SOC 229: Selected Topics in Criminology

Fred Desroches, St. Jerome's University

Estimated reading time: 4 hr 56 min

Table of contents

Cross-listed course: These notes are for SOC 229 / LS 229: Selected Topics in Criminology, offered jointly through the Department of Sociology and the Legal Studies program at the University of Waterloo. The course content is identical under both designations.

This course provides a sociological analysis of research and theory on selected criminal activities, examining the motivation, modus operandi, and social characteristics of offences and offenders. The course is organized into four sequential topics: prison riots and hostage-taking, bank robbery, tearoom trade (impersonal sex in public places), and higher-level drug trafficking and organized crime. Each topic is studied through primary research conducted or closely examined by the course author, Professor Fred Desroches, who brings a distinctly qualitative, interview-based methodology to the study of crime.

About the Instructor

Fred Desroches is a Professor in the Sociology Department at St. Jerome’s University at the University of Waterloo. His research is almost entirely qualitative, involving interviews with offenders and investigating officers alongside the use of available data such as police files and trial transcripts. His major publications directly inform this course:

Force and Fear: Robbery in Canada — based on interviews with 80 convicted bank robbers in federal penitentiaries across Canada, examining motivation and modus operandi
Behind the Bars: Experiences in Crime — companion volume presenting robbers’ stories in their own words
The Crime That Pays: Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime in Canada — based on interviews with 70 higher-level (wholesale) drug traffickers, including a chapter on the RCMP drug squad

Other research areas include the police subculture, organized crime legislation, prison riots and hostage-taking, sex in public places, and police use of the polygraph.

Required Textbooks

Force and Fear: Robbery in Canada, Fred Desroches, Canadian Scholars Press, 2002.
Behind the Bars: Experience in Crime, Frederick Desroches, Canadian Scholars Press, 1996.
The Crime That Pays: Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime in Canada, Fred Desroches, Canadian Scholars Press, 2005.
Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places, 2nd edition, Laud Humphreys, Aldine Transaction, 1975.

Course Structure

The course is divided into four topics:

Topic	Modules	Subject
1	01–04	Prison Riots and Hostage-Taking
2	05–09	Bank Robbery
3	10–15	Tearoom Trade
4	16–20	High-Level Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime

Module 01: The April 1971 Kingston Penitentiary Riot

Objectives: After completing this module, students should be able to critically analyze the problems in researching prison riots, explain the main characteristics of the Kingston Penitentiary riot, define and explain the nature of inmate “undesirables,” discuss the violent nature of prison riots, explain the reluctance of most inmates to participate in prison riots, critically discuss why prison guards are seldom injured in prison riots, and critically analyze various theories of prison riots.

Reading: Course Reserves: “The April 1971 Kingston Penitentiary Riot,” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Corrections, pp. 317–331.

Introduction to Prison Riots

The first major topic of this course concerns prison riots, and the subject breaks naturally into four areas of inquiry. The first is a detailed case study of one of the most violent riots in Canadian history — the April 1971 uprising at Kingston Penitentiary. The second concerns the patterns that recur across prison riots, because despite appearing chaotic, these events are actually quite predictable in their structure. The third topic, treated separately given its importance, addresses the differential treatment of hostages: why guards are nearly always protected while certain categories of inmates — those the inmate subculture labels “undesirables” — are frequently attacked and killed. The fourth topic introduces and critiques three theoretical frameworks used to explain why prison riots occur.

Prison riots are inherently difficult to study. Because they involve crime, hostage-taking, and the presence of armed authorities, no researcher can enter a riot while it is unfolding. Study must therefore proceed after the fact, relying on interviews with participants and whatever documentary evidence can be assembled. The analysis of the 1971 Kingston Penitentiary riot rests primarily on what researchers call the use of available data — specifically, the statements that the Kingston Police took from approximately 50 of the 550 inmates present at the time. These statements were gathered in the context of a murder investigation and subsequent prosecution of thirteen inmates charged with two counts of murder. Two inmates, Brian Ensor and Bertrand Henry Robert, were killed during the riot. With both officers present during each interview, the statements were tape-recorded and transcribed, often running to 50 or 60 typed pages per inmate. Because so many witnesses described the same events, it was possible to cross-check accounts and build a remarkably detailed reconstruction of what happened. The limitation of available data is the reverse of its convenience: questions one would have liked to ask cannot be posed, and the biases inherent in a police investigation may shape what was recorded and what was not.

To study patterns beyond Kingston, additional sources were assembled — newspaper and magazine articles, official investigations, and inmate biographies — covering dozens of riots across Canada and the United States. Much of this data is fragmentary, but the patterns it reveals are consistent, and every major riot in the decades since the original research was published has confirmed rather than challenged those patterns.

Kingston Penitentiary as a Maximum Security Prison

Post-riot interior, Kingston Penitentiary

Canada’s correctional system is divided along a constitutional fault line established at Confederation in 1867. Any sentence of two years or more is served in a federal penitentiary, administered by Correctional Services Canada; sentences under two years go to provincial institutions variously called jails, detention centres, or reformatories. Federal institutions consequently house the country’s more serious and chronic offenders — career criminals whose sentences grow with each successive conviction, along with those convicted of the gravest offences. Within the federal system, institutions are classified as maximum, medium, or minimum security. Newly sentenced inmates typically enter at Millhaven Institution, just outside Kingston, where they are assessed by parole officers and psychologists before being assigned to an appropriate security level. Through sustained good behaviour, an inmate can gradually “cascade down” from maximum to medium to minimum security, and eventually to a halfway house.

Maximum security institutions restrict movement the most severely and provide the fewest privileges, and they are also the settings most prone to prison riots. Kingston Penitentiary, opened in 1835 as one of nine penitentiaries in the Kingston area, was a maximum security institution at the time of the 1971 riot. What made the Kingston riot uniquely catastrophic was that the inmates succeeded in capturing the central dome — the nerve centre from which all cellblock doors are controlled — and thereby released the entire population of approximately 550 inmates simultaneously. This almost never happens. Prisons are designed to be segmentable, so that guards can contain a disturbance to one wing while locking down the rest. At Kingston, the complete collapse of that segmentation produced what is, by any measure, one of the most violent prison riots in Canadian history.

Inmate Informants and Roger Caron’s Bingo

Among the inmates who cooperated with police in the aftermath of the riot, roughly 50 out of 550 gave detailed statements — just under ten percent. The decision to cooperate carried genuine personal risk. Inmates who testified were, in the eyes of the inmate code, becoming informants themselves and therefore undesirables. Two motivations emerge clearly from the statements themselves. The first was practical self-interest: many explicitly indicated they would testify only if it helped their parole applications, and under correctional legislation, cooperation in an institutional investigation or police inquiry can in fact yield favourable parole consideration. After the murder trial concluded, the crown attorney, police, and parole officials reviewed all 50 files together and granted many of these inmates the early release they had been angling for. The second motivation was something more altruistic — a sense that they had witnessed acts so morally repugnant that they could not stay silent, a revulsion consistent with the conventional values that most inmates, despite their criminality, continue to hold.

The danger of cooperating was not hypothetical. During preliminary hearings, a day-parolee from Collins Bay Penitentiary was attending court sessions, collecting the names of testifying witnesses, and passing those names back to inmates who then assaulted the witnesses inside. Police investigation exposed this pipeline and ended the man’s day parole. More seriously, through the process of legal discovery, the crown attorney passed the 50 witness statements to the thirteen defence lawyers, on the explicit condition that client names not be disclosed to their clients. That condition was violated. The resulting document — known within prison circles as the “rat list” — circulated rapidly through the penitentiary system; within days, a guard at a British Columbia institution confiscated a copy from an inmate. Correctional Services responded by removing all 50 cooperating inmates from their various institutions and consolidating them at Kingston Penitentiary, which had been partly emptied after the riot and hastily renovated. This ad hoc protective custody arrangement had lasting policy consequences: Kingston became, and largely remains, a dedicated protective custody institution, housing inmates whose safety cannot be guaranteed in the general population. It was a policy shift the riot itself had made unavoidable.

The most detailed first-person account of the riot remains the 1985 book Bingo: Four Days in Hell, written by inmate Roger Caron. Caron was present during the riot and later gave testimony drawing on research materials shared with him in manuscript form — materials that had been compiled from the 50 police statements. Caron’s earlier book, Go-Boy!, a partly autobiographical account of his criminal career and prison escapes (he holds the Canadian record of thirteen escapes), won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction in 1978. Bingo describes the tortures of the riot in vivid and disturbing detail that goes well beyond what any academic account attempts. Both books are recommended reading for students wishing to understand the riot from the perspective of someone who witnessed it directly.

The Riot Begins – Billie Knight’s Role

The riot began on the evening of April 14th, 1971. Prison administrators noticed nothing unusual that day, but below the surface a small group of inmates had been laying plans. Inmate statements confirm that rumours of a planned hostage-taking had been circulating throughout the day — one prisoner overheard several men in the carpentry shop discussing a previous failed attempt and how “this time” they would pull it off. Others reported being approached to take part and declining. Yet despite widespread knowledge that something was imminent, not a single inmate warned the guards. This silence was itself unusual: inmates generally have strong reasons to prevent riots (they lose property, face legal jeopardy, and lose privileges), and alerting authorities about a planned incident is one of the most reliable riot-prevention mechanisms available to prison administrators.

The riot began in the gymnasium, which could accommodate up to 100 inmates and had its own guard in an elevated gun cage accessible from outside the building. Guards walking the general inmate population do not carry weapons — they move among hundreds of inmates and could easily be overpowered — but firearm positions are maintained in secure elevated locations throughout the institution. During a routine recreation period that evening, approximately 20 inmates from range 2-H lined up to return to their cellblock, escorted by guards at front and rear. Unnoticed, six of the men in the line had been substituted — inmate Billie Knight and five associates had slipped in among the legitimate group. As the procession moved out of the gym and into the connecting corridor, Knight’s group struck, overpowering the escort guards. A seventh inmate, in the dome area, simultaneously grabbed guard Joseph Valiere as he moved to order other inmates into their cells. Valiere later recalled reading fear, not complicity, in the faces of the legitimate inmates walking past him. The takeover was swift: the six guards captured in the corridor were secured and tied, and Knight’s group moved immediately into the dome, where the remaining guards were also taken hostage with some physical resistance but no serious injuries.

