Confessions of a Dying Thief:
Understanding Criminal Careers and Illegal Enterprise

By Darrell J. Steffensmeier and Jeffery T. Ulmer
New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine/Transaction Publishers, 2005

Confessions is an engaging book that offers something for multiple audiences. With its emphasis on social structures and processes as the causes of both criminal and conventional behavior, the sociological community will love it. With its insights from a chronic offender, academic and lay readers with little to no criminal justice experience will love it. For criminal justice practitioners who have heard countless similar stories from countless offenders, Confessions offers nothing new.

For criminologists who conduct research on criminal careers, career criminals, and the current life-course paradigm, Confessions is a must have. Steffensmeier and Ulmer made several key insights and provide evidence that will inform the area. First, Sam Goodman, the subject of the book, engages in crime well into his fifties and sixties. This contrasts with the bulk of criminal career research, which focuses on adolescence and early adulthood and assumes that virtually all offenders desist. Confessions illustrates that perhaps the most remuneratively successful offenders offend for much longer periods of time. Second, the book illustrates and describes the processes of criminal opportunity and self-selection into delinquent settings with great detail. Much light is shed on offender agency and choice. Third, Confessions is a nice alternative to the excessively quantitative study of criminal careers that currently exists. In this sense, the book adds much needed contextual background and meaning to concepts such as, onset, continuity, discontinuity, desistance, specialization, versatility, etc. All of these contributions are important because they should serve as the impetus for future research that will refine our theoretical and empirical understanding of criminal careers. Substantively, Confessions is masterfully rooted to theoretical perspectives that can be traced to Edwin Sutherland and Edwin Lemert. Criminologists who share these theoretical orientations will be especially pleased.

Confessions is limited by two weaknesses. First, Steffensmeier and Ulmer have ignored some of the most important works on criminal careers, career criminals, and the correlates of habitual offending. Thus, there is no mention of Wolfgang, Rutter, Elliott, Loeber, Raine, Robbins, Glueck and Glueck, or Piquero. Scholars like David Farrington and Terrie Moffitt are cited once! For a book that has a subtitle of “Understanding Criminal Careers,” it omits scores of research that would have illuminated their commentary on Goodman’s offending career. Concomitantly, Confessions exudes a clear antipathy toward criminologists who favour individual-level characteristics, such as criminal propensity or self-control, as important causes of crime. Scholars, such as Gottfredson and Hirschi, Wilson and Herrnstein, and DeLisi, are framed as diabolical thinkers. This segues to the second weakness: Steffensmeier and Ulmer’s fond solicitude for Sam Goodman. Seemingly all of Goodman’s bad acts were mitigated in some apologetic way. For example, when Sam strangled an injured co-defendant to death, the act was framed not as manslaughter or homicide, but an act of mercy. Whether it was fondness for the research subject or simple liberal naïveté, the tone undermines an otherwise excellent contribution to the field.