Life of Crime

So, what would that life look like?:

The subject was raised last year in Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's bestselling book Freakonomics. In a chapter called "Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?" the authors described a drug-dealing operation as a bloated, inefficient organization. There were a few wealthy members at the top and a slew of underpaid minions at the bottom. They compared the gang's organizational structure to that of McDonald's.

... Dennis Chevalier, a "forensic investigative psychological criminologist" based in Fort Worth, Tex., says that while there is lots of cash circulating among the criminal element, much of it gets hung up in a kind of underworld bureaucracy.

"People aren't getting rich because there are too many people involved," says Chevalier. "There are payments to keep people quiet, there are cops to pay, security guards to pay, you have to pay the people who arranged the selling of the merchandise... There's not a whole lot of people getting rich."

Chevalier also points out that goods are devalued in an underground economy. The value of, say, a diamond priced at $10,000 in a store takes on a cash value of $2,000 on the streets.

But even if more money were flowing into the hands of criminals and gangsters, they probably wouldn't know what to do with it. It turns out criminals have poor money-management skills. The Oregon Mail Tribune reported in 2001 that only seven per cent of inmates in Oregon prisons have more than $200 in their bank accounts.

"They're not people who defer gratification in the first place," says Greek. "The money those people make, they just go spend it. It's not like they're investing in a nest egg and at the age of 40 they're going to go live in Tahiti. They don't have long-term goals like that.

"People doing robberies are basically living from one robbery to the next. They may go out and do a ton of robberies over a weekend, then they don't have to do any for a month and a half. But they know that when the money's gone, they'll have to go do some more robberies. That's as far ahead as it's planned."

... "They go through psychological trauma knowing what they've done to hurt people," says Chevalier "They start envisioning those things happening to them. They don't trust anyone and anything.

"That makes a great afternoon movie, but in real life the human mind cannot take that kind of heightened sensitivity and alertness and awareness all the time. There's sleep deprivation, a loss of appetite, you end up having paranoia to such a degree that you can't even function as a criminal any more."