With the dome secured, Knight’s group was able to open every cellblock in the institution. Inmates report that most of them were reluctant to leave their cells and were ordered out at gunpoint by the handful who had initiated the takeover. Once out, however, the population quickly engaged in the characteristic behaviour of the early riot phase — running, yelling, smashing furniture and fixtures, drinking the chapel wine, and arming themselves with metal bars torn from the cell-door mechanisms. The destruction ultimately ran into the millions of dollars, damage still visible when the institution was visited a year later. Knight climbed to the upper tier of the dome and addressed the assembled population, announcing his leadership, pledging that the guard hostages would not be harmed, and declaring his intention to negotiate with prison authorities — before also telling the inmates to “wreck the place.”

The Inmates of 1-D – Inmate Undesirables

The first floor of D-block — 1-D — held the prison’s protective custody inmates, men whose safety could not be guaranteed among the general population. The wing had an unfortunate stigma: to live in 1-D was to be assumed an undesirable, regardless of the actual reason for placement there. Most inmates in 1-D were there because they were sex offenders (particularly child molesters) or known or suspected informants. Others, however, had been placed there for different reasons — a young inmate threatened for refusing sexual advances, others with unpaid gambling debts. Bertrand Henry Robert, one of the two men ultimately killed, had been convicted not of a sexual offence but of torturing his children by sitting them on a hot stove; his wife had been convicted alongside him, and she was attacked in the Kingston Penitentiary for Women and held under scalding water. Robert’s case illustrates that any crime against children, not only sexual abuse, could earn a man the status of undesirable.

At the time, Correctional Services policy was to house undesirables within the general population, in a designated wing — a policy that the Kingston riot would ultimately discredit and replace. One inmate, Brian Ensor, was living not in 1-D but in the general population, his history as a child molester known to some but not all of his fellow inmates. During the riot’s early hours he was seized on the third tier, beaten with metal bars, and hung upside down over the iron railing by his ankles while others chanted “Drop him!” The two inmates holding him eventually pulled him back up. That they did not drop him — despite the crowd’s urging — probably reflected awareness that 500 witnesses would have seen the murder. Another inmate, Ralph Lake, had been among the 50 left in the gymnasium when the riot began. Returning to find his cell destroyed, he sought out a friend, inmate St. Temure, who hid him for several days. James Ball, in 1-D itself, was beaten by multiple successive groups across the course of the night, his assailants repeatedly calling him a rat and a stool pigeon; after slashing his wrists, he was taken to the prison hospital — still under guard control — which almost certainly saved his life.

Knight, upon learning of these assaults, took direct action. He collected Ensor, assisted by inmate Barry MacKenzie (who would later succeed him as leader), and forcibly returned Ensor to 1-D despite Ensor’s panicked protests. Knight then addressed the inmate population from the upper tier, visibly angry, and demanded that harassment of the undesirables stop immediately. For a time, it did. It was the only serious attempt by anyone to protect the inmates in protective custody, and it succeeded only while Knight remained in power.

Friday – The Struggle for Power and Leadership

The riot had begun on Wednesday night, and Thursday passed quietly with most of the inmate population sleeping. During this period Knight set up an inmate committee and requested that the government convene a negotiating panel of prominent Canadians — lawyers, journalists, an ex-judge. Five such individuals agreed to serve and began meeting with the inmate committee in the hospital wing, which remained under prison authority control. These negotiations were always tense partly because the army had surrounded the institution, creating a palpable threat that force might be used to retake the prison.

By Friday a competing group — led by inmates Dave Shepley and Brian Beaucage — had begun actively challenging Knight’s authority. This faction had been involved in the assault on Ensor, had advocated killing the guard hostages, and had clashed with Knight over both issues. That evening the confrontation came to a head: Knight called the inmate population together using a loudhailer and began to address them from the third tier about the progress of negotiations, when Beaucage reached forward, seized the loudhailer, and ordered him to stop while Shepley swung a metal bar at him. The resulting scuffle in front of the assembled inmate population was resolved when MacKenzie stepped between them, disarmed Beaucage, and returned the loudhailer to Knight. Knight spoke, but witnesses later recalled nothing of what he said — he was widely regarded as a “bullshitter,” an inmate not genuinely respected by his peers. MacKenzie then addressed the population, and the shift in authority was immediately apparent to everyone present.

Knight was given sleeping pills, put to bed, and played no further role in the riot. MacKenzie — a member of the inmate elite, respected by both inmates and prison authorities — assumed leadership. This transition is historically notable: leadership changes of this kind are extraordinarily rare in prison riots. Once a leader is in place and has secured a group of armed followers, removing them is nearly impossible. Kingston is the only riot on record in which an established leader lost power to a successor — and, as will be seen, it happened twice.

Saturday – The Violent Inmates Take Over

Saturday was relatively calm until late afternoon, when the federal government lost patience. The chief source of that frustration was the inmates’ failure to produce any coherent list of demands; without demands, negotiations were essentially without content. Ottawa delivered an ultimatum: surrender the prison and release the guard hostages unharmed, or the army would take the institution by force within 24 hours. From today’s standpoint, this decision seems reckless — the evidence across decades of prison riot research consistently shows that negotiation produces the safest outcomes. But in 1971, negotiating with inmates was politically costly. Opposition questions in Parliament, media criticism, pressure from the families of guard hostages, and the general sense that a government that negotiates with criminals looks weak all combined to make the ultimatum politically attractive. Had the army actually stormed the institution — as the National Guard did at Attica that same summer — the results could have been catastrophic, as they were at Attica, where troopers killed nine of thirty guard hostages along with twenty-five inmates.

MacKenzie brought the ultimatum to the inmate population, laying out the choice plainly: surrender voluntarily, or stand and face the army. Discussion among the inmates strongly favoured surrender — multiple statements subsequently given to police suggested that as many as 80 percent of the population wanted to give up. A secret vote was agreed upon, with time allowed for discussion. The vote never took place. While MacKenzie and the negotiating committee were in the hospital wing, Shepley appeared on the fourth tier with a group of roughly 30 armed “toughs” and seized the loudhailer. His message was blunt: they were not giving up, and anyone not with them was against them. Beaucage stood beside him, wielding a club. The threat was immediate and physical, and the approximately 500 other inmates — terrified, leaderless without MacKenzie — surged up to the third and fourth tiers to avoid being identified as dissenters. Inmates later described the experience as being overwhelmed by what one called “the insane element.” Once gathered on the upper tiers, the group began preparing defensive positions against the army: mattresses for barricades, buckets of water for tear gas, ripped sheets as face coverings, and stockpiles of heavy objects to throw down on troops advancing up the stairwells. With the 24-hour clock running, they then turned to an idea that would define the riot’s most horrific chapter: bringing the undesirables out of 1-D.

Sunday – The Beatings

With nearly 20 hours remaining before the army’s deadline and little to do but wait, Shepley organized the removal of the undesirables from 1-D. Beaucage and a group of others went through the wing, dragging the inmates out of their cells. Some were passive; others, including Ensor, resisted. The men were brought to the dome floor and tied to chairs arranged in a circle with their hands secured behind their backs. The contrast with the treatment of guard hostages could hardly have been more stark: not a single inmate stepped forward to interfere on behalf of the undesirables.

Shepley then staged a performance that took the form of a kangaroo court. Moving around the circle, he addressed each man in turn: “I am your prosecutor, you animal, and you are charged with being a diddler” — or an informant. The crowd of inmates gathered on the upper tiers served as a tribunal, responding with thumbs-up or thumbs-down signals. The verdicts were unanimous: guilty. When the question of punishment arose, the crowd shouted for death, castration, and throat-slitting; a suggestion to break their noses became the opening action. From that point the beatings continued from roughly midnight through dawn on Sunday. The men were struck with fists, hammers, and metal bars across the head, face, groin, and ribs. Their legs were cut with knives; blood was collected and consumed in front of them. Cigarettes were used to burn their arms; fingers were broken; salt was poured into open wounds; urine was directed at wounds; hot glue was poured over their heads. Brian Ensor was picked up and dropped on his face repeatedly. About thirty inmates took an active part in the assault; another twenty drifted in to add individual blows. Shepley directed proceedings from the floor; Beaucage positioned himself on the upper tier — a distance that he may have calculated would reduce his legal exposure, though not enough: both were among the thirteen ultimately charged.

The reaction of most of the inmate population was not enthusiasm but revulsion. Witnesses gave statements describing the scene as a “torture chamber.” One inmate said he had not minded when the beatings began — “I have no love for these people” — but quickly became physically ill. Others left and were rounded up and forced back by Shepley and Beaucage. Periodically, guards threw cold water on the victims to revive them, and the beatings resumed. Inmates went back to their cells in groups; when Shepley noticed the audience had dispersed, he sent others to force them back. Most of the inmate population, it is clear, found it impossible to watch what was happening, even if they felt no sympathy for the victims.

When the torturers finally believed all the men were dead, the chairs were cut free and the bodies dragged back into 1-D. Inmates brought fire hoses to wash away the blood. One man, Robert Robidoux, checked the occupants and found Ensor still breathing. He retrieved a steel bar, straddled Ensor, and drove repeated blows into his skull until the skull fractured and Ensor was dead. Roberts was found still alive and ambulatory; he eventually lapsed into a coma and died several weeks later. Remarkably, all the other men survived, though with injuries — fractured skulls, requiring metal plates — that likely affected them for the rest of their lives. After the worst was over, a few inmates entered 1-D, made the surviving men more comfortable, chased away those who came back to inflict further injury, and advised the victims to play dead.

The End of the Kingston Penitentiary Riot

MacKenzie and the inmate negotiating committee had remained in the hospital wing throughout Saturday night and Sunday morning, aware of what was happening in the dome but too fearful to return. When dawn brought the tortures to an end, MacKenzie went back in alone — the only inmate willing to do so. He climbed to the upper tier, began banging the metal railings, and assembled the population. He announced that prison authorities would allow inmates to surrender through the hospital wing in groups of 100, with one guard hostage released alongside each group. The moment he mentioned the hospital corridor, roughly 200 inmates stampeded toward it. The guard posted at the hospital entrance drew his weapon as the crowd rushed toward him, but after a brief, tense exchange, the inmates were allowed through, handcuffed in the main courtyard, and transferred to Millhaven. Shepley and Beaucage, watching the exodus, understood that it was over and made no further attempt to block it. The remaining inmates were called out alphabetically in groups of about 60, each batch accompanied by a released guard. True to the word he had given on Saturday, MacKenzie was the last inmate to leave, walking out alongside the final guard hostage. Not one of the five guard hostages had been injured during the four-day riot.

