Crime without punishment: Learning criminal skills, learning criminal behavior

• In Event: New perspectives on crime in the digital age

Abstract

Criminological research has identified multiple risk and protective factors that influence criminal reiteration, but is steadily improving in its ability to explain criminal and life trajectories as a whole: how individuals initially learn to commit crime, how they reiterate, and how they desist.
‘Skilled’ criminals are thought to have more success in lucrative criminal activities and, therefore, desist later than other offenders. Criminal competence has been discussed in the literature for nearly a century and is considered relevant for the study of crime. However, it is difficult to find studies that focus directly on criminal competence. Researchers typically use various concepts as proxies for studying competence: professionalism, criminal capital, criminal success or achievement, criminal self-efficacy, or, as discussed last year in Bucharest at EUROCRIM 2024, criminal incompetence. These concepts are often operationalized using data from official sources (police, justice) or interviews with inmates (or former inmates). While these indicators can moderately explain criminal behavior, they tend to conflate criminal activities, criminal skills, and the process of learning these activities and skills, thus losing sensitivity to their evolution over time. Qualitative research methods and active offender research are identified as effective ways to understand criminal learning.
The current research project aims to distinguish between these concepts both theoretically and empirically, combining a literature review, a quantitative study, and a qualitative study. Using interviews with mostly active, non-judicialized offenders, we retrospectively examine lucrative criminal activities and competence at different points in time, as well as their learning process, paying attention to the meaning these offenders assign to it from their subjective point of view.

Author

• Marie Guellec, Université de Montréal, Université de Lille, private practice