Book Review: Delisi, M. (2005). Career Criminals in Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. pp. 196

• Author: Jeffery T. Ulmer
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016808314553
• Published date: 01 March 2008
• Date: 01 March 2008
• Subject Matter: Articles

Delisi, M. (2005). Career Criminals in Society.

Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. pp. 196.

DOI: 10.1177/0734016808314553

“In a way, the crime problem in a society is the career criminal problem because about

5% of the offenders account for more than half of the total crime and delinquency affecting

the population” (p. 173). This is the major premise of Matt Delisi’s Criminal Careers in

Society, which attacks the issue of persistent, dangerous criminals from a self-identified

conservative ideological perspective. That is, Delisi presents the book as a conservative

counterweight to much of academic criminology, which he characterizes as liberal-leaning

at least its implications, and often in its explicit stances.

His focus is particularly on those offenders who exhibit strong tendencies toward anti-

social and violent behavior from childhood or adolescence onward. Since these offenders

create so much havoc, “social control efforts should almost entirely focus on them” (p. 6).

Delisi first describes, with illustrative narratives and sample criminal records as examples,

the dynamics and parameters of the kind of criminal careers he is talking about. In two later

chapters, he categorizes relevant theories on criminal careers into developmental theories

(e.g., social bonding/control theory, social learning/differential association theory, Moffitt’s

developmental theory, and others) and propensity theories (J. Q. Wilson’s discussions of

crime and human nature, Gottfredson and Hirschi’s self-control theory), noting the strengths

and drawbacks of each in empirically addressing career criminals. Next, Delisi discusses

“the politics of career criminals,” and this chapter contains the polemical and policy heart

of the book. Here and in the concluding chapter, his main argument is that for a variety of

reasons, the “disorganized and lenient” (p. 136) criminal justice system does a generally poor

job of dealing with career criminals, and society does a poor job of investing in prevention

of the processes by which criminal careers develop, and of identifying and incapacitating

career criminals. He is not an uncritical enthusiast of selective incapacitation strategies,

however, noting that the prediction of criminal careers is very difficult, and current crimi-

nological tools are not up to the task. However, he notes that society cannot afford to wait

around for criminology to achieve the ability to prospectively identify career criminals with

great accuracy, if that is even humanly possible. Delisi also calls for much greater efforts

to incapacitate career criminals through longer (perhaps lifetime) periods of incarceration

for proven violent career criminals, and muses about the possible efficacy of more wide-

spread use of the death penalty for such offenders. Such a strategy, he argues, would neces-

sitate the state taking over the function of the well-known Innocence Project, using DNA

evidence routinely to guard against wrongful execution.

In my view, this is the most evidence-based, theoretically sophisticated, and least arrogant

conservative statement on criminology that one is going to find. Despite the conservative

rhetoric, what Delisi ends up doing is attempting to find a middle ground between his two

categorizations of theory (developmental and propensity), and indirectly, Left and Right.

He argues that conservative policy makers and criminal justice officials should embrace and

invest in specific efforts to prevent the processes by which career criminals develop in the

first place (he emphasizes primarily child and adolescent development processes). In turn,

liberal-leaning academics should recognize the human costs and harm done by career criminals,

accept the notion from propensity theories that some criminals have always been “bad” and

remain irredeemable, and stop implicitly apologizing for or sympathizing with them.

Book Reviews 103