Three separate criminal proceedings followed. In the first, thirteen inmates were charged with two counts of murder in the deaths of Ensor and Roberts. Twelve pleaded guilty to manslaughter; Beaucage, who had remained on the upper tier during the worst of the beatings, successfully resisted a manslaughter plea and was allowed to plead guilty to assault. The sentences added to existing terms ranged from two to five years — a leniency that reflected the uncomfortable reality that prison authorities are primarily invested in the safety of guard hostages, not inmate victims. The authorities had known the beatings were occurring as they happened and had not intervened, precisely because the guards were not in the circle. In the second trial, eleven guards charged with assaulting inmates during the transfer to Millhaven — a gauntlet of baton blows administered to shackled prisoners — were acquitted on all counts. In the third, Billie Knight and five others were originally charged with kidnapping; five accepted a plea and received three years each for forcible abduction. Knight, however, took his case to trial. He altered his appearance — suit, glasses, differently combed hair, a new moustache — and seated himself among identically dressed defence lawyers. Only one of four guards called to identify him could do so. The judge dismissed the case for insufficient identification. Knight, who had started the entire riot, was convicted of nothing.

Key Concepts:
Prison riot (a large-scale disturbance in which guard hostages are taken) vs. prison disturbance (a smaller incident without hostage-taking, resolved quickly by force)
Inmate undesirables: informants and sex offenders, particularly child molesters, who are targets of inmate violence during riots
Inmate elite: high-status inmates who typically emerge as riot leaders; distinguished by criminal reputation, prison positions, and the loyalty of a following

Module 02: Patterns in Prison Riots

Objectives: After completing this module, students should be able to describe and explain the various patterns in prison riots, critically analyze the role of prison riot leaders, explain how riots begin and end, discuss the violent nature of prison riots, and explain why most inmates prefer to avoid prison riots.

Reading: Course Reserves: “Patterns in Prison Riots,” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Corrections, pp. 332–351.

Initial Stages of Prison Riots – Riots vs. Disturbances

The study of patterns in prison riots required piecing together fragmentary data — newspaper clippings, official inquiries, magazine articles, and the occasional book-length account — drawn from dozens of riots across Canada and the United States. Despite the unevenness of this evidence base, clear and consistent patterns emerge, and every major riot observed since the original research was published has confirmed rather than disrupted those patterns. Prison riots, despite their apparent chaos, are in fact remarkably predictable events.

A necessary first step in this research was arriving at a working definition. No definition existed in the criminological literature, and a distinction between two types of incidents had to be constructed. A prison disturbance involves inmates who rise up, perhaps destroy property, but do not take guard hostages. Disturbances involve a small number of participants — sometimes only one or two — and because guards are not being held, authorities can enter immediately with force: tear gas, batons, whatever is required. Disturbances end quickly, often within hours, and rarely attract media coverage. A prison riot, by contrast, involves a significant proportion of the inmate population and crucially includes the seizure of guard hostages. Riots last days — typically three or four — generate extensive media coverage, and cannot be resolved through a simple use of force without risking the lives of the hostages.

Historically, this pattern hardened in the 1950s. A Kingston Penitentiary disturbance back in 1932, for instance, involved inmates who barricaded themselves but made no effort to take guards hostage and committed no destruction; it was organized and essentially peaceful. From the 1950s onward, two features became characteristic of serious prison riots: taking guard hostages and threatening their lives, and systematic destruction of prison property.

The initial stage of a riot is typically chaotic and opportunistic. A small group of inmates seizes guards, breaks down barriers, and releases others from their cells. This phase is rarely the product of long-term planning — a day or two at most, sometimes entirely spontaneous. Once the immediate takeover is complete, inmates flood into common areas and begin a spree of destruction that usually involves roughly 10 percent of the population. The remaining 90 percent are largely passive, driven by a calculus of self-preservation: they arm themselves and seek out friends to stay close to throughout the riot, primarily because of the fear of being attacked. Many inmates are forced out of their cells by armed groups and compelled to participate in at least a nominal way. The fear of fires is also significant — fires set during riots have killed hundreds of inmates in South American cases, and the prospect of being trapped in a locked cell during a prison fire drives some inmates out even against their inclination. At Kingston, the inmates drank the chapel wine, dressed themselves as pirates, and fought amongst themselves in scenes that, to an outside observer, resembled a particularly violent party more than a calculated political act.

Personal security is the dominant concern for the majority. Wherever an opportunity to surrender to authorities presents itself, many inmates will take it. A frequently observed pattern in riots is that if authorities simply open a door and allow inmates to walk out, most will do so — and the sudden collapse in numbers quickly demoralizes those who remain.

Leadership, notably, does not typically originate with those who start the riot. The men who seize the first guards and trigger the uprising do not generally translate that initial act into lasting authority. Kingston was the exception that proves the rule: Billie Knight started the riot and did briefly lead it, though his leadership was quickly and unusually overturned. The more common pattern is that the initial stage is genuinely leaderless, and leaders only emerge once the immediate chaos has subsided.

Prison Riot Leadership

The leadership vacuum that characterizes the first hours of a riot is typically filled through one of three mechanisms. The most common is simple assumption of power — someone steps into the void and takes charge without being formally asked or elected. The second is an invitation from a group of inmates who recognize the need for leadership and seek out someone to provide it. The third, and least common, is an election. Attica in 1971 held actual elections, producing around 25 to 30 spokespersons — a number so large that it made coherent negotiation nearly impossible, contributing to the breakdown that ended in the National Guard killing both inmates and guard hostages.

Regardless of how leadership is attained, those who become leaders share a defining characteristic: they are almost invariably members of the inmate elite. Status within the inmate world derives from several sources. High-level drug traffickers, members of organized crime networks, and accomplished armed robbers carry considerable prestige by virtue of their criminal accomplishments. Some inmates earn status through their personality — toughness, reliability, the willingness to “look out” for others. Others gain semi-official positions within the institution, working in capacities that give them influence and access. These men are described in inmate argot as “right guys” or “solid” — people who live by the inmate code and can be trusted to act in the collective interest rather than purely for personal gain. They typically have a following: other inmates who will take direction from them and who can be mobilized as a group. When a riot occurs and leaders emerge from this elite, they bring both credibility and the organizational capacity to enforce their authority.

Inmate leaders occupy a delicate position. On one hand, they must maintain legitimacy with the inmate population by appearing to represent the collective interest. On the other, they are acutely aware that harming guard hostages will expose them to serious legal jeopardy — murder charges, denial of parole, transfer to the most restrictive institutions in the country. Their response to this tension is typically to ensure that guard hostages are actively protected, appointing trusted followers as guards and taking personal responsibility for the hostages’ safety. This is also a function of their political sophistication: members of the inmate elite generally have working relationships with prison authorities that allow them to negotiate, and they know that a dead guard hostage ends any possibility of a negotiated settlement.

Once in power, riot leaders are almost never displaced. They maintain their position through force — the armed followers who enforce their edicts — and through the respect they command from the broader inmate population. As seen at Kingston, the few attempts to dislodge them are historically anomalous. Leaders set strict rules for the duration of the riot and enforce them harshly; at Attica, two inmates caught speaking to journalists in violation of the spokespeople’s explicit prohibition were subjected to a formal tribunal, found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed by dozens of stab wounds. The kangaroo-court formality of such proceedings reflects an inmate tendency to seek legitimacy for acts of violence — to frame punishment as justice rather than murder.

Violence During Prison Riots

Violence in prison riots takes several forms, and understanding each form requires distinguishing it from the others. The most common and least lethal is the destruction of prison property, which typically occurs in the opening hours of a riot and can inflict millions of dollars in damage. More dangerous is violence between inmates. During the initial stage, old grudges surface with immediacy: inmates with weapons seek out enemies, and victims of these attacks are sometimes severely injured or killed. Once leaders establish control, they typically collect the most seriously injured and pass them to prison authorities through negotiated handoffs — a pattern that, paradoxically, can improve medical outcomes for some victims.

Sexual violence occurs during prison riots in the United States more commonly than in Canada. The Canadian inmate subculture tends toward conservatism on this point, and the inmate code prohibits sexual assault of other inmates; when it occurs, the inmate elite and others will typically intervene. American patterns have historically been more severe, with groups of predatory inmates described in the literature as “wolves” committing gang sexual assaults during the disorganized opening phase of a riot.

The most prevalent and socially specific form of violence is the assault on undesirables. This pattern — the simultaneous protection of guard hostages and the brutal targeting of informants and sex offenders — will be examined in depth in Module 3. What is worth noting here is that these assaults are almost never simply impulsive: as at Kingston and Attica, some form of theatrical legitimation through mock trial tends to accompany them, as if the participants need to satisfy themselves, and perhaps a watching audience, that punishment is just rather than merely opportunistic.

Guards are most vulnerable in the opening moments of a riot, when force is used to overpower and capture them. Some will resist and sustain injuries — a broken arm, a black eye, bruising. These injuries are largely incidental to the process of taking hostages rather than the result of deliberate harm. After capture, guard hostages are almost universally treated well; across several decades of riot data, there is no documented case of a guard being injured by inmates after being taken hostage. More than occasionally, inmates are actively protected by fellow prisoners who like them or feel some obligation toward them. The far greater danger to guard hostages, as the Attica case brutally demonstrated, comes from the forces sent to rescue them.

Ending Prison Riots and Prison Riot Prevention

The lesson most hard-won from the history of prison riots is simple: negotiate. A riot will typically run its course in three or four days, and once the momentum subsides, inmates will almost invariably surrender without guard hostages being harmed — provided authorities do not attempt to retake the institution by force. Forceful attempts have repeatedly resulted in the deaths of the very hostages they were meant to save, usually because rescuers cannot distinguish between guards dressed in inmate clothing and actual inmates, and because the sudden entrance of armed troops creates chaos in which anyone can be shot. The Attica riot remains the most devastating example, but Canadian cases — the 1975 shooting death of social worker Mary Steinhauser by guards attempting to rescue her, and the killing of two Dorchester Maximum Security Prison guards by their would-be rescuers — confirm that the pattern is not uniquely American. Governments face enormous political pressure to act decisively, to not be seen bargaining with criminals, to resolve the embarrassment quickly. The evidence consistently shows this impulse to be both politically understandable and practically dangerous.

Allowing inmates the opportunity to surrender voluntarily is among the most effective tools available to authorities. When a door opens and inmates can walk out, most take the chance — and the rapid thinning of the riot population typically collapses whatever collective determination remains among those who wanted to hold out.

