Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Sociology Show podcast. My guest
Speaker 1: for this episode is the fantastic professor Jack Katz, talking
Speaker 1: all about seductions of crime. Before we go to the interview,
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Speaker 1: the interview with Professor chat Katz.
Speaker 2: Hi.
Speaker 1: You're listening to The Sociology Show, a podcast about absolutely
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Speaker 1: and anything else that sociology has to offer. My name
Speaker 1: is Matthew Wilkin. In each episode, I will speak to
Speaker 1: someone working in the field of sociology and let them
Speaker 1: explain all about their own interests, their research, and their experiences.
Speaker 1: So put your ear phones in, turn the volume up,
Speaker 1: and let's be sociology geeks together. Ah, Hello, and welcome
Speaker 1: to the Sociology Show podcast. Would you like to start
Speaker 1: by telling us a little bit about who you are
Speaker 1: and what you do?
Speaker 2: Please? Okay. So I'm Jack Cats and I've been doing
Speaker 2: sociology for maybe forty years. I was initially trained as
Speaker 2: a lawyer and then went into sociology writing school and
Speaker 2: what I do. I work on a number of different topics.
Speaker 2: First crime, which is why you're talking to today, Also emotions,
Speaker 2: self in every day life. And I've been doing a
Speaker 2: long term project neighborhoods in Hollywood right an area in
Speaker 2: Los Angeles that's famous for the movies but also has
Speaker 2: interesting people living there, and how to change sociology. So
Speaker 2: I work on a lot of different topics and enthusiastic
Speaker 2: as ever about sociology and what you can learn. I'm
Speaker 2: stimulated every day by it. Yeah, So as we go along,
Speaker 2: I think you'll get a sense. So my perspective is
Speaker 2: similarly different things what other sociologists.
Speaker 1: Great, Thank you Jack, Thank you. And the main reason
Speaker 1: I want to talk to you today is about your
Speaker 1: your book, Seductions of Crime. Sociology students always really interested
Speaker 1: in it because most of the research that you look
Speaker 1: at in understanding crime and criminology very much comes from
Speaker 1: sort of socioeconomics, trying to understand inequalities, poverty, money. Students
Speaker 1: learn about things like strain theory, status, frustration, and so on,
Speaker 1: and yours really kind of leaps out as something a
Speaker 1: little bit different and sort of approaching and trying to
Speaker 1: understand why crime case from a very different angle. So
Speaker 1: I wondered if you you wouldn't mind sort of expanding
Speaker 1: on that in terms of how you take a slightly
Speaker 1: different look at why crime the curs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a good question and helped me kind of
Speaker 2: open up how what I do is different. Basically, I
Speaker 2: look at the thing we're trying to understand. Okay, you
Speaker 2: can there's different vocabularies for this, but you can talk
Speaker 2: about the independent variable and the deepenetary. You can look
Speaker 2: about the explanans thing that's going to do the explaining
Speaker 2: and the explanandum the thing you're trying to explain. Almost everybody,
Speaker 2: especially in criminology generally in sociology, is looking at the
Speaker 2: explainer the cause, and the debates are all about is
Speaker 2: it a lack of self discipline, It's something in the
Speaker 2: way the child was raised that leads them to is
Speaker 2: it something about poverty, It's something about race or ethnic
Speaker 2: or minority status. Is it something about neighborhood? And each
Speaker 2: of these causes have different sociologists associated, But you could
Speaker 2: probably go down the list of the different theories that
Speaker 2: your students are looking at and associate different sociologies their
Speaker 2: careers are tied to different costs, different explanams, different independent variables,
Speaker 2: most recently neighborhood, at least in the US, I don't
Speaker 2: I'm Some work in England too and in other countries
Speaker 2: emphasizes the neighborhood character. Life history studies that Barrington and
Speaker 2: others have sustained in England that looked is there a
Speaker 2: difference between lifelong offenders and those who just offend an adolescence?
Speaker 2: Is that related? That difference related to something in the
Speaker 2: family and early childhood. So all the action, all the
Speaker 2: status differences among academics is on the explanance side. Everybody
Speaker 2: on the other side the thing you're trying to explain.
Speaker 2: Everybody takes crime range pretty much. Some people do studies
Speaker 2: where they have interview, they interview people who self report
Speaker 2: whether they offend it or not. But most mostly people
Speaker 2: are trying to explain. So that's not where the action is.
Speaker 2: The action is not on the side of the thing
Speaker 2: you're trying to explain. The intellectual action is all on
Speaker 2: the cause. And so my difference is essentially I start
Speaker 2: by looking at the thing we're trying to understand, and
Speaker 2: to me, that's the way a natural scientist operates. It's
Speaker 2: and I think often people read subductions and they think
Speaker 2: I'm saying people do it for the thrill, that background
Speaker 2: isn't important. That's not really organizing idea of the book.
Speaker 2: The organizing perspective is to look, get as close as
Speaker 2: you can, seem as much detail whatever it is you're
Speaker 2: trying to understand. I've done that in my other studies,
Speaker 2: like when I studied emotions, I did video tapes of
Speaker 2: people laughing in a fun house, video tapes of little
Speaker 2: kids crying, and to try to understand the dynamics of
Speaker 2: those emotional events. To me, that's what that's a scientific impulse.
Speaker 2: You try to get see as far out into the
Speaker 2: universe as you can technologies are allowing us to do.
Speaker 2: You look under the microscope, you look at DNA, you
Speaker 2: look at the structure you're just trying to describe, and
Speaker 2: then see process, and you build towards cause from first
Speaker 2: looking at the thing you're trying to explain. So that's
Speaker 2: I think that's why my work is very different. The
Speaker 2: action in academics and in politics is all on the
Speaker 2: cast side, and I think the action and the action
Speaker 2: in the sense of what motivates, what organizes the careers
Speaker 2: of academics, especially in criminology, is very politically tied. If
Speaker 2: you look at all the causes that people cite for crime,
Speaker 2: whether it's the lack of self discipline or neighborhood quality, poverty,
Speaker 2: racial discrimination, they're all tied to different political programs, and
Speaker 2: everybody takes that for granted. That's what you should be doing.
Speaker 2: You should be emphasizing the cause side. My approaches to
Speaker 2: start on the thing you're trying to explain, you don't
Speaker 2: quite know what it is. If you knew, but if
Speaker 2: you had an accurate sense of the thing you try
Speaker 2: to explain, we would have to do the research. But
Speaker 2: you have something important is going on out there. Well,
Speaker 2: I mean, and then you look at process, you look
Speaker 2: at life cycle, you look at the course of an advance,
Speaker 2: and then you try to build towards an explanation, try
Speaker 2: to find causes and ingencies of change behavior that way.
Speaker 2: So that's what I would encourage your students. I would say,
Speaker 2: maybe it's a personality thing, but I'm either paranoid or
Speaker 2: suspicious about what government tells them. So most sociologists who
Speaker 2: study crime are very happy. From dirkime on right, I mean,
Speaker 2: They're very happy to take official statistics with it at
Speaker 2: suicide or crime and say, okay, that that gives us
Speaker 2: what we're trying to explain. Now let's look for the cause. Well,
Speaker 2: I'm not comfortable with that. I don't I don't try
Speaker 2: government and don't trust government doesn't produce information on crime
Speaker 2: in order to serve social science. In some sense, criminology
Speaker 2: is an effort by academics to kind of get the police,
Speaker 2: the courts, the whole, the judges, the whole criminal justice
Speaker 2: system to be their research agent, their research assistance, what
Speaker 2: the criminal justice system is in, the businesses are doing.
Speaker 2: So when they produce statistics on crime, they produced the
Speaker 2: crime rates, it's for their own purposes. So when I
Speaker 2: started to study crime, which I just started to study
Speaker 2: in a way because I was starting to teach and
Speaker 2: I had to teach something and I had a law background,
Speaker 2: and I realized people studding crime never actually looked at
Speaker 2: what the people were doing very much. So I just
Speaker 2: started to gather all the information I could what people
Speaker 2: were actually doing in the moments of doing time, and
Speaker 2: whether they're doing this before, what are they doing after?
Speaker 2: And I tried to build I tried to find patterns.
Speaker 1: Should we start with that then, because you mentioned about
Speaker 1: perhaps a different methodology compared to what other people used, say,
Speaker 1: but for your book Seductions of Crime, how did you
Speaker 1: approach it? You mentioned ethnography, ethnographic research.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I just collected everything. I put all the biographies,
Speaker 2: auto biographies, all the close up descriptions by journalists. I
Speaker 2: found a very nice data sets that were collected by
Speaker 2: a couple of researchers in Chicago who didn't just take
Speaker 2: the police statistics. They went into the police files. And
Speaker 2: when you go into the which it's hard to do, right,
Speaker 2: they spent a lot of time and I pickybacked off
Speaker 2: of them. They spent a lot of time over years
Speaker 2: getting good relations with the police departments, so they get
Speaker 2: into the files. When you get into the files, you
Speaker 2: get the witness statements, you get the reports made on
Speaker 2: the scene when the tops first get there, you get
Speaker 2: sometimes the fender statements. You get more raw material on
Speaker 2: what actually happened. So that was really helpful. So I
Speaker 2: put all that stuff together, and other studies have done
Speaker 2: videos that and you know, one thing I'm working on
Speaker 2: now with other people in Europe are videos of people
Speaker 2: getting into the fights that are recorded on iPhones are smartphones.
Speaker 2: Everybody's got a smartphone through students, maybe they've done this themselves.
Speaker 2: They pulled out the phone. Something interesting is going on,
Speaker 2: and that stuff is posted on the web and you
Speaker 2: get the first time in human history you actually get
Speaker 2: first hand immediate documentation of what's going on. And and
Speaker 2: it's a it's a real challenge to work up this material,
Speaker 2: but there it is for you. So that's the sort
Speaker 2: of way of working at least to gather the data
Speaker 2: that's I see this as the video material of the
Speaker 2: kind of new frontier that the next generation will spend
Speaker 2: a lot of time developing. They find. It's a wonderful
Speaker 2: education if you really try to just describe what's happening,
Speaker 2: you know, you get a very fine sensibility of interaction
Speaker 2: and how people are adjusting their behavior based on what
Speaker 2: they perceive other buildings, other kind of influence of it.
Speaker 2: And it should be useful for understanding the contingencies of
Speaker 2: starting violence, progressions and violence, and of ending violence, but
Speaker 2: bystanders and so forth. But they're there. It's interesting to me,
Speaker 2: and I think instructive that while these videos have become
Speaker 2: available and there are a lot of them out of England,
Speaker 2: a lot of them in English language US out of England.
Speaker 2: And a lot of these events happen in public transportation,
Speaker 2: on buses, on trained cars, free cars. A lot of
Speaker 2: really ugly stuff happens. And there it is not quite
Speaker 2: from the beginning, because somebody has to Usually the recording
Speaker 2: starts after the event it's already turned towards violence. But
Speaker 2: you get more of a complete documentation of what actually
Speaker 2: happens in violence than we've ever seen before. And it's
Speaker 2: striking that criminology is barely looking at this. I mean,
Speaker 2: what would you want to look at it in criminologists?
Speaker 2: But this is the stuff. It's kind of like you
Speaker 2: can see cancer. You can see a progression, you can
Speaker 2: see the cells fantastasizing it, and you don't want to
Speaker 2: look at it. You want to look at some statistics.
Speaker 2: It's crazy.
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Speaker 1: I was just thinking, like the example you gave, you know,
Speaker 1: the people whipping out their smartphones to record a fight.
Speaker 1: That sort of brings me on to the first question
Speaker 1: that one of my students asked. Because the full title
Speaker 1: of your book is going to read it Seductions of Crime,
Speaker 1: Moral and centual attractions in doing evil. We are all fascinated,
Speaker 1: we're all interested, you know, if something does go viral
Speaker 1: and it's a fight on a bus or something like that.
Speaker 1: So do you mind explain what you mean by the
Speaker 1: central attraction of crime?
Speaker 2: To start with? Yeah, we think of it this way.
Speaker 2: Whatever background factors may be important in the theology and
Speaker 2: the kind of path forwards h and a violent attack
Speaker 2: or affect, they're there. They're not active, they're not controlling
Speaker 2: the person. And until a certain moment, in a certain situation,
Speaker 2: what happens in that some change of behavior, some change
Speaker 2: of perception happens that makes it attractive, compelling, productive to
Speaker 2: act right now. And that's the transition that I'm focusing on,
Speaker 2: and that is you know, all of a sudden, it
Speaker 2: feels the moment feels right, Well, let's do okay, let's
Speaker 2: let's steal that from the store. Let's you know, break
Speaker 2: that window. Let's uh, I'm going to attack that guy.
Speaker 2: It turns out that actually, when you look at like
Speaker 2: these violence I haven't minded working on that recently, the
Speaker 2: attacker usually is in a dominant position. Often, okay, they
Speaker 2: can say they've been threatened, they've been challenged, but when
Speaker 2: they attack, they're in a dominant position, so it feels right.
Speaker 2: They have a sense of power advantage. Well, that's a seductor,
Speaker 2: that's a seduction, it's a feeling. So that's why I
Speaker 2: call it aesthetic. And it's moral in the sense of
Speaker 2: either its specifically I'm gonna defend my honor get respect,
Speaker 2: whether it's you know, I don't I don't know what
Speaker 2: you do with bulgarity on these videos, but that's fine.
Speaker 2: It's fine then. Yet, Yeah, I'm gonna fuck this guy over.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm gonna, I'm gonna break his balls, I'm
Speaker 2: gonna I'm gonna, I'm gonna ally with the power of
Speaker 2: destruction and triumph and feel that from my body. Okay,
Speaker 2: when you attack with violent you organize yourself, your whole
Speaker 2: body into a weapon. Right. I mean, if you're a
Speaker 2: good boxer, you want to stay loose, right, But in
Speaker 2: order to generate power, you've got to discipline a whole
Speaker 2: series of muscles in your body to be affected. And
Speaker 2: so that's an aesthetic sensual attraction. Okay, I'm going to
Speaker 2: I'm going to be a tough gun, which is just
Speaker 2: a metaphor. It's like I'm going to toughen up my
Speaker 2: body to be effective. And how I attack. You know,
Speaker 2: each of the kinds of violence or staff or devians
Speaker 2: that I'm identifying describing the book and their central and
Speaker 2: moral attractions is different. But that's the critical shift that
Speaker 2: all of a sudden it feels right. That's why, that's
Speaker 2: why the background factors, however poor you were, however, discriminated against, however,
Speaker 2: lows in your schooling, however lows you, your neighborhood, however,
Speaker 2: cuon your father was, however victimized you were in one
Speaker 2: way or another. You don't constantly effect, you don't constantly
Speaker 2: steal or beat people up. Something happens in that moment,
Speaker 2: and that shift is because all of a sudden it
Speaker 2: seems like the right thing to do. Also positive. It's
Speaker 2: interesting if you look at all the explanations of crime
Speaker 2: that are out there that are popular, they're all negative things.
Speaker 2: There's a kind of moral symmetry that seems to govern
Speaker 2: the way people think about crime. Crime is banded oy,
Speaker 2: so what can explain it must be something bad? Poverty's bad,
Speaker 2: racial discrimination said, yeah, coming from a broken families fail,
Speaker 2: a neighborhood that doesn't have good social services, that's bad.
Speaker 2: So you could see that all basically, all the explanations
Speaker 2: have caught out there are something bad because it's something bad.
Speaker 2: And that's basically a kind of non rational, mythological way
Speaker 2: of explaining that has an ancient history that's in all societies,
Speaker 2: has always been part of the way people think in society.
Speaker 2: If you know, the crops fail, it must be because
Speaker 2: somebody violated the rules prohibitions that the gods insist on.
Speaker 2: So we have to find that person do something to
Speaker 2: make the gods. Something bad happens. People are getting sick,
Speaker 2: another group is attacking us. We got to find something bad,
Speaker 2: somebody to blame. That's an ancient kind of way of
Speaker 2: looking at things. But in fact, what happens in the
Speaker 2: actual doing of time, is that it seems positive. I'm
Speaker 2: going to achieve something I'm attracted to. It's positive. That's
Speaker 2: why seduction in the title has some some relevance. That's
Speaker 2: why it's the right term, I think, because it's it's
Speaker 2: a version of something positive.
Speaker 1: You also use the word you know, you mentioned central seductive.
Speaker 1: The word that often raises an eyebrower students is that
Speaker 1: the word arousal, you know, or even the word sexual.
Speaker 1: How do you how do you attach sort of arousal
Speaker 1: to the idea of criminality.
Speaker 2: You know, there's a lot you can do a lot
Speaker 2: for the sexual metaphor and penetration, violation, going beyond a
Speaker 2: protective boundary, taking the risk projecting yourself into somebody else's world,
Speaker 2: all these things. And you know the fact that the
Speaker 2: kinds of behaviors we're thinking about when we think about crime,
Speaker 2: that violence, peak and adolescence isn't coincidental sexual and the
Speaker 2: fact that males are doing these activities at five to
Speaker 2: ten times a rat the females are, and the female participation,
Speaker 2: even when it occurs, is often different process that's not
Speaker 2: unrelated to sexual dynamics. H no I think I get
Speaker 2: a little bit at that, a little bit because I
Speaker 2: do have some discussions in the book where I try
Speaker 2: to get the background factories, like the sexual difference. Often
Speaker 2: there's this art pattern that when women murder and they're
Speaker 2: asked about it, they can't recount what was going on
Speaker 2: at the time. Males can. And it's it seems to
Speaker 2: be difficult for more difficult from femails to reconcile, organizing
Speaker 2: their bodies and violence more difficult than it is for men.
Speaker 2: You know, for men, you're just you're being a hard man.
Speaker 2: You know, which is a stick up guy, which is
Speaker 2: a ballot medical it's a very straight coward not subtle.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: For women that doesn't a lot of them, you do violence,
Speaker 2: it's hard for them to reconcile. They are in the
Speaker 2: violence with who they are and the rest of their lives.
Speaker 1: Yeah, could I ask you about that, because I was
Speaker 1: really interested because you know, if we look at evidence
Speaker 1: of things like vandalism or graffiti, ars and setting something
Speaker 1: on fire, they are predominantly may lax. So what what
Speaker 1: essentially or arousal? What what what are men getting from
Speaker 1: it that women don't?
Speaker 2: You're being masculine, right, stamp being tough, you're being re sturbed,
Speaker 2: You're you know, doing violence. You're organizing your body into
Speaker 2: a into a hard wool. It's just like a you
Speaker 2: know a lot of work set. I mean, think of
Speaker 2: the cocky way when wal mm hmm. All these metaphors
Speaker 2: are not accidentally close one to the other two violent activity.
Speaker 2: Let me say just one of the something before, because
Speaker 2: I if your students want to understand how to do
Speaker 2: this work, I wrote a like four page, very short,
Speaker 2: a little essay called on analytic induction, and it's I
Speaker 2: think pretty accessible. It's in International Encyclopedia and Social Science.
Speaker 2: They can find it on the web. It's open access.
Speaker 2: But that'll kind of show you how you do this
Speaker 2: work and how it's different than how social scientists soften.
Speaker 2: And there are examples of studies and other fields, not
Speaker 2: just crime. But if you want to pursue this and
Speaker 2: start your own investigations, and even you know your students
Speaker 2: who are in high school and what we call high school,
Speaker 2: that's a good time to start, because I mean, I
Speaker 2: think basically what I'm doing is continuing who I was
Speaker 2: when I was an analystspected I had I think, this
Speaker 2: is you find and I would encourage your students, you know,
Speaker 2: finding a way of working there continues who you are.
Speaker 2: That helps you. You know, you get a lot of
Speaker 2: motivation out of that, Like your work reflects back on
Speaker 2: concerns you have on an ongoing basis, and that gives
Speaker 2: you motivation.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Thank you for that. Can I throw a
Speaker 1: few more turns at you that often come up that
Speaker 1: the student asks for a little bit more clarification on
Speaker 1: And you mentioned that the stick up guy doing the
Speaker 1: stick up? Do you just want to explain what that means?
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, in the US it's a phrase
Speaker 2: for robbery. I don't know in the UK whether.
Speaker 1: It is occasionally use yeah the stick up, ye.
Speaker 2: Yeah, pick them up, which I mean, you know, put
Speaker 2: your hands on ah as you're illustrator. But it's also
Speaker 2: a pilot metaphor so of being a hard man and
Speaker 2: so forth. These are beard often admired personalities. Dominance is
Speaker 2: a large part of the tracture. I have a chapter
Speaker 2: Ways of a Badass that doesn't focus on a particular
Speaker 2: a crime like event, but it's just a way of
Speaker 2: being that sometimes ends up in violence or exploitations. But
Speaker 2: that came out of really a memory. I had one
Speaker 2: of my first jobs. I was like a busboy waiter
Speaker 2: at a hotel where we we would stay there. It
Speaker 2: wasn't a community every day, it's that the resort kind
Speaker 2: of place you go stay there. We lived in both
Speaker 2: would have been stalls for horses that were converted and
Speaker 2: the first night I got there, we would have roommates
Speaker 2: and I my roommate guy they called Billinger out of
Speaker 2: uh it was a boxer, but Dollinger was a famous
Speaker 2: American criminal, escaped the law for a long time, was
Speaker 2: finally shut down at the Biograph Theater. And this guy,
Speaker 2: he told me, somebody's gonna come up to you and
Speaker 2: they're gonna ask you to borrow some money. And it's
Speaker 2: not gonna be a lot of money, and you're gonna
Speaker 2: think I got the money. You know. They'll ask me
Speaker 2: for a dollar, two dollars and you're gonna think, well,
Speaker 2: I need to have friends here. I don't know people.
Speaker 2: I'll give him the money. Don't give them them. If
Speaker 2: you give the money, And I mean, he didn't explain
Speaker 2: a lot. I don't think if I recall, right, but
Speaker 2: I what I came to understand is that if I
Speaker 2: give this guy the money the first day I'm there
Speaker 2: the rest of the summer because of the summer jol.
Speaker 2: The rest of the summer, I'm going to be looking
Speaker 2: to that guy to get paid back, and he's not
Speaker 2: going to pay me back. And so what's going to
Speaker 2: happen is he's going to be robbing me the whole summer.
Speaker 2: Like it starts out as a loan, but then it
Speaker 2: turns into robbery. It's a dominance thing, not that he
Speaker 2: needs a dollar or two dollars, it's that that dominance
Speaker 2: in a world of mails, and we were all males
Speaker 2: of fails. Well that's a masculine thing, and you know,
Speaker 2: when you get into masculine things, you're never very far
Speaker 2: from sexuality. So the next day, in fact, this guy
Speaker 2: comes up to me. He's not a big guys, not
Speaker 2: an intimidating guy, and he says, hey, Jack, and I'm
Speaker 2: a little short, and you give me a buck. I
Speaker 2: want to get amber with them. And I said, you
Speaker 2: know what, I was just about to ask you, because
Speaker 2: I'm sure too. And that's say Bill. Because they were
Speaker 2: a judge juvenile delinquents, and the head waiter would recruit
Speaker 2: these guys from the judge in the Lower East Side
Speaker 2: of Manhattan, and this would be the way they would
Speaker 2: avoid jail come out to do this work. So these
Speaker 2: were interesting guys. It was a good instructor summer, but
Speaker 2: that I always had that in mind when I was writing,
Speaker 2: like Waves of the Badass. You know what, you know
Speaker 2: these events when somebody goes in and punches somebody, or
Speaker 2: somebody goes in and steals something around. So that's not
Speaker 2: what this is about. Really. The real thing to explain
Speaker 2: is the attractions of the waves of the badness, of
Speaker 2: dominant of how you can do something. And it only
Speaker 2: has the power this kind of asking a person for
Speaker 2: money and not paying it back. It only has power
Speaker 2: if the other people understand you're doing something bad and
Speaker 2: you're getting away with it. That's where you generate the
Speaker 2: power the rule that you should pay back. Otherwise it's
Speaker 2: robbery that allows this guy with a little phrase, hey
Speaker 2: can you give me a buck? Can you lend me
Speaker 2: a buck? Can you not lend the guy a buck?
Speaker 2: And that innocent little phrase becomes a summer long robbery. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it comes worse and worse every day.
Speaker 1: I can't help hearing stick up and waves Badass without
Speaker 1: thinking about pulp fiction the film, which I think both
Speaker 1: both have made reference to, aren't.
Speaker 2: They Yeah, yeah, you know a lot of people, yeah,
Speaker 2: creating culture, movies, writing scripts, writing books. The responsor to
Speaker 2: always symbol They're not getting it from me, It's just
Speaker 2: I'm getting it from the same place they are from
Speaker 2: the world the you know, people who were living whom
Speaker 2: it's motivating. The Joe Peshi character, I think he's very
Speaker 2: you know, the people doing the streets that whole series
Speaker 2: of movies. They are very respond These are people, but
Speaker 2: these are very much like people are new from New York.
Speaker 2: They were responding to the Saint and I the same
Speaker 2: dramatic and dramatics of everyday life.
Speaker 1: Thank you, And if it's like, go with you. I
Speaker 1: just wanted to ask you two more things, one one
Speaker 1: at one end of the scale and one at the
Speaker 1: other end of the scale. So I wonder the scale
Speaker 1: you talk about the sneaky thrills, okay, which students always
Speaker 1: interested in. Do you mind just explaining what that means
Speaker 1: and some examples if that's okay?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I asked my students and at uc
Speaker 2: C L A H anonymously described to me any uh
Speaker 2: kind of thefts that you did a little transgressions and
Speaker 2: what they were about. And over a couple of years
Speaker 2: I got dozens and dozens of these reports. Some of
Speaker 2: them were franklin bullshit, you could tell, but others were detailed,
Speaker 2: and they all they fit together in that the people
Speaker 2: were off and shoplifting, stealing something. Ah. I remember one
Speaker 2: of the reports was getting a pizza up the back
Speaker 2: of the truck. I remember the account. We weren't even hungry,
Speaker 2: but that was the tastiest piece of the ever did
Speaker 2: just to say, oh, is actually the transgression that was
Speaker 2: the attraction. It's the whole drama of had I pass
Speaker 2: as looking normal when I'm in this store? It's not
Speaker 2: just the thing. In fact, the things some up and
Speaker 2: thrown away. It's neglected. They had the money in their
Speaker 2: pocket to buy if they want. It's not like they're
Speaker 2: really poor. And that's what Even if they are rule,
Speaker 2: it's not like they needed this thing. So what is
Speaker 2: really a think here? Well, what's really a thick is
Speaker 2: shown that you can get away, you can be seen
Speaker 2: as normal while you have these dan thoughts. And so
Speaker 2: people are approaching sexuality. You know, if people know what
Speaker 2: you're thinking all the time, if they really, if everybody
Speaker 2: really knew what you were thinking all the time, I mean,
Speaker 2: my god able to because what you're thinking, well, you couldn't,
Speaker 2: you couldn't defend it. So it's very important for you
Speaker 2: to realize. I remember when my own kids were young
Speaker 2: and they would do these embarrassing things, and I kept hoping,
Speaker 2: why don't they get to the age already when they
Speaker 2: have to hide this stuff I don't even want to
Speaker 2: know about, you know. But so eventually now they're pretty
Speaker 2: good at hiding from they will they became pretty good
Speaker 2: at hiding stuff from me. That's what's its fake. You know,
Speaker 2: this is a Huberty Adolesson pre adolescent edge of adolessons
Speaker 2: in adolescens kind of phenomenon. And then you know, it
Speaker 2: can payed off. And that's one of the reasons that
Speaker 2: these crimes vandalism as well are very graffiti. Okay, you
Speaker 2: come at night when nobody's looking, you put your name
Speaker 2: up and you disappear. Okay, there's something in you you
Speaker 2: want known, but you don't want people seeing it that
Speaker 2: it's you. It's come. I want to be known but
Speaker 2: not known. Yeah, your name up everywhere. Ah. But on
Speaker 2: the other hand, you don't want them to identify with
Speaker 2: you and arrest you. So there's a tremendous attraction in
Speaker 2: ad less or proving you to get away with it.
Speaker 2: Whatever the hell it is, it's not that important.
Speaker 1: I think we've probably all done that one, haven't we.
Speaker 1: And from from sneaky thrills. Right at the other end
Speaker 1: of the scale, then is your section of cold blooded
Speaker 1: senseless murder. It's called yeah. I mean, if we've, for example,
Speaker 1: you know that the sneaky thrills, I think we can
Speaker 1: all get our head around that. We can understand of
Speaker 1: it trying to act like a badass doing the stick up,
Speaker 1: you know, demonstrating masculinity. But I think it's a little
Speaker 1: bit more difficult to understand why someone would commit such
Speaker 1: an extreme act and what's the just you know, are
Speaker 1: they trying to justify in some way or is it
Speaker 1: is it something that's just gone beyond their control.
