Wright Richard T. - Burglars On The Job: Streetlife and Residential Break-ins

Burglars on the Job

Advisor in Criminal Justice to Northeastern University Press Gilbert Geis

Streetlife and Residential Break-ins

Richard T. Wright
Scott H. Decker

NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS / BOSTON

Published by University Press of New England
Hanover and London

NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published by University Press of New England
One Court Street, Lebanon, NH 03766
www.upne.com

1994 by Richard T. Wright and Scott H. Decker

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Members of educational institutions and organizations wishing to photocopy any of the work for classroom use, or authors and publishers who would like to obtain permission for any of the material in the work, should contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Lebanon, NH 03766.

Library of Congress Catalogiag-in-Publication Data

Wright, Richard.

Burglars on the job : streetlife and residential break-ins / Richard T. Wright, Scott Decker.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1555531857 (alk. paper);

ISBN 1555532713 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN 9781555537852 (e-book)

1. BurglaryMissouriSaint Louis. 2. BurglarsMissouriSaint Louis. I. Decker, Scott, II. Title.

HV666I.M8W75 1994

364.I62dc20 93-44357

To Gil Geis, the Babe Ruth of criminology Keep hittin em out of the park!

THERE ARE SOME extraordinarily compelling vignettes in this excellent field study of burglars by Richard Wright and Scott Decker. One that particularly caught my fancy was the rapture of some burglars when they found themselves surrounded by all those wonderful things in the house they had illegally entered. Everythinganythingis theirs for the taking, presuming they can carry it away without being observed and taken captive. One is reminded of the ecstasy conveyed by Charlie Chaplin in one of his antic movies when he finds himself locked in a large well-stocked department store overnight.

There are other insights in this detailed study that epitomize essential ingredients of the crime of burglary as it is experienced by those who commit it. There is the ominous fear, expressed by many of the offenders, that when they enter a dwelling its occupant will be waiting for them, right there, with a shotgun that will blast their heads into pieces. And there is the tension between grabbing what is readily available and getting out of there quickly, or lingering a bit longer to pick up other goodies, but thereby increasing by some unknown but frightening fraction the possibility of being discovered.

Most essentially, there is the strong focus in this field study on the pressures, internal and external, that drive human beings to break into the living quarters of other human beings and take whatever there is of value that they can locate and comfortably carry away. It is these pressures as they bear on particular persons in particular circumstances that for the authors lie at the heart of an understanding of the dynamics of the criminal offense of burglary.

Ideas and information were gathered through locating and gaining the cooperation of men and women who had done and were continuing to do burglaries. What most differentiates Burglars on the Job from the handful of inquiries that have reached out to the criminal protagonist to seek understanding of the offense of burglary and the person of the burglar is that the sources here are men and women on the streets. They are offenders who are not constrained by incarceration and the concomitant impact that being caught and imprisoned has on retrospective thoughts about the crimes that got them into such difficulty. It is one thing to talk about failure, another to discuss contemporaneously behavior that is succeeding but which at any moment may end disastrously.

Probably more than anyone else, Malcolm X, a burglar before he became so highly respected as a leader in the black civil rights movement, taught the public the relative advantages of burglary. Malcolm expressed in his autobiography [The Autobiography of Malcolm X [New York: Grove Press, 1965]) many of the same feelings and attitudes that Wright and Decker encountered when they went out into the streets of St. Louis to talk with their informants:

I had learned from the pros, and from my own experience, how important it was to be careful and plan. Burglary, properly executed, though it had its dangers, offered the maximum chances of success with the minimum risk. If you did your job so that you never met any of your victims, it lessened your chances of having to attack or perhaps kill someone. And if through some slip-up you were caught, later, by the police, there was never a positive eyewitness (1965:14142).

Throughout Burglars on the Job, its authors alter our ideas about crime and, in particular, about the offense of burglary on the basis of what they learned from those who work at it. They note, for instance, that many highly heralded protective devices often do not discourage burglars because they already are committed to the deed by the time they discover the existence of such barriers. On the other hand, there is considerable evidence that some shields, most notably large and noisy dogs, can readily convince many to go elsewhere to practice their trade. There also is the paradoxical finding that certain kinds of safeguards used by homeowners sometimes only encourage burglary by communicating to the offender the idea that there are expensive things within the dwelling.

This book is a particularly significant contribution to a school of thought in criminology that finds demographic and other fashionably current explanations of offending inadequate and asks instead that attention be accorded to the immediate considerations that produce an offense. Jack Katz highlighted this view in his pathbreaking monograph Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil (New York: Basic Books, 1988). How do you explain, Katz asked rhetorically, an offender who on many days walks past a jewelry store with barely a notice, but on one particular day decides to break the window and help himself to some of the merchandise. After all, his age, his psychological complexes, and his relationship to his peers and parents (as well as those various other characteristics considered by mainline criminologists to be explanatory) were no different on the earlier days than they were when the offense was carried out. Background factors may tell us in a general and statistical sense who might at some time commit a crime, but they do not tell us why a particular crime was committed when it was by a particular person.

It is this kind of focus that pervades Burglars on the Job. In a noteworthy concluding chapter, the authors set forth their theoretical stance, and tell us what they have learned by dealing with burglars, as they denote it, in the wild. They point out the difficulties and dangers of an approach such as theirs. The careful reader will come to appreciate from this materialand from other hints here and there throughout the volumethe enormity of the research enterprise, and why so few studies of this kind are carried out, however basic and intellectually valuable they may be.

Criminological research today has a considerable tendency to rely on large data sets from which findings emerge which, at best, are merely mildly interesting. Presently research with a direct policy relevance is in fashion, particularly inquiries which test this or that rearrangement of law enforcement procedures or criminal justice agency practices. The truth is that no criminal justice tinkeringbe it with such matters as the nature of police patrols, the death penalty, or sentencing guidelinesis going to have more than the merest marginal impact on the extent of crime in this country, if it has any impact at all. It seems to me that we must begin to understand how people who commit offenses view their behavior and how such views can be influenced before we will see any notable change in crime levels. Admittedly this is a gigantic task, but I would insist that the kind of tough and basic work and interpretation that has gone into