Prison riot prevention centres on responsiveness to early warning signs. Inmates often know that trouble is building before authorities do, and cultivating informants — not through coercion but through genuine relationships that make inmates willing to share what they know — is the most reliable preventive measure available. When signs of dissatisfaction appear, the most effective response is immediate and proactive: direct engagement with inmate grievances, selective security tightening, and investigation of specific threats. At Attica, guards had been leaving their wallets at home for months because they felt something was coming; authorities did not act on those signals. At Kingston, tension over the impending move to Millhaven was widespread and ignored. Organizational change within a prison — including reform and improvement, not just deterioration — creates vulnerability, a point that will be addressed directly in Module 4’s discussion of Durkheim’s theory of anomie.

Key Concepts:
Patterns in prison riots: the consistent structural regularities observable across riot events in different places and times
Initial stage of a riot: the chaotic, often leaderless first hours characterized by property destruction, grudge-settling, and the forced participation of a passive majority
Prison riot leadership: typically assumed by members of the inmate elite who protect guard hostages while enforcing strict internal discipline
Violence in prison riots: includes property destruction, grudge violence, assault on undesirables, and initial resistance during hostage-taking; guards are rarely harmed after capture
The concern over personal security in a prison riot: the primary motivation for most of the inmate population, who prefer surrender over participation

Module 03: The Treatment of Hostages in Prison Riots

Objectives: After completing this module, students should be able to explain why guards are protected and seldom injured in prison riots, explain why inmates despise inmate informants, explain why inmates despise sex offenders and child molesters, compare and contrast the treatment of guards versus undesirables, discuss the four types of hostage taking, and critically analyze strategies for ending hostage-taking incidents.

Reading: Course Reserves: “The Treatment of Hostages in Prison Riots: Some Hypotheses,” Canadian Journal of Criminology, pp. 439–450.

Introduction – The Different Manner in Which Guards and Undesirables are Treated in Prison Riots

One of the most striking regularities in North American prison riots is the sharp divergence between how guard hostages are treated and how inmate undesirables — informants and sex offenders, especially child molesters — are treated when they fall into the hands of rioting inmates. Guards are seized, threatened, occasionally slapped around during capture, but almost never seriously harmed thereafter; they are released at the end of the riot, typically uninjured and sometimes reporting that individual inmates actively risked their own safety to protect them. Undesirables, by contrast, who are usually housed in protective custody precisely because their lives are at constant risk, find that a riot strips away whatever protection the institution could provide, and they face beatings, torture, and frequently death at the hands of other inmates.

The 1980 New Mexico State Penitentiary riot at Santa Fe illustrates this contrast with particular clarity. Seventeen guards were taken hostage; most later described their captivity in positive terms, reporting that inmates had gone out of their way to protect them. Meanwhile, rioting inmates broke into the prison records office, located the files identifying “helpful prisoners” — the institution’s euphemism for informants — and used mug shots to systematically hunt them down. Thirty-six inmates identified as informants were located and murdered, some with blowtorches applied to their eyes.

The analytical framework for understanding this pattern involves five hypotheses, applied first to guard hostages and then to undesirables. These hypotheses draw on both widely shared cultural values and the specific structural and subcultural characteristics of prison life. Together, they help explain not only why guards are protected but why undesirables are so reliably attacked. Undesirables, it is worth emphasizing, can themselves be considered a form of hostage: they are trapped in the riot against their will, unable to reach the authorities who might protect them, entirely at the mercy of those who despise them.

Prison Guards as Hostages

man in small window of steel-reinforced door

The injuries guards sustain in prison riots occur almost exclusively during the initial takeover, when inmates are using sufficient force to overpower them and they may resist. A black eye or a broken arm during this phase is not unusual. These are largely incidental to the process of seizing hostages rather than expressions of deliberate intent to harm. After the takeover is complete, however, the record across decades of prison riot data is remarkable: no guard taken as a hostage has been killed or seriously injured by inmates after being taken captive. Guards who have been through riots consistently report on their treatment in positive terms — they were fed, their needs were attended to, and specific inmates often went out of their way to prevent violence against them.

The peril that does threaten guard hostages comes not from their captors but from the forces deployed to rescue them. At Attica in 1971, state troopers firing into the prison yard could not distinguish between guards dressed in inmate clothing and actual inmates. Nine of the thirty guard hostages were killed, and more than eighty prisoners were seriously injured. None of the hostages had been harmed by inmates; many inmates had, in fact, thrown themselves over the guards to shield them. Canadian examples include the 1975 shooting of Mary Steinhauser at a British Columbia institution and the deaths of two Dorchester guard hostages killed by other guards in the rescue attempt. The pattern is consistent enough to constitute a principle: in nearly every situation where guard hostages have been killed, it was the use of force by authorities that killed them.

Given this backdrop — prisons filled with violent men who have every reason to resent the people enforcing the rules against them — the question of why guards are so reliably protected deserves serious analytical attention. Five hypotheses offer a collectively persuasive answer.

Hypothesis 1 – Moral Prohibitions

guard restraining inmate through hole in door

The first hypothesis is that moral prohibitions — deeply held cultural values — protect guards from being killed during prison riots. Society does not condemn all killing uniformly: killing in self-defence, or in wartime, occupies morally legitimate space. What makes killing morally prohibited is the nature of the target. Prison guards are doing a job. They have families, pay taxes, and raise children. They enforce rules against inmates, some of those rules deeply resented, but enforcement of the law is not a moral justification for their death. The cultural case for killing guard hostages is essentially impossible to construct.

The key claim here is that inmates largely share the dominant moral values of Canadian society. The inmate subculture is not a wholesale rejection of conventional morality. Inmates subscribe to most of the same values as the rest of society and may violate only a limited subset of them, usually rationalizing those violations through what Sykes and Matza described as techniques of neutralization. Most inmates differentiate between guards — some are decent, some are not — and even those who dislike particular guards are unlikely to find a killing morally supportable. The moral prohibition against killing guard hostages is, in this account, genuinely internalized by the inmate population, and it is this internalized prohibition, operating alongside the more instrumental concerns that follow, that explains why guard hostages survive their captivity.

Hypothesis 2 – Friendships and Alliances

The second hypothesis concerns the friendships and alliances that guards build with inmates over time. Guards occupy the role of managers within a profoundly coercive environment, and some inmates will, inevitably, develop antagonism toward them. But the day-to-day reality of prison life also creates opportunities for positive exchanges. Guards who treat inmates with fairness, who exercise discretion about minor rule violations, and who show basic human respect earn goodwill — and, more instrumentally, build relationships that can be called upon in a crisis. The selective non-enforcement of petty rules is common prison practice, and what it buys guards is a degree of reciprocal compliance on the issues that matter, along with a reservoir of goodwill among inmates who appreciate being treated like adults.

The inmate elite are particularly important here. Guards who cultivate respectful relationships with high-status inmates — the men most likely to emerge as riot leaders — are investing in a kind of protection insurance. When a riot begins and these men take charge, they are likely to include their allied guards among those they actively work to keep safe. This dynamic was visible in a Jackson prison riot, where the leader was asked to designate a guard hostage to send out to a threatening crowd; inmate after inmate objected to the first and second choices because those guards had friends in the room. Only the least popular guard — the one with no particular friendships among the population — could be selected without protest.

The Stockholm Syndrome — the psychological bonding that can develop between hostage takers and their hostages over the course of extended captivity — may also play a modest supporting role in prison riots, though the pre-existing friendships and alliances are likely more significant. In prison riots, many of the guards assigned to protect hostages may already know and like those specific guards, so the protective impulse long predates the hostage situation itself.

Hypothesis 3 – Fear of Repercussions

The third hypothesis draws on deterrence theory: inmates do not harm guard hostages largely because they are afraid of the consequences. Prison riots last three or four days. Guards will be back in control very soon. Any inmate who kills a guard during a riot will almost certainly be identified — there are hundreds of witnesses — and will face a first-degree murder charge, meaning life imprisonment. Beyond the criminal charge, legal repercussions include indefinite denial of parole and transfer to the most restrictive facilities in the federal system. Canada operates two Special Handling Units (the “Shu”) — one in Quebec, one in the west — where sentences for the most severe institutional offenders are served under conditions of extreme restriction. In the first year of an SHU placement, inmates are effectively in solitary confinement; by the second year, controlled contact with a small number of other inmates is allowed; only by the third year does any meaningful relaxation occur. Most inmates who have served time in the SHU describe it in terms approaching horror.

Informal repercussions are an additional deterrent. Guards retake the prison and they remember who did what. After the Kingston riot, inmates transferred to Millhaven were forced to run a gauntlet of guards armed with batons who beat them systematically — a reprisal even for a riot in which guard hostages were not seriously injured. An inmate interviewed at Archambault Penitentiary described being held in solitary for over a year during which, daily, a guard would defecate in his sandwich before passing it through the cell door — retaliation for a perceived role in a prison incident in which, notably, the actual guard fatalities had occurred before any riot began. Inmates know these informal retaliations are coming and factor them into their calculations.

For riot leaders, the fear of repercussions is especially acute. They have assumed personal responsibility for what happens to the guard hostages. If a guard dies on their watch, they know they will be held accountable both legally and informally. This is one reason why the first action many leaders take is to organize protection for the hostages — not merely from altruistic concern but from a clear-eyed awareness of what failure to protect will cost them.

Hypothesis 4 and 5 – Rewards and Barter

The fourth hypothesis concerns the expectation of rewards. Correctional Services Canada has provisions for meritorious service awards, and protecting a guard hostage during a prison riot is explicitly included. Inmates who act to shield guards from harm during a riot know that their actions will be remembered and that they are likely to be rewarded — through improved prison conditions, transfer to a lower-security institution, or, most valuably, favourable treatment at a parole hearing. Guards, who return to positions of institutional authority once the riot ends, are in a position to advocate for inmates who protected them. The anticipated rewards are concrete enough that they probably motivate some inmates to act protectively — alongside, rather than instead of, the moral prohibitions and friendships described in earlier hypotheses.

The fifth and final hypothesis concerns hostages as barter. The only reason prison authorities negotiate with rioting inmates at all, rather than simply waiting them out or deploying force, is that they hold guard hostages whose lives are at risk. Guards are the only currency inmates have. If authorities did not care about guard lives, there would be no negotiations, no forum in which inmate demands could be presented, no political leverage of any kind. Killing or seriously injuring the guard hostages would immediately eliminate the inmates’ only bargaining chip and would invite a forcible response with no further constraint from the administration’s concern about hostage safety. Inmates understand this perfectly well. The guard hostages are kept alive and unharmed not only because of moral prohibitions, friendships, and fear of reprisals, but because they are the instrument through which any outcome other than a military assault can be secured.

Informants – The Absence of Moral Prohibitions

Having established why guards are protected, the same five hypotheses can be examined in reverse, as an explanation of why undesirables are attacked. Beginning with moral prohibitions: there are none that protect informants. The hatred of people who inform on others is not merely a feature of inmate subculture; it is deeply embedded in the broader culture as well. Children learn early that “tattle-tales” are figures of contempt. The term “snitch,” “fink,” or “rat” is pejorative in virtually every social context. What makes the cultural condemnation of informants so broad is that informing betrays trust — the informant exploits a confidence placed in them, typically for personal gain, at the expense of the person confided in. In a criminal context, many of the people in prison are there specifically because a partner or associate informed on them. That creates a very personal reason for hatred alongside the general cultural one.

The inmate code formalizes this cultural animus. Within the code, informants are not merely disliked but are defined as deserving of death — “getting what they deserve” in the language Sykes and Matza would analyse as a “denial of the victim.” The moral framing inverts entirely: the informant is the wrongdoer, the person informed upon is the victim, and inmate violence against the informant is a form of justice. There is no moral prohibition protecting informants from harm because the prevailing moral framework — both societal and subcultural — actually endorses harming them. The contrast with guard hostages, who are seen as doing their jobs, could hardly be more complete.

Child Molesters – The Absence of Moral Prohibitions

The absence of moral prohibitions against harming child molesters requires even less argument, because the revulsion is universal rather than subcultural. Children are regarded as innocent, vulnerable, and dependent; adults who exploit or harm them violate the most basic cultural obligations. Child molesters are hated not merely in Western cultures but across virtually every human society, and this universality is itself significant: the hatred tracks the nature of the target — a helpless child — rather than any culturally specific norm.

Within the inmate population, additional reasons layer on top of the general cultural revulsion. Many inmates come from backgrounds that included abuse, foster care, and institutional settings, and a significant proportion have themselves been victimized by predatory adults. For these men, the hatred of child molesters is personal as well as principled. There is also a sharp sense of comparative injustice: sex offenders typically enter prison without lengthy criminal records, often having held steady employment and maintained community ties. This background earns them relatively lenient sentences — two to three years, compared to eight, ten, or fourteen years for a bank robber who, by the robber’s own reckoning, harmed no one. Inmates who feel their sentences are disproportionate to their crimes experience this sentencing differential as an acute injustice, and it intensifies the existing hostility. Sex offenders also tend to earn parole relatively quickly, since their institutional profile looks appealing to parole boards — stable job history, community ties, apparent rehabilitation potential. Watching a man who molested children walk free while one’s own parole applications are denied compounds the sense of grievance.

An additional consideration is scapegoating. Sociological research has consistently found that people of low status seek to elevate themselves by identifying a group of even lower status — what amounts to a comparative social elevation. Inmates who may feel shame or ambivalence about their own criminality can achieve a sense of moral superiority by pointing to child molesters. Attacking Paul Bernardo at Kingston Penitentiary is not merely violent; it earns the attacker status in the eyes of other inmates, and likely even the tacit approval of segments of the general public.

The macho value system of the inmate subculture also contributes. The code prizes toughness, courage, and criminal skill; crimes that demonstrate none of these qualities — and child molestation specifically demonstrates their opposites — are held in contempt. The predation of children is seen as cowardly, requiring no skill, involving helpless victims: the antithesis of everything the inmate code valorizes. None of these reasons produces any moral prohibition against harming such men. On the contrary, the combined force of cultural values, subcultural norms, personal histories, and perceived injustice makes attacking child molesters feel, to many inmates, not merely permissible but actively righteous.

San Pedro Prison – La Paz, Bolivia

A visit to San Pedro Prison in La Paz, Bolivia provided an unusual opportunity to observe prison dynamics in a radically different institutional context. San Pedro was, at the time, effectively inmate-governed: guards maintained offices at the perimeter but did not enter the institution proper. Inside, inmates ran businesses, restaurants, and a small pub; wives and children of some inmates lived within the prison walls; cells were bought and sold according to an internal market. Money was the operative currency of the entire social order.

The experience of visiting this institution — obtained by paying a modest entry fee and being assigned an inmate tour guide and a “protection” detail of three men, the most imposing of whom had committed three murders — illustrated principles that translate directly back to the theoretical framework under discussion. Inmates at San Pedro had their own norms against cell theft (punishable by death) and against the molestation of children. A book published in 2003, Marching Powder by Rusty Young, recounts what happened when three men convicted of a series of gang rapes of women were sent into the prison. Inmates recognized who they were. A crowd of hundreds formed, chanting, and the three men were lifted above the crowd, carried to a large pool-like structure used for institutional punishment, thrown in, and beaten to death while onlookers screamed encouragement. The guards, whose offices bordered the institution, could hear the noise and did nothing.

The pattern established in North American prisons is not a product of any particular cultural context. The hatred of sexual predators, and the willingness to subject them to lethal violence while treating guard hostages with relative care, appears to be something close to a universal feature of institutional inmate life. The La Paz case confirms that even in a radically different legal and cultural environment, the same logic obtains: undesirables have no friends, no protectors, no barter value, and no moral shield.

Undesirables – Friendships and Alliances/Repercussions/Rewards/Barter

Applying the remaining four hypotheses to undesirables reveals that each factor protecting guard hostages is absent or greatly diminished in the case of informants and sex offenders. Friendships and alliances: inmates are judged by the company they keep, and association with a known undesirable will taint one’s own reputation. No one cultivates friendships with informants or child molesters; to be seen associating with them is to become suspect oneself. When the occasional inmate at Kingston Penitentiary did try to remove someone from the beating circle, they argued not that their friend was an undesirable who deserved protection but that their friend was not an undesirable at all — a fundamentally different argument, and one that conceded the premise that undesirables are legitimate targets.

Fear of repercussions is reduced to a minor deterrent. The outcome at Kingston — manslaughter convictions with sentences of two to five years added to existing terms — reflected the institutional reality that prison administrations are concerned about guard lives, not inmate lives. Authorities knew the beatings were occurring in the dome throughout the night and did not intervene. The undesirables are not protected by the same legal apparatus that would respond immediately to any threat to guard hostages. Some deterrence exists, but it is far weaker.

The reward hypothesis fails entirely. Guards are worth protecting in part because they will be in a position to advocate for inmates who helped them once the riot is over. Undesirables have no such capacity; they are marginalized, vulnerable, and unable to offer anything in return for protection. Institutional authorities will not reward inmates who protect undesirables in the same way they reward those who protect guards. The barter hypothesis likewise fails: undesirables have no leverage with the administration. Harming them does not prompt negotiators to walk away from the table or compel authorities to retake the institution by force. As Kingston demonstrated, authorities can know that torture is occurring and allow it to proceed because their only genuine priority is the safety of the guard hostages. In sum, all five hypotheses point in the same direction: every structural and cultural factor that protects guards actively fails to protect undesirables, and many of those same factors are reversed — operating to facilitate attacks rather than prevent them.

Hostage Taking – An Overview

Police have developed a typology of hostage-taking that classifies incidents into four broad categories: rioting inmates (already discussed), escaping or cornered criminals, emotionally disturbed persons, and terrorists. Each presents a different profile of risk and requires a correspondingly different negotiating approach.

Cornered criminals — most commonly bank robbers who find the police at the door before they can leave — are typically the most manageable. The hostage-taking is unplanned, a product of panic rather than design. These individuals are frightened, often bewildered, but they are also fundamentally rational: they know they cannot escape, they know a prolonged standoff makes their situation worse, and they have no ideological commitment that might override self-interest. Police negotiators who can open communication, stall for time, and allow the perpetrators to think clearly will usually secure a peaceful surrender relatively quickly. The film Dog Day Afternoon offers a popular-culture illustration of this type.

Emotionally disturbed persons are considerably more dangerous because they are frequently irrational and unpredictable. They may be psychologically troubled in a chronic way, or simply in a state of acute crisis — a domestic dispute that spiralled out of control, a long-standing grievance erupting in violence. They may be suicidal; they may enjoy the power and attention the situation gives them. The fact that they expend emotional energy rapidly can work in negotiators’ favour — exhaustion erodes resolve. Police approach these situations by remaining calm, avoiding threats, and stalling for time, while quietly preparing for the possibility of a forced entry if negotiations break down completely.

Terrorist hostage-takers are the most complex and dangerous category. They are typically politically motivated, often operate as part of an organized group, and may be ideologically prepared to die for their cause. Their targets are usually chosen to symbolize a political adversary. They have strong rationalizations for their actions — they are freedom fighters, not criminals; they are responding to oppression and injustice — and these rationalizations make them resistant to the appeals to self-interest that work with cornered criminals. Terrorist incidents can last weeks or months and may require eventual military resolution. Terrorists often deliberately prevent the Stockholm Syndrome — the emotional bonding between captors and captives that develops during prolonged shared confinement — by assigning an executioner who has no contact with the hostages, ensuring that familiarity never undermines the executioner’s capacity to act. The hostage-taking that gave this syndrome its name occurred in Stockholm in 1973, when a bank robber and his prison-mate held four clerks captive for several days; the hostages emerged from the ordeal defending their captors and weeping as they were taken into custody — behaviour that shocked Swedish viewers and gave the phenomenon its name.

Across all categories, the foundational principle of modern hostage negotiation is the same one that applies to prison riots: time works in the negotiator’s favour. Communication can be opened, trust can be slowly built, tactical options can be developed, exhaustion will set in, and mistakes will be made. The use of force, by contrast, has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to kill the very people it is meant to save.

Key Concepts:
Inmate undesirables (informants and sex offenders): despised by other inmates for reasons rooted in both mainstream cultural values and the specific norms of the inmate subculture
Moral prohibitions: cultural values against harming guard hostages; absent in the case of undesirables
Friendships and alliances: day-to-day relationships between guards and inmates that can motivate protective intervention during riots
The fear of repercussions (deterrence theory): formal and informal consequences for harming guards; significantly weaker as a protection for undesirables
The expectation of rewards: inmates may protect guards in anticipation of parole and institutional benefits
Hostages as barter: guards represent the only leverage inmates hold in negotiations; undesirables have no such value
Typologies of hostage-taking incidents: cornered criminals, emotionally disturbed persons, rioting inmates, and terrorists
The Stockholm Syndrome: emotional bonding between hostage takers and hostages during extended captivity

Module 04: Theories of Prison Riots

Objectives: After completing this module, students should be able to critically analyze the powder keg theory of prison riots, critically analyze anomie theory as it applies to prison riots in the manner of Merton, critically analyze anomie theory as it applies to prison riots in the manner of Durkheim, and use these theories to help explain the Kingston Penitentiary riot.