Speaker 2: You know what I've done since that book, I did
Speaker 2: the one paper school intimate massacres. I call it it's
Speaker 2: school shooting. So let's talk about that example, because it
Speaker 2: becomes important to break down what the government or what
Speaker 2: journalists consider all one category into the subcategory. So let
Speaker 2: me talk about school shooting. Uh, there's lots of things
Speaker 2: going on in school, and we have many more here.
Speaker 2: You have some experience with us because availabilities, so rat
Speaker 2: of many more of these things. But in some one
Speaker 2: subset of them, what's going on what I call into
Speaker 2: the massacres. That is, who are attacking others in places
Speaker 2: that they think have a very intimate understanding of who
Speaker 2: they are, and they're trying to destroy that undertone. So
Speaker 2: that becomes that it's not that they're trying to achieve anything.
Speaker 2: In fact, they often don't have much of a plan
Speaker 2: to get away. And what's going on in that kind
Speaker 2: of cold blood senseless what we call cold blooded senseless
Speaker 2: murder is a destruction of the image that the attacker
Speaker 2: things others, even if they don't even if they don't
Speaker 2: even know the attack, they have this images and they're
Speaker 2: trying to destroy them, and sometimes they destroy them. In
Speaker 2: some of these events, they kill their mother, they kill
Speaker 2: people very close to them who could give them different
Speaker 2: accounts they are. They want to get rid of that version.
Speaker 2: So without constructing anything new and.
Speaker 1: Just going back to what you said right earlier, on
Speaker 1: in the show that all of these kinds may mayle
Speaker 1: dominated other than that sort of the demonstration of masculinity.
Speaker 1: What else is going on there? How can we explain
Speaker 1: or understand it through a gendered lens.
Speaker 2: We're talking now pretty much about physical steps and bios
Speaker 2: and we think of that as male, and we think
Speaker 2: of that as the associable poverty, lack of opportunity and
Speaker 2: so forth. But why can't I corruption, broad theft, in
Speaker 2: devious means that kind of taxes, shooting people, all kinds
Speaker 2: of internet us say they will be much more common,
Speaker 2: and the masculine dominates may not be the same, or
Speaker 2: maybe people haven't really looked into it. The kinds of
Speaker 2: crimes we're talking about, the kind of physical we break
Speaker 2: into some place, when you're physically violent somebody, it's a
Speaker 2: way of being masculine, that it's better with men than
Speaker 2: it does with women. On the un hand, fraud, conspiracy,
Speaker 2: a cheating may well be a different gender bats. So
Speaker 2: I think it has to do with how these acts
Speaker 2: fit into who you are in the rest of your life.
Speaker 2: It's not like you do these things separate from the
Speaker 2: rest of your life. This has to be an extension
Speaker 2: of the rest of your line. So if we look
Speaker 2: at what's called white collar time, we might find a
Speaker 2: very different male or female and make those acts assist.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Jack, Thank you. I always end by asking
Speaker 1: if people want to find out more about your work
Speaker 1: or read some more of your literature, how can they
Speaker 1: get in touch or find out more about you?
Speaker 2: Well, you know you can my emile from U C.
Speaker 2: L a Is and I have a female female and
Speaker 2: you can find me on that. I have an article
Speaker 2: that should be coming out in the next year, well
Speaker 2: beyond the selections of the state, and you can look
Speaker 2: for that, and that will particularly how my approach is
Speaker 2: suspicious of government and of the state, and how so
Speaker 2: much of criminology goes along with this state, and that
Speaker 2: might be a kind of guide to how to read
Speaker 2: the whole range of different contributions, perhaps specify brilliant.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you, yeah, exactly, Thank you. I really really
Speaker 1: do appreciate your time. Sorry, I said it'd be about
Speaker 1: thirty minutes, so I've taken up more of your time.
Speaker 1: So I really do appreciate you giving up your time
Speaker 1: for me today, Jack, Thank you, Thank you.
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