“LIKE two jobs? It IS two jobs!”: Identity Strategies for Combining Work and Crime

• In Event: Aging and the Life Course Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 11: Employment, Job Quality, and Retirement

Abstract

Criminological theory posits that strong social bonds to employment create “stakes in conformity” that should render criminal behavior irrational. This paper disrupts that assumption by theorizing “doubling up” (Fagan and Freeman 1999) not as a failure of social control, but as a form of multiple job holding best understood through the lens of role-identity theory. Armed with this perspective, we introduce a new work-identity typology and apply it to 63 doubling episodes (averaging 64 months) drawn from life-history interviews with 100 formerly incarcerated men.

Our analysis focuses on the most theoretically puzzling configuration: individuals who maintain a salient, genuine legal work identity yet continue to offend. Analyzing 51 such episodes, we identify two distinct strategies for managing this moral tension. First, “Workers with an Illegal Sideline” resolve the conflict through role distancing: they perform the criminal role but reject the identity, defining crime as a temporary “hustle” external to their true self. In contrast, “Plural Careerists” (in 28 episodes averaging 91 months) embrace both identities. Rather than rejecting the criminal self, they employ active strategies—salience hierarchies, segmentation, and aggregation—to integrate these opposing identities.

Ultimately, our findings challenge not only social control theory but also the classic Mertonian binary of conformity versus innovation. We show that Plural Careerists combine both. They experience legal and criminal work as mutually identity-enhancing, reflecting a desire for work providing respect, power, excitement, and very high wages in addition to intrinsic interest and a sense of duty. By disrupting the assumption that the “worker” identity requires legal conformity, and conceptualizing remunerative crime as antisocial work, we explain how criminal labor serves as an attractive complement for those whose ambitions exceed the boundaries of the legal workplace.

Authors

• Steven H. Lopez, The Ohio State University

• Paul E. Bellair, The Ohio State University