Reading: Course Reserves: “Anomie: Two Theories of Prison Riots,” Canadian Journal of Criminology, pp. 173–190.

The Powder Keg Theory of Prison Riots

The first of three theories under examination is the powder keg theory, a commonsense model that has appeared in newspaper editorials, letters to the editor, and the academic literature without ever having been attributed to any single theorist. The analogy is straightforward: just as a powder keg is an explosive device that only requires a spark to detonate, prisons are volatile institutions housing angry, impulsive, and criminalized men under conditions of deprivation and oppression. Any triggering incident — guard brutality, bad food, a flippant comment over a public address system — could ignite an explosion, and that explosion is a riot. The theory has surface plausibility. Prison riots do tend to occur disproportionately in maximum security institutions, which are the most overcrowded, the most restrictive, and the most oppressive. Overcrowding in particular is associated with riots, as it makes prison conditions more difficult. A Millhaven disturbance once erupted when a guard called inmates “girls” over the loudspeaker — a flippant remark that triggered a rampage; had there been accessible guard hostages, it would have qualified as a full riot.

Three criticisms, however, limit the theory’s explanatory power. First, prison conditions improved considerably through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s — work-release programs, conjugal visits, educational programs, professional psychiatric staff, newer and smaller institutions were all introduced — yet the number of prison riots increased during this same period. A theory that attributes riots to bad conditions should predict fewer riots when conditions improve, not more. Second, the correlation between bad conditions and riots is not consistent: some older, overcrowded institutions have historically had no riot problems, while some newer institutions with excellent facilities have experienced multiple riots. Bad conditions cannot be the single determining variable. Third, and most fundamentally, the conditions the powder keg theory identifies as causal are essentially constant: prisons always hold angry, impulsive, volatile men in oppressive environments. If these conditions alone explained riots, riots would occur far more frequently than they actually do. The theory over-predicts. Prison riots are rare; the powder keg theory implies they should be common.

These criticisms do not entirely disqualify the theory. What they demonstrate is that the powder keg theory articulates necessary conditions for prison riots without articulating sufficient conditions. Angry, deprived people are indeed a prerequisite for rioting — happy people in benign conditions do not riot. But not every angry, deprived population produces a riot, and any adequate theory of prison riots must explain why some prisons experience riots and others do not, why riots happen at particular moments rather than continuously, and what triggers the specific outbreak. The powder keg theory provides the background conditions; other theories must explain the ignition.

Robert Merton’s Theory of Anomie

Robert Merton, an American sociologist, published his landmark article “Social Structure and Anomie” in 1938. His concern was explaining the distribution of crime — specifically, why crime is disproportionately concentrated in the lower socioeconomic classes. Rather than attributing this to individual character or ethnicity, Merton located the explanation in the structure of American society itself.

American society, Merton argued, promotes one overriding culturally approved goal: financial success, or money. The culture socializes people relentlessly to aspire to wealth, status, and material success. Simultaneously, it socializes people to pursue these goals through legitimate means — education, hard work, entrepreneurship, saving and investment. The problem is that the emphasis on the goal far outweighs the emphasis on the means. When this imbalance exists, people are implicitly encouraged to use whatever means are most efficient, regardless of their legitimacy. In sport, the goal of winning is so strongly emphasized that cheating proliferates — steroids in cycling and baseball, deliberate injury in contact sports. In the economy, the goal of financial success is so strongly emphasized that people who cannot reach it through legitimate channels may turn to criminal ones.

Merton further argued that legitimate opportunities are not equally distributed. Wealthy families provide their children with private schools, networks, mentors, and capital. Poor families, in inner-city environments with underperforming schools and few well-connected role models, find that legitimate pathways to success are effectively blocked. This is the condition Merton described as anomie — a situation in which people have been socialized to want goals they cannot reach through the means society endorses. The result is psychological and emotional strain. People feel inferior, like failures, sometimes victimized by the structural barriers that block their advancement. One adaptive response — Merton called it innovation — is to seek the socially approved goal through illegitimate means: drug dealing, robbery, fraud.

Merton’s theory is flexible. The two core elements — culturally endorsed goals and blocked legitimate means — can be identified in many social contexts. In academic life, the imperative to “publish or perish” creates a situation where academics whose legitimate publishing capacity is constrained by time, resources, or ability may fabricate data or plagiarize. The structural logic applies wherever goals matter and means are blocked. In the next section, this logic is applied directly to prison riots.

Anomie and Prison Riots – Merton

Merton never applied his theory to prison riots; the application here is an adaptation of his framework. The argument runs as follows: inmates in prisons have demands — better conditions, more privileges, greater access to programs and services. These demands can be understood as the goals they wish to achieve. Legitimate means for achieving these goals are essentially non-existent: inmate committees can make requests, but the prison administration is not obligated to respond, and inmates have no real institutional power. If the goals matter and the legitimate means are blocked, the logic of Merton’s theory predicts that inmates will seek illegitimate means — and a prison riot, complete with hostage-taking and forced negotiations, could be understood as precisely that. By seizing the institution and holding guards hostage, inmates acquire the leverage that the legitimate institutional structure denies them. They force the administration to the table. The riot becomes an illegitimate instrument for achieving goals that cannot be achieved legitimately.

This reading gives the theory apparent empirical support: most prison riots do, in fact, involve the presentation of demands. Inmates typically produce a list of grievances — better food, more gym time, improved medical care, fairer parole reviews, salary increases for prison labour — and these demands are negotiated as part of the process of releasing hostages. If riots are caused by anomie in Merton’s sense, those demands should represent the goals that motivated the riot in the first place.

Several significant criticisms, however, undermine the theory when tested against the evidence. First, the theory implies that riots are premeditated and rational: that inmates identify their goals, recognize that legitimate means are blocked, and plan a riot as an instrumental solution. In reality, prison riots appear to be largely spontaneous and opportunistic, not the product of calculated planning. Second, at Kingston in 1971, no list of demands was ever produced — the government repeatedly asked for one and never received it. If the riot was motivated by specific unmet goals, one would expect those goals to be articulated. Third, where demands are made, they frequently appear to be constructed after the riot has begun, sometimes with great difficulty. One account from an American riot describes the leadership asking the men who started it what they were rioting about, and being told they didn’t know; the demands were then assembled item by item in a somewhat arbitrary process. This strongly suggests that the demands are not the cause of the riot but are produced to explain and justify it retroactively. Fourth, the demands tend to be constructed by the leaders — who, as established, are typically not the people who started the riot — and therefore cannot reflect the actual motivations of those who did start it. Fifth, there are cases in which all inmate demands were met and inmates still refused to surrender, suggesting that the demands are not the primary issue. Sixth, prison riots are not cold, calculated affairs — they are hot, violent, emotionally charged events, filled with destruction and rage. Merton’s rational, goal-oriented model cannot account for the affective quality of riots. For all of these reasons, while Merton’s theory might fit the handful of riots that genuinely do appear to be premeditated and instrumentally motivated, it does not describe the phenomenon as it characteristically appears.

Emile Durkheim’s Theory of Anomie

Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist, used the concept of anomie decades before Merton borrowed and transformed it. In his 1897 study of suicide, Durkheim identified several types of suicide, among them anomic suicide — a response to conditions he described as unfulfilled aspirations. What he observed empirically was that the suicide rate did not simply increase when economic conditions worsened; it increased whenever the business cycle moved rapidly in either direction. An economic boom, paradoxically, drove the suicide rate up alongside a recession. His explanation was that human aspirations are normally regulated by cultural and family socialization — people learn to want things that are achievable given their position in the social structure. When the economy moves very rapidly upward, initial success may exceed all expectations, and instead of being satisfied, people find their appetite for more growing faster than any success can satisfy it. Aspirations become unanchored from what is actually attainable. When the economy collapses, the reverse occurs: everything achieved and hoped for is suddenly threatened or destroyed. In both cases, the condition of anomie — unfulfilled aspirations, the gap between what one wants and what one can have — diminishes the will to live.

For Durkheim, the key variable is change — rapid change that disrupts the normal regulation of aspirations, inflating them beyond what reality can sustain or deflating them catastrophically. Culture and social structure ordinarily keep aspirations elastic but bounded; anomie is the condition produced when those bounds are broken. Durkheim’s version of anomie is thus about frustrated desire and the emotional and motivational consequences of that frustration, not the rational calculation of blocked means to specific goals as in Merton. Where Merton’s anomie produces innovation, Durkheim’s produces a kind of emotional collapse or explosive reaction.

Anomie and Prison Riots – Durkheim

Durkheim’s theory, applied to prison riots, directs attention to change within the prison as the key variable. If the analogy to suicide holds, the relevant question is whether sudden changes in a prison environment can produce conditions of anomic frustration intense enough to generate a riot. Two scenarios emerge as most important.

In the first, the prison administration promises improvements that are subsequently withdrawn or restricted. A concrete Canadian example involves the introduction of conjugal visits in the federal penitentiary system. When the federal government announced its intention to implement conjugal visit programs — widely regarded as rehabilitative because they maintain family bonds that reduce recidivism upon release — inmates at several maximum security institutions pooled their money to purchase trailers to be placed on prison grounds as visitor accommodations. When the government finally published the regulations, however, the program was restricted to legally married spouses. Most inmates do not have legal marriages; many have common-law partners. The exclusion crushed the expectations that had been carefully built up. The resulting anger and sense of victimization created a situation that, according to those in the prison administration who advised the government, was extremely dangerous. The government backed down and extended the program to common-law relationships, and the tension dissipated. Had the government held firm, a riot under Durkheim’s model would have been an angry, expressive, revenge-oriented event — not the cool calculation Merton describes, but an emotional explosion.

The second and more common scenario involves the removal of existing privileges. Prison administrators face a recurrent problem: when they relax conditions and extend privileges, some inmates exploit the new freedoms, engaging in drug use, violence, or escape planning. The administration responds by clamping down — removing the privileges from the entire population as collective punishment for the behaviour of a few. Inmates who have done nothing wrong lose something they have come to regard not as a privilege but as a right. The sense of victimization this produces is intense precisely because prison life already involves so little latitude; small privileges take on disproportionate significance when they represent the only areas of discretion remaining to people stripped of almost all autonomy. Being deprived of a weekly gym visit or a library privilege in a prison context can produce the same intensity of reaction that major loss of income might provoke in the outside world. A cyclical pattern became evident in Canadian prisons through the 1960s and 1970s: reforms introduced new freedoms, problems emerged, clampdowns followed, anger built, and riots occurred. The riots themselves were followed by reviews and further reforms, and the cycle continued.

