Subsequently, Steffensmeier and coauthor Jeffery Ulmer updated the criminal career and fencing operation of Sam in a recent work, Confessions of a Dying Thief: Understanding Criminal Careers and Criminal Enterprise (2005). Steffensmeier also interviewed thieves and customers who had contact with Sam, several other fences, and law enforcement officials to authenticate Sam’s account of events. Klockars interviewed ”Vincent Swaggi” (not his real name), a well-known fence in his city, while Steffensmeier interviewed ”Sam Goodman” (also an alias), a well-known fence in an unnamed American city. Much of what is known about fencing today comes from two in-depth studies of individual fences, one being Carl Klockars’ work, The Professional Fence (1974), and the other being Darrell Steffensmeier’s The Fence: In the Shadow of Two Worlds (1986). In America, as in England, there are three elements to the crime: (1) The property must have been stolen (2) the property must have been received or concealed (though the fence may not have actually seen or touched it) (3) the receiver must have accepted it with knowledge that it was stolen. The legal requirements for demonstrating that fencing has occurred are complex. Third, the cloak of secrecy and the maintenance of a legitimate ”front” make detailed investigation difficult. Second, because fencing is a crime with low visibility and is conducted in secrecy, researchers have directed their attention to more visible crimes such as theft or to violent crimes against persons, for which statistics are available. First, it often wears the cloak of legitimate business and is carried out in a rational, business-like manner, so that it has few of the qualities traditionally associated with crime. For the rest of society, the fence provides an opportunity for interested people to buy something at less than market price.įencing remains a rather poorly researched area in criminology, for several reasons. Without someone to dispose of stolen property, thieves would have to rely on their own connections, and both the costs and the risks of crime would increase substantially. “Fencing”-the crime of buying and reselling stolen merchandise-is one of the links that binds theft to the larger social system.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |