Accounting for Identity Theft

• Published date: 01 August 2013
• Author: Lynne M. Vieraitis,Arthur Vasquez,Heith Copes,Stephanie M. Cardwell
• DOI: 10.1177/1043986213496174
• Date: 01 August 2013
• Subject Matter: Articles

Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice

29(3) 351 –368

© 2013 SAGE Publications

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DOI: 10.1177/1043986213496174

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Article

Accounting for Identity

Theft: The Roles of Lifestyle

and Enactment

Heith Copes1, Lynne M. Vieraitis2, Stephanie M.

Cardwell1, and Arthur Vasquez2

Abstract

White-collar offenders are thought to be particularly adept at excusing and justifying

their crimes. Whether this is due to their personal backgrounds or the characteristics

of their crimes is, as of yet, unknown. To shed light on this issue we explore the various

justifications and excuses given by identity thieves. Using data from semistructured

interviews with 49 federally convicted identity thieves we show that they all provided

numerous accounts for their crimes, with denial of injury being the most common.

We also find that the use of accounts varies by the lifestyles these offenders live. That

is, those seeking to live as conventional citizens call forth different accounts than

those who have a criminal lifestyle.

Keywords

identity theft, accounts, neutralizations, qualitative methods

Decades of research have established the importance of excuses and justifications for

continued involvement in crime (see Maruna & Copes, 2005 for a review). This litera-

ture shows that offenders take great steps to make sense of their crimes either to soothe

their conscience or to repair their damaged social images. One of the first studies to

examine this social psychological process empirically was Cressey’s (1953) Other

People’s Money. Using data collected from men convicted of trust violations, Cressey

analyzed the ways in which they accounted for their crimes through “certain key

1University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL, USA

2University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA

Corresponding Author:

Heith Copes, Department of Justice Sciences, University of Alabama at Birmingham, 1201 University

Blvd, Suite 210, Birmingham, AL 35294-4562, USA.

Email: jhcopes@uab.edu

496174CCJ29310.1177/1043986213496174<italic>Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice</italic>Copes et al.

research-article2013

352 Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 29(3)

verbalizations” that enabled them to maintain an image acceptable both to themselves

and to others in their social groups. In the years since Cressey’s study was published,

research on offenders’ excuses and justifications has contributed greatly to our under-

standing of crime and those who commit it. This work was the foundation for such

theoretical developments as neutralization theory (Sykes & Matza, 1957) and the soci-

ology of accounts (Scott & Lyman, 1968). Using these theories scholars have exam-

ined the ways that those who engage in a host of criminal and deviant activities make

sense of their indiscretions to continue offending seemingly unaffected (see Maruna &

Copes, 2005).

This corpus of research has shown that offenders of all types excuse, justify, and

rationalize their indiscretions but do so in ways that reflect their understanding of the

expectations of the primary social group to which they belong. That is, the content of

offenders’ accounts appears to differ not only by the specific offense but by back-

ground characteristics of those who commit these crimes. Interviews with offenders

suggest that the accounts of white-collar offenders differ from street offenders in ways

that reflect the class positions of each and their understandings of or experiences with

the criminal justice process (Shover & Hochstetler, 2006; Willott, Griffin, & Torrance,

2001). While survey research is less supportive of this claim, it still shows that white-

collar and street offenders see and portray themselves in substantively different ways

(Stadler & Benson, 2012).

Although decades of research have demonstrated that those who commit crimes as

diverse as bribery, fraud, employee theft, and embezzlement seek to manage the stigma

associated with their crimes (Benson, 1985; Cressey, 1953; Jesilow, Pontell, & Geis,

1993) we still do not know why such offenders appear to call forth different linguistic

devices to make sense of their actions than those used by ordinary street criminals.

Possible explanations for this variation in the use of accounts include differential

access to social capital (Scott & Lyman, 1968), child-rearing practices of middle-class

parents (Shover & Hochstetler, 2006), personality characteristics that contribute to

excuse-making, and stronger commitments to conventional society (Benson, 1985). It

is also possible that the differences are merely due to specific elements of the crimes

that lend themselves more easily to excuses (Hollinger, 1991).

Our goal here is to shed light on this phenomenon by exploring how one’s social

position and enactment strategies explain variation in the content of justifications and

excuses used by identity thieves. To do this we rely on data collected from semistruc-

tured interviews with federally convicted identity thieves. What makes these offenders

ideally suited for this inquiry is that those who commit identity theft hail from dispa-

rate backgrounds, maintain varied lifestyles, and have numerous methods of enacting

the offense (Copes & Vieraitis, 2012). This diversity in both the types of offenders and

types of offenses will allow us to determine if the frequency and content of accounts

vary by the lifestyles of the offenders (conventional vs. street life) and by the way they

enact identity theft (occupational teams vs. street-level identity theft). By doing so we

not only shed light on the ways that identity thieves think about themselves and their

crimes but also add to the theoretical development of the sociology of accounts more

generally.