The theory also connects to overcrowding. When a prison becomes overcrowded, the reduction in privileges is not the result of any punitive decision by the administration — it is simply the arithmetic consequence of too many people competing for finite resources. Gym time per inmate decreases, wait times for educational programs grow, double-bunking replaces single cells. Inmates experience these reductions as losses, and they feel victimized by a process they had no role in causing. The anger generated is the same whether the reduction was intentional or structural.

Durkheim’s theory provides the most compelling explanation for the Kingston riot. In the months before April 1971, Kingston Penitentiary’s entire population knew that a move to the newly constructed Millhaven Institution was imminent. Millhaven was rumoured to be a super-maximum facility — remote-controlled guard stations, video surveillance throughout, minimal direct human contact between guards and inmates. Whatever the reality, the perception among Kingston’s inmates was that they were about to lose whatever quality of life they had managed to carve out in their current institution and be subjected to conditions they expected to be far more oppressive. Guards confirmed this perception: inmates were angry, tense, and frightened about the move. The riot that erupted on April 14th can be read, in Durkheim’s terms, as an expressive release of that built-up anger — not a calculated attempt to achieve specific demands, but an emotional explosion driven by frustrated aspirations and the anticipation of loss.

Key Concepts:
The powder keg theory of prison riots: a necessary-conditions model arguing that volatile men in oppressive conditions create explosive potential; criticized for over-predicting the frequency of riots
Necessary and sufficient conditions for prison riots: the powder keg theory identifies necessary conditions (angry men, oppressive environment) but not sufficient ones (why a particular riot happens at a particular moment)
Anomie theory and prison riots (Merton): a grievance theory in which riots are illegitimate means to blocked goals; critiqued for implying premeditation inconsistent with the evidence
Anomie theory and prison riots (Durkheim): a change-based theory in which riots are expressive, emotionally-driven responses to frustrated aspirations; better explains the anger and violence of riots and connects to the Kingston case

Module 05: Sample and Research Methodology

Objectives: After completing this module, students should be able to describe the sample and research methodology used in Force and Fear, discuss variables that relate to a victim’s decision to report a robbery offence, debate the advantages and disadvantages of interview research with respect to robbery, and explain why robbery offenders agreed to be interviewed for this study.

Reading: Text: Force and Fear, Ch. 1, pp. 1–8.

Sample and Research Methodology – Part I

The second major topic of this course is robbery, with a particular focus on bank robbery, and it is grounded in a study published in 1995: Force and Fear: Robbery in Canada. The study involved interviews with 80 convicted male bank robbers incarcerated in federal penitentiaries across Canada and was conducted over a period of eight years. Many subjects were interviewed more than once — at least 30 received follow-up interviews, either because the original session had been too short to exhaust the subject matter or because the subject had subsequently been released, reoffended, and returned to prison, prompting curiosity about why a man who had insisted he would never rob again had done exactly that.

The origin of the study was an encounter with Roger Caron, already known from Module 1 as the author of Bingo and the award-winning autobiography Go-Boy!. Caron had been a bank robber, and he was invited to speak to a course that would eventually become SOC 229. His stories about bank robbery suggested a lecture topic, but a search of the academic literature revealed almost nothing: a handful of dated, methodologically weak American studies and nothing from Canada. The decision to do original research was straightforward. Caron became the first subject interviewed, at his apartment in Hull overlooking the Ottawa River, where he spoke for hours about his bank robbery career.

The procedural requirements for gaining access to incarcerated subjects were substantial. Permission had to be obtained from Correctional Services Canada at the national level, approved by a University of Waterloo ethics committee, reviewed by a CSC research committee, cleared by each of the five regional correctional services divisions (Ontario, Quebec, Eastern, Western, and Pacific), and then approved by individual wardens. In some institutions parole officers would contact inmates directly to solicit their participation; in others, they would simply arrange for the researcher to arrive at the institution and ask to see a particular inmate, who would come down with no advance knowledge of why. Nearly all agreed. Those who declined were typically apologetic — they had outstanding charges or pending appeals and felt they could not speak freely, but many offered to cooperate once their legal situations were resolved.

Logistically, setting up each interview typically required weeks or months. Interview rooms in penitentiaries are scarce, and lawyers take priority. Travelling to geographically dispersed institutions across the country was expensive and time-consuming; it required research grant funding of approximately $50,000, much of which went to transcription costs. Interviews typically lasted about three hours, and a two-and-a-half-hour session was considered short. On productive days, a morning and an afternoon interview could be completed.

The sample was demographically consistent with the broader bank robber population: all male, with an average age of 31 at the time of interview and approximately 24 to 25 years old when they committed their first bank robbery — somewhat older than other robbery populations, because bank robbery is a more specialized activity. Most came from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, frequently from dysfunctional family situations involving foster care and institutional placements. Eighty percent were unemployed at the time of arrest. Drug use was common, with 12.5 percent identifying as addicts and additional subjects acknowledging heavy use. The criminal records were extensive: only 5 of the 80 had no prior convictions, and 45 had previous robbery convictions, including 25 with prior bank robbery convictions. The remaining 35 had convictions for other types of robbery as well as a wide range of other offences — car theft, assault, break and enter, narcotics offences, fraud, and in a small number of cases, more serious crimes. Several subjects were serving their third or fourth federal penitentiary term.

Sample and Research Methodology – Part II

The criminal histories of the subjects extended beyond past convictions to their legal status at the time of the index offence. Of the 80, 51 were already under supervision by the criminal justice system when they committed their present bank robbery: 17 were on parole, 11 were on mandatory supervision (now called statutory release, triggered at the completion of two-thirds of the sentence), 15 were illegally at large after escaping prison or walking away from halfway houses, 4 were on bail awaiting other charges, and 4 were on probation. That more than 63 percent of the sample were actively under correctional supervision when they reoffended speaks to the limited deterrent effect of prior incarceration for this population.

The sentences being served at the time of the interviews averaged approximately 9.37 years — substantial terms that put nearly all subjects in federal penitentiaries. Exceptions were rare. One subject, a first-time offender who was blind and disabled, had shown genuine remorse, turned himself in, and was given probation. Two young men (17 or 18 years old at the time, having travelled from Quebec to Ontario without realizing they would be tried as adults rather than under the Young Offenders Act) received 18-month provincial sentences; they were interviewed at Maplehurst, a provincial institution near Milton, and some followed up over subsequent years as they moved in and out of bank robbery. Most began at maximum security and cascaded toward medium and, eventually, minimum over the course of good institutional behaviour — the classification system treats bank robbery as a violent offence, reflecting the inherent threat of force even in relatively controlled incidents.

The sample was constructed deliberately rather than by random selection, because a purely random approach would have yielded a sample overwhelmingly composed of one type: note pushers. The study instead oversampled less common types to ensure representation across the full typology. Thirty-one subjects were note pushers (or “beggar bandits”), who represent 85 to 90 percent of all bank robbers. Thirty-five were members of crews — two or more people, typically armed and masked. Fourteen were solo gunmen, a relatively rare category requiring particular effort to locate. Ten subjects had also committed armoured vehicle robberies, eight of whom had previously worked in crews and two as solo gunmen. This deliberate oversampling of less common types allows analysis across the full spectrum of bank robbery methods and risks making the sample somewhat unrepresentative in terms of type distribution, but the researcher’s view is that the sample is quite representative of convicted bank robbers as a whole because most bank robbers continue offending until caught. They do not accumulate enough money to retire — yields per robbery are modest and lifestyles are expensive — and so the population of convicted bank robbers closely reflects the population of practicing bank robbers.

Sample and Research Methodology – Part III

One of the most consistent surprises for outsiders hearing about this research is how cooperative the subjects were. The question of whether convicted bank robbers would agree to participate was entirely open at the start — there was no basis for confident prediction, and no comparable study to draw on. The answer, it turned out, was an emphatic yes: almost none declined, and most were enthusiastic. The practical obstacles — arranging interview rooms in institutions with few available spaces, coordinating schedules with parole officers whose levels of helpfulness varied enormously, dealing with closed prisons after violent incidents — were far greater than the human ones. On a few occasions, institutions were entirely locked down following a murder, and planned interviews had to be abandoned and rescheduled.

Several reasons explain the subjects’ willingness to participate. Many felt they had nothing to hide — their convictions were matters of public record, they were not planning to reoffend (or so they believed at the time), and the prospect of withholding information about a past they were moving on from seemed pointless. A second reason was the promise made in the consent process: the interview would not address sensitive identifying details (when, where, with whom), and subjects could decline any question that felt too revealing. This limited scope reassured them that cooperation could not make their legal or institutional situation worse. The formal consent form — bearing the University of Waterloo’s name and phone number, specifying that all data would remain strictly confidential and would be used only for research purposes — carried genuine weight. Inmates recognized that they had rights; the document confirmed those rights were being respected. The assurance that nothing would go back to the parole board was particularly important and, once given, appeared to be believed.

Altruism played a role too: many subjects simply considered the research legitimate and worth supporting. Some clearly enjoyed the attention — the interview was, after all, about them and their experiences, which many found interesting and exciting regardless of how those experiences were likely to be presented in print. Proximity to parole was a motivator for some: cooperating with a University of Waterloo researcher, with evidence of cooperation placed in their file, was a way of appearing open and having nothing to hide — a posture that could only help. For others, the motive was simply the relief of a break from institutional routine: if the alternative was mopping floors, three hours of conversation was welcome regardless of subject.

A practical technique that proved highly effective was bringing newspaper clippings about subjects’ own cases. Many had never seen the media coverage of their crimes, and the moment a clipping was placed in front of them, conversation flowed immediately. Starting the interview became almost effortless. With experience, copies were made so that subjects could keep them, a gesture appreciated enough that it became standard practice.

Tape recording presented advantages and serious costs. The advantages were accuracy and completeness. The costs were staggering: each hour of recorded interview produced two and a half to three hours of transcription work, and transcription was psychologically punishing enough that student research assistants rarely completed more than one or two interviews before declining further work. One transcriptionist erased an entire interview, requiring the subject to be re-interviewed — an avoidable setback that was not avoidable until it happened. The eventual solution was to conduct later interviews using a laptop, typing quickly without worrying about punctuation or capitalization, then spending an hour or two afterward filling in gaps while the conversation was still fresh. This approach captured the essential content at a fraction of the time cost and is the method now recommended for students intending to conduct interview-based research.

