Maturation process, criminal career, and professional philosophy of a criminal

Maturation process, criminal career, and professional philosophy of a criminal

As discussed earlier, a criminal does not become a professional all of a sudden but learns techniques and skills in an educational process, involving habituation to a life of crime.

Caldwell has also said: “Gradually he participates more and more in criminal activities and progressively shifts his loyalty from the world of law and law-abiding citizens to the underworld of crime and criminals.”

It is, however, not only the learning of skills but also developing a new philosophy of his own which makes him a professional criminal. Not only he considers himself a criminal but others also accept him as one, and thus he achieves status in the world of crime.

Ruth Cavan (Criminology, 1962: 134) has said: “The process of becoming a professional criminal may be described as a gradual alienation from loyalty to and participation in agencies that conform to the community mores, such as family, neighbourhood, peer group, and occupational group.

For a time, he may be a member of both the conventional world and the criminal world but when he arrives at the point of complete severance with the conventional groups and organises his life in terms of the criminal group, he has become a full-fledged professional criminal.”

According to Frank Tennenbaum (Crime and Criminality, 1938: 177), “the new philosophy that the professional criminal develops is the philosophy of beliefs that are acquired in a process of adjustment over a period of time, organised into a system of principles and hardened and crystallised in terms of experience”.

This philosophy gives meaning to his life, determines his attitudes towards life and his work fixes his views, gives him insights, binds him to prejudices, and pushes him towards bias. He develops values quite contrary to those acceptable to organised society. For him, pockets are made to be picked, purses to be snatched, and ventilators for not getting clean and fresh air but for entering the house.

Further, he holds that all politicians have a price, all policemen are corrupt, all businessmen are cheats, all traders are eager to make an’easy and dishonest buck, and all victims are naive and stupid. If he is caught by the police, he blames himself for not being careful enough and vows to be more cautious next time.

He says: “Everybody runs into tough luck once in a while and he too will get his chance some day: in the meantime, he must lie low.”

He knows that if he has failed to ‘fix’ his case, it is because he did not contact the ‘right’ person. Like a normal person, he too seeks love, affection, sympathy, recognition, and security but he finds them only in the world of crime.

Small wonder then that he tends to be loyal to this world of crime. Just as a businessman may not like some businessmen, a professional criminal also may not like some professional criminals. However, in the face of danger, all criminals tend to unite.

Some criminals live together but many prefer to live alone. They live in socially disorganised areas, cheap hotels, rented rooms, and favourite lodging places where social control is not so effective. Many of them remain constantly on the move. They do not have stable family life or any dependents. A few professional criminals think of retirement even when they strike it rich.

Some professional criminals display ‘toughness’ in dealing with their victims. This is in part based on segregation of criminals from criminal behaviour. Just as businessmen act on the principle, “business is business”, so also professional criminals act on the principle, “crime is crime”. There is no place for sentiment in either case.

The sexual life of professional criminals is usually loose. They generally have relations with prostitutes and mistresses. They meet other criminals and middle-men in cheap restaurants and gambling dens, etc. They also use their own codes to interact with other criminals. It may, however, be remembered that very few professional criminals are ever arrested, brought to trial, convicted or made to serve time in prison.