The Seductions of Crime : UCLA Sociologist Looks at Crime as the Criminals See It and Finds Some Surprising Motivations

Jack Katz is convinced that crime pays--and that it can be fun too.

The psychological rewards of crime may be so rich--if only temporarily--that nickel-and-dime robberies, penny-ante shoplifting and even murder are worth the risks, according to the UCLA sociologist, who has published an unconventional new study of criminal behavior that is attracting wide attention.

Katz’s “Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil” (Basic Books: $19.95) is a criminal’s-eye view of mayhem and apparent madness, of the driving forces behind seemingly irrational, brutal acts that in fact have their own internal--albeit demented--logic. The densely detailed, closely argued book has been praised by reviewers for its “insight and intelligence” and as “an alluring and disturbing study.”

Grew Out of a Void

The book grew out of what Katz discovered to be a void “in the academic literature of the actual quality of the experience of doing a crime.” But Katz also discovered that in popular literature and other sources, including some research with Los Angeles criminals, there was a wealth of information that--taken together--detailed the moods and calculations of criminals and formed the vantage point for a different way of looking at crime.

For Katz, a mild and soft-spoken man who previously has done research on white-collar crime, exploring criminal thinking was a sometimes disturbing exercise in imagination.

Among other things, he cast himself in the role of a mugger to see “what it feels like to go out on the street and approach someone to ask the time of day, knowing you’re doing that just to gauge what size they are, which hand they have the watch on, whether they have a watch.” Afterward, he joked, “It can be rather chilling if you go back out on the street and somebody asks (you) for the time.”

But there aren’t many points of humor in the landscape surveyed by Katz.

When a husband or a wife turns a shotgun on a spouse in a typical domestic homicide, Katz asserts, the resulting “righteous slaughter” often compensates for the killer’s humiliation in some long-standing dispute. Such murders typically are committed in a state of “moral” rage, and the killer may see himself as a defender of traditional values against an abusive mate, he says.

Ironically, family killings often are prompted by the victim encouraging a gun-toting spouse to “go ahead and shoot me,” he writes.

Crimes such as shoplifting and vandalism are attractive because of the “sneaky thrills” experienced by the offenders, Katz says, noting that the threat of being caught is an essential part of the thrill.

Furthermore, career criminals such as armed robbers are so committed to their carefully constructed images as “bad” characters that the prospect of jail time is no deterrent, Katz maintains. In one instance cited by Katz, a career armed robber was arrested for a stickup after he was confined to a wheelchair.

“They lead very fearsome lives,” Katz said. “We don’t appreciate that when we suggest that increasing the penalty is going to make a difference. They’re already facing the risk of severe violent harm and death quite frequently when they’re on the street or in prison.

“What penalties we can come up with are very likely to be very irrelevant or only indirectly relevant. They’re already willing to hang around people who are as fearsome as they are. . . . They’re sleeping with guns under their pillows, guns in their glove compartments. They’re ready at all times.”

The moral arithmetic of criminals is a world apart from the logic used by society at large, Katz said. The crippled robber, he pointed out, figures that he came out on top because “he got away with it more than he got caught.” What the criminal didn’t comprehend, Katz said, is that “he’s put away for eight years at a shot because everybody in the criminal justice system understands that he got away with a lot of other things.”

Nor is money the prime objective for such “hard men.” One criminal quoted by Katz put it this way:

It’s for Show

“Straight people don’t understand. I mean, they think dudes is after the things straight people got. It ain’t that at all. People in the life ain’t looking for no home and grass in the yard and . . . like that. We the show people. The glamour people. Come on the set with the finest car, the finest woman . . . Hear people talking about you. Hear the bar get quiet when you walk in the door.”

Law professor Franklin E. Zimring, who is the director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute at UC Berkeley, gives Katz especially high marks for his portrait of armed robbers and for his emphasis on “crime as recreation.” Armed robbery, Zimring said, is apparently a lot like hang-gliding, a “crazy” activity that thrives because “it feels good and there’s a subculture to support it.”

In general, Zimring said, Katz’s emphasis on the recreational aspects of crime is an important contribution because it brings clarity and proportion to scholarly discussion of crime.

Lawrence Sherman, professor of criminology at the University of Maryland, said the book is being widely discussed in academic circles and has garnered the praise of respected experts on crime and criminal behavior.

In the book, Katz writes that street lingo for money--”dead presidents”--is “an aggressive attack on materialism as a potentially misleading, false deity.”

No Savings Accounts

Expanding on that subject, he noted that criminals seldom open savings accounts. “The money is burned,” he said. “You use it as fast as you can, because if you don’t, it’ll give people the wrong impression about why you’re doing it (committing crimes). You take tremendous risks to get that money but you throw it around--to girlfriends, to buy cocaine for people, to have parties. You get rid of it as if it’s a sacrilege to have the money.”

Criminal thinking is frequently “unpredictable” because the “mythology” guiding criminals is “often very idiosyncratic,” Katz said. In fact, a crime may be committed to sustain an image rather than for money, he added.

“You’re working in a store and you see three or four fellows come in and you don’t know what they’ve been smoking or if they came in not particularly intending to rob anything but just in a kind of mood of braggadocio,” he said. “They’re playing off each other to see who’s the toughest. Then somebody pushes one of the clerks, and to make sense of that they make it a stickup. Because why do you go around pushing people around? A crazy guy does that but a cool guy does a stickup as a way of making sense of the violence . . . they’re not killing in order to rob, they’re robbing in order to appear to be killers, to sustain that kind of general appearance among the people they are familiar with.”

Description of Leaders

One indicator of the importance of image for criminals, Katz said, is that gang leaders “are usually not the toughest guys, not the guys who win the fights but the aesthetic leader, the one who can create a mythology for each of the members, give them names, tell stories about their events.”

Katz further argues that notorious criminals such as Gary Gilmore, subject of Norman Mailer’s book, “The Executioner’s Song,” kill in order to reinforce their own self-image as tough guys who have not been forced into conformity with “straight” society.

Overall, Katz believes that misperceptions about the causes of crime have distorted public debate about crime.

“Our modern ways of thinking both in academia and in politics and in conventional thought is to locate evil in the lower classes and among people who lack opportunity,” he said. “We don’t see in general the moral and central attractions of evil that animate the people doing common crimes as much, I think, as we do the people doing white-collar crimes.”

Obscured by Politics

In fact, the criminal motivations Katz sees so clearly have been obscured by political perspectives, he said.

“We tend to look at crime as the result of material need, either from a left perspective because we see people lacking opportunity or from a right perspective because we don’t think the penalties are severe enough to offset the damage,” he explained.

”. . . We don’t see the moral and sensual attractions of crime, that many crimes are outgrowths of kind of arrogant attitudes, almost pleasure at becoming outraged, shame at being humiliated and attempts to overcome that--dynamics that characterize a good deal of white-collar crime. In other words, the criminals may be a lot more like us than we’re willing to see in some respects.”