Christopher Uggen and Melissa Thompson. 2003.
"The Socioeconomic Determinants of Ill-Gotten Gains: Within-Person Changes
in Drug Use and Illegal Earnings." American Journal of Sociology
109:146-85.
ABSTRACT
Although criminals experience varying degrees of
socioeconomic success, sociological research on attainment has rarely considered
illegal activities. Generalizing from the sociology of earnings attainment, we
develop a conceptual model of social embeddedness in conventional and criminal
activities to explain illegal earnings among criminal offenders. We analyze
unique monthly earnings data from the National Supported Work Demonstration
Project, a large-scale social program that provided employment to released
offenders, drug addicts, and youth dropouts in the 1970s. To isolate the
effects of time-varying indicators such as legal earnings, drug use, and
criminal opportunities, we estimate fixed effects models predicting
month-to-month changes in illegal earnings. Our results show that criminal
earnings are highly sensitive to embeddedness in conforming work and family
relationships, criminal experience, and the perceived risks and rewards of
crime. Moreover, heroin and cocaine use creates a strong earnings imperative
that is difficult to satisfy in the conventional low-wage labor market, and
offenders earn far more money illegally when they are using these drugs than
during periods of abstinence.