ABSTRACT
This chapter considers offending as professional when it was specialist and sufficiently successful to offer a fairly regular income. It notes that offenders who make a living from what they do are less likely than others to co-operate with their probation officers, less likely to have their probation officer's 'sympathy', and less likely to ask for or be offered welfare help and advice. Most of the offences involve stealing property, but sometimes the targeting of certain victims makes the offending much worse, or so the tone of Dean's probation officer suggests. Traditional criminology has appeared to suggest that all we need to do is await nature's course: job, partner, babies equals non-offending. The bulk of thieving, of course, has nothing to do with poverty is the result of wickedness and greed'. The probation officer was definitely implying a 'greed' argument and suggesting that only prison would be likely to change young Neale.
