ABSTRACT

Employing a rational choice perspective, this chapter suggests ways in which ethnography could provide new information about how high-rate property offenders continue their careers and conduct their "criminal" business. It considers how "successful" careers in property offending develop and how such offenders commit numerous specific criminal episodes while generally avoiding detection and arrest. The theoretical and empirical literature on offender characteristics such as demographics, age of onset in crime, and range of criminal activities is extremely large and diverse. Ethnographic techniques and qualitative methodologies are particularly well designed to study the issues delineated — which are rarely a focus of existent criminology. Specifically, trained ethnographers in most urban areas would be able to easily locate, recruit, and repeatedly interview high rate offenders who successfully avoid arrest for the vast majority of their crimes. The key contribution of ethnographers will come when they reduce offender complexity to key themes and findings accessible to criminal policymakers.