Patterns in criminal achievement: Wilson and Abrahamse revisited

Even though intense cultural pressures for monetary success and an institutional social structure dominated by the economy are viewed in anomie theory as stimulating criminal motivations and accounting for criminal behavior with an instrumental character patterns in criminal earnings have not attracted much scholarly and empirical attention. Wilson and Abrahamse's (1992) analysis of Rand's second inmate survey concluded that most inmates interviewed during the survey had overestimated their monthly criminal earnings in art effort to rationalize their poor criminal performances. In this paper, we conduct, using Rand's first survey, a reanalysis of inmates' self-reported monthly earnings. We conclude that meaningful patterns in criminal achievements easily emerge when allowed to no so. These patterns offer a telling story about differential criminal opportunities. Wilson and Abrahamse's emphasis on temporal inconsistency and response bias (boosting past benefits of crime) misrepresents the facts of that story and misjudges those persons agreeing to tell it. It is concluded that for a "criminal subculture" to have any persuasive or binding effect, its participants must be reasonably assured that their chances of making "crime pay" are not so remote as to become unattainable.