The Changing Nature of Crime
Thinking Allowed
BBC
4.4 • 997 Ratings
🗓️ 1 September 2021
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The changing nature of crime: What do current day thieves, gangsters and dealers say about their ‘business’ and how its evolved over time? How strict a division is there between the 'respectable' and the 'illicit' world? To what extent are our notions of crime rooted in Hollywood myth making about sharp suited gangsters rather than the more mundane reality? Laurie Taylor explores these questions with Richard Hobbs, Emeritus Professor of Criminology at the University of Essex and author of a new study which analyses the essence of illegal capitalism, from anonymous warehouse thieves to exalted underworld figures such as the Krays. They’re joined by Tuesday Reitano, Deputy Director of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, whose research highlights the impact on Covid 19 on the illegal economy. She finds that shortages, lockdowns and public attitudes have brought the underworld and upperworld closer together allowing criminals to taking advantage of the virus, finding new routes for illegal commodities, from narcotics to people.
Producer: Jayne Egerton
Transcript
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| 0:36.3 | This is a Thinking Loud Podcasts from the BBC, and for more details and much, much more about |
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| 0:47.2 | Hello a memory about 50 years ago when I was a junior university lecturer in sociology I received a, well a |
| 0:54.6 | rather unusual invitation from Durham University. Would I be prepared to give a |
| 0:58.7 | series of social science lectures to the long-term prisoners contained in the maximum security |
| 1:04.6 | wing of Durham prison. |
| 1:06.1 | Well, as my lecturing colleague, the late Stanley Cohen and I soon discovered as we began |
| 1:11.5 | our classes, this was hardly a normal set of pupils. In the words of one |
| 1:15.9 | prison officer they saw themselves as the landed gentry of crime. The bank robber John |
| 1:21.6 | McPicker occupied a desk alongside gang leader Charlie Richardson, |
| 1:26.0 | and behind them sat the Cray Brothers accomplice Tony Lambriano and the great train thief Bruce Reynolds. |
| 1:32.0 | Well, as our earnest lectures on Marx and Weber and Derkheim began to fall on stony ground, |
| 1:39.6 | we found ourselves increasingly asking our restless class to talk more and more about their |
| 1:45.0 | own lives of crime, their motives, their ways of coping with sentences of over 20 years. |
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