This article explores how the subject becomes a professional criminal, setting out the life experiences of a group of (ex-)offenders in Turkey who have desisted from crime for 15 years. By analysing the socially-individuated trajectories of offenders, it analytically traces out how the primary habitus inherited from lower-class, migrant, doorkeeper cosmology fits in with the secondary criminal habitus: a bodily-mental, informally-trained capacity to carry out burglary. The formation of criminal habitus is dissected into conative, cognitive and affective components to demonstrate how specialist (physical) breaking and entering skills, maintaining composure, self-confidence, resourcefulness and fluency in the Turkish subcultural language of the street are developed in such a way as to professionalise the modus operandi of burglary. Undertaking the dispositional theory of action, the primary contribution lies in exploring the formative principles of the bodily and mental dispositions necessary to commit a criminal action in a non-Western context.
Criminology has not yet adequately distinguished ‘emotional expression’ from ‘unconscious affect’. As a result, there are deficits in its understanding of criminal motivation. This article introduces a psychosocial approach that reveals the unconscious affects that are hidden within offender discourses. To do so it draws on Freud’s psychoanalytical account of affects and thus allows for an understanding of the energies and fantasies that lurk behind them. Using examples from crime ethnographies and restorative justice conferences, the article demonstrates that this theoretical orientation and these methods allow the criminologist to engage with the inner-world of offenders more deeply. Doing so, for example, shows that emotional reactions of offenders, in fact, fantasmatically conceal the latent negativity of anxiety and the fear of violent humiliation. Through establishing ‘affect’ as a more distinct analytic within criminology, its theoretical and methodological tool-box is significantly enhanced.
Despite its existence as a common-sense category and criminological analytic, the notion of the ‘persistent criminal’ remains theoretically underdeveloped. While there is a notion that particular individuals ‘commit’ to a life of crime, criminology is yet to properly articulate why this is and how it comes to be. Drawing on psychoanalytically inflected discourse theory, this article demonstrates that the clinical categories of psychoanalysis such as subject, lack, identification and jouissance (enjoyment) are useful in understanding persistence and career criminality. The imagined possibility of inhabiting a ‘fantasmatic’ lifestyle becomes unconsciously reinforced by the joyful sensations that accompany aspects of their criminal lifestyle: criminal cultural consumerism, peer group respect and appearing attractive to women. Without being conscious and rationalistic, these processes nevertheless inform self-perception and behaviour at a deep level of being. This article provides a novel explanation for why persistent criminals remain dedicated to their illicit lifestyles.
Bourdieusian criminology has produced useful concepts such as the street-criminal field, capital and habitus. In employing these concepts, this article demonstrates the importance of the criminal role model-image, such as the respected career criminal, as an ego-ideal among lower class youths who identify with these role models, acquiring bodily and mental criminal dispositions using the results of ethnographic research conducted in a run-down district in Ankara, the capital of Turkey. Focusing on a non-Western context with an original theoretical articulation, this article further suggests that the affective relationship between these disadvantaged lower class youths and respected older criminals lubricates the youths’ formation of criminal habitus and likewise constitutes a ‘strategic mutuality’ flowing through certain practices in the street-criminal fields. The original finding lies in revealing a strategic affinity transmitting knowledge of criminal techniques and skills across generations, and further making crime as work a reliable source of income for disadvantaged youths.
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