional theft (highly polished stealing by expert thieves) per se. Conwell’s story comprises part I of The Professional Thief, but it was edited and annotated by Sutherland, and part II, “Interpretation and Conclusion,” is entirely Sutherland’s work. The Professional Thief inaugurated the behavior-system approach to the study of specific offense types that persists unabated today. It also influenced later work on career criminals and life-course criminology.

Sutherland builds The Professional Thief on his usual assumption that criminal behavior is normal, a type of activity that, like all behaviors, is learned in interaction with others. “Differential association,” he writes, “is characteristic of the professional thieves, as of all other groups.”36 He also shows that professional thieves constitute a subculture: “The thief is a part of the underworld and in certain respects is segregated from the rest of society.”37 Sutherland maintains that Conwell came from a middle-class background (“his family was in comfortable circumstances”),38 a claim that reinforces Sutherland’s contention that poverty does not cause crime. And in showing how Conwell learned to be a professional thief, Sutherland supports what he came to call his differential social organization thesis.39 A critic has questioned some of The Professional Thief’s data, arguing, for instance, that Jones/Conwell was probably working-class in origin.40 Moreover, despite Sutherland’s claim that “the thief

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