Sample and Research Methodology – Part IV

In addition to the interviews with bank robbers, the research included extensive work with police Hold-up Squads — specialized investigative units within large metropolitan police departments (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Peel Regional Police) that investigate bank robberies and other financial institution crimes. Access to police files provided detailed information about modes of operation, escape planning, and case histories that allowed for corroboration of what subjects said in their interviews. In most cases, interview subjects had already been researched through police files before the interview took place, enabling pointed questions and making it possible to calibrate the accuracy of inmate accounts. The subjects turned out to be genuinely honest — not boastful, not minimizing, and often disarmingly self-deprecating. Note pushers, in particular, frequently protested that they weren’t “real” bank robbers, reserving that label for those who carried guns. Several subjects, when asked to explain a decision that in retrospect seemed irrational, simply said “Because I’m stupid” — not the response of someone performing heroics for an audience.

The few expressions of regret were genuine but rare. One subject who had become deeply religious showed sincere remorse. Most subjects were able to rationalize their past behaviour effectively and showed little guilt — a phenomenon connected to the techniques of neutralization that will be discussed in later modules. Their criminal pride, such as it was, was generally modest rather than grandiose.

The construction of interview questions in exploratory research is iterative rather than fixed. Early interviews revealed that three of the first subjects mentioned the influence of media — films, newspaper coverage, television — on their initial motivation to rob banks and on their choice of methods. Nothing in the existing literature had prepared for this finding, and nothing in the original question guide asked about it. Once the pattern was identified, media influence was incorporated into subsequent interviews, and subjects who had been interviewed early were re-interviewed to fill the gap. The media turned out to play a significant role, particularly in the formation of the initial idea to rob banks and in the development of specific operational choices. This iterative process — reviewing interview data periodically and revising the question guide in light of what subjects are actually saying — is essential to any exploratory study and is a standard practice that students undertaking original interview research would do well to observe.

By the time 40 interviews had been completed, a pattern of diminishing returns was apparent: new interviews were adding little that was genuinely novel. After 40 good interviews, it is likely that 90 percent of the available information on the topic has been collected. The remaining interviews contributed primarily to ensuring adequate representation of less common bank robber types — armoured vehicle robbers, solo gunmen, and crew members — rather than to expanding the conceptual range of findings. This experience is consistent with studies in other areas of interview-based research, including qualitative work on psychiatric patient populations: around 40 interviews tends to mark the saturation point. The additional 40 interviews in this study were justified by the decision to represent the full typological range, not by the prospect of discovering entirely new phenomena.

Key Concepts:
Reporting robbery: variables affecting victims’ decisions to report, including severity of harm, presence of witnesses, and the nature of the relationship to the offender
Interview data — advantages and disadvantages: rich, detailed, contextually grounded information; costly to collect and transcribe, subject to recall limitations and potential self-presentation effects
Representative samples: the challenge of constructing a sample in which rare types (solo gunmen, armoured vehicle robbers) are adequately represented without making type-distribution claims about the broader population

Module 06: Defining Robbery – Robbery and the Law

Objectives: By the end of this module, students should be able to critically discuss the laws related to robbery, explain why robbery is treated as a serious criminal offence, and identify other offences that are commonly associated with robbery.

Reading: Force and Fear, Ch. 1, pp. 8–23.

What Robbery Actually Means

The word “robbery” is one of the most frequently misused terms in everyday speech. People routinely telephone the police to report that they have “been robbed” after returning home to find a broken window and missing valuables. In law, however, what they have experienced is a break and enter, or a theft — not a robbery. The distinction matters. Robbery is a specific form of theft in which the offender confronts the victim directly and uses violence, or at minimum the threat of violence, to take property from them. Because this confrontation is essential to the offence, robbery occupies a unique dual category in criminal law: it is simultaneously a property crime and a crime of violence. No robbery can occur unless the offender and the victim are in the same place at the same time.

In Canada, robbery is codified in section 343 of the Criminal Code, which sets out four ways the offence can be committed. A person commits robbery who steals and, for the purpose of extorting what is stolen or to prevent or overcome resistance to the stealing, uses violence or threats of violence against a person or property; who steals from any person and at the same time, or immediately before or immediately after, wounds, beats, strikes, or uses personal violence against that person; who assaults any person with intent to steal; or who steals from any person while armed with an offensive weapon or an imitation of one. Conviction on any of these grounds constitutes an indictable offence attracting a maximum penalty of life imprisonment — the highest tier in the Canadian sentencing structure. To place that in concrete terms: in Desroches’ study of 80 incarcerated bank robbers, the average sentence being served was just over nine years, and that figure excluded three men serving life sentences and one man serving several concurrent life terms.

Violence: Overt, Implicit, and the Courts’ View

A persistent tension runs through the sociology of robbery: offenders frequently do not perceive themselves as violent criminals, yet the law emphatically does. The majority of bank robbers in Desroches’ sample were note pushers — men who simply stood in line, approached a teller, and passed a handwritten demand note. Many of them were unarmed. They left if the teller refused to comply. From their point of view the whole transaction was closer to an “unauthorized withdrawal” than a violent crime. They saw no reason that it should result in an assault classification, let alone a decade in a maximum-security penitentiary.

The courts take a categorically different view. Even a note that contains no explicit threat — even a note that begins “May I please have all the money in your drawer?” — will be read by the courts as containing an implicit threat. The legal test is subjective from the victim’s perspective: if a reasonable victim would believe that failure to comply might provoke violence, that is sufficient. A politely worded note, delivered at a bank counter by a stranger who then waits expectantly, carries an implicit threat behind its courteous facade. Courts will find robbery even when the threat is covert. This has important implications for how broadly the law casts its net over robbery-adjacent behaviours.

The same logic applies to purse-snatching, which straddles the boundary between theft and robbery. If someone simply lifts a handbag from a chair and runs, that is a theft. But if the victim held on and was dragged to the ground, or if any force was used in the taking, the offence becomes robbery. The line is drawn at the presence of force or the threat of force, however minimal.

Police agencies share the courts’ perspective. Banks train tellers to assume that every person presenting a demand note is armed, because a proportion of note pushers do carry weapons — roughly 10 per cent in Desroches’ sample — and it is impossible to distinguish armed from unarmed at the moment of confrontation. The institutional policy in Canada is therefore compliance: tellers hand over what is in their till, press the silent alarm only when it is safe to do so (usually after the robber has left), and avoid any action that could escalate the encounter. This contrasts sharply with how banks respond to suspected fraud; someone trying to pass a fraudulent cheque will be stalled until police arrive, while a bank robber will be cooperated with and ushered out as quickly as possible.

Offenders are treated as violent criminals throughout the criminal justice process. They are classified into maximum- or medium-security institutions, they face hostile treatment from the police, and the Parole Board takes a dim view of their applications. The robber’s self-serving characterization of the offence as non-violent does not change this, though it does function as an important motivational mechanism — understanding how offenders neutralize the seriousness of their conduct is essential to explaining why they choose to commit it.

Reporting Rates and Why They Matter

One significant methodological advantage robbery possesses over many other crimes is its high reporting rate. Crimes such as break and enter are chronically under-reported: victims may not notice a loss, may judge the amount too small to bother reporting, or may lack confidence in police. Robbery is different. It is a confrontational, overt crime that leaves a frightened and generally determined victim behind. Financial institutions are legally required to report all robberies, making bank robbery arguably the most consistently reported crime in Canada — more reliably counted than even homicide, which can be obscured as a suicide or a disappearance. The implication for researchers is that robbery statistics, particularly for banks, are unusually accurate measures of the true rate of the offence.

Robbery as a “Dumb” Crime: A Preview

Throughout this course the argument will recur that robbery is, in a practical sense, a deeply irrational offence. Witnesses are produced the instant the crime occurs. Cameras capture the scene. Victims who resist can transform a robbery charge into assault causing bodily harm or murder. Sentences are among the harshest in the code. Financial returns are modest. And yet people commit robberies repeatedly. Understanding the gap between the objective irrationality of the crime and the subjective sense — held by the offenders themselves — that it is manageable and relatively low-risk is one of the central puzzles of robbery research.

Key Concepts: Robbery and the law Overt and implicit threats Law and consensus theory Conflict theory and the law

Module 07: An Overview of Robbery

Objectives: This module asks students to differentiate among the three principal types of robbery, explain why robbery is an unsophisticated crime, describe the demographic and social characteristics of robbery offenders, analyze the relationship between drug use and gambling and robbery using both the drug addiction and criminalization hypotheses, evaluate the unemployment–robbery relationship, critically examine offender typologies and the concept of crime specialization, and explain why robbery is, in practical terms, a poor criminal enterprise.

Reading: Force and Fear, Ch. 2, pp. 24–50, 52–66 and Ch. 3, pp. 89–100; Behind the Bars, Ch. 5, pp. 99–120.

Types of Robberies

Robberies in Canada fall into three broad categories: robberies of individuals (commonly called muggings), commercial or retail robberies, and robberies of financial institutions. Each type has its own offender profile, risk structure, and level of violence.

Muggings are robberies in which one or more individuals are targeted while going about their daily lives — in a park, an underground parking garage, or a poorly lit laneway. They tend to be committed by younger, more inexperienced offenders who are often nervous and frequently armed. Because victims are fighting for their own personal property, resistance rates are higher in muggings than in any other robbery type, and resistance is strongly associated with injury. The combination of a young, inexperienced offender and a resisting victim creates a volatile and dangerous situation. Offenders typically select vulnerable victims in isolated locations where no assistance can be summoned, and they often apply preemptive force — attacking before the victim can react — precisely to prevent resistance. Muggings, though less common in Canada than in the United States, account for the highest injury rates among robbery types.

The most common form of robbery in Canada is the commercial or retail robbery — the hold-up of a convenience store, a gas station, a liquor outlet, or similar cash-handling business. Offenders tend to operate in familiar neighbourhoods and select targets they already know. A typical retail robbery yields only a few hundred dollars, which for many young offenders is nonetheless sufficient motivation. Liquor outlets and variety stores are frequent targets. In the United States, where many small retailers are armed, these robberies frequently escalate into deadly shootouts; Canadian law and culture produce a different dynamic, though the possibility of a resisting owner — especially one who owns the establishment and considers it their life’s work — remains a consistent source of violence.

Robberies of financial institutions — banks, credit unions, trust companies, and armoured vehicles — represent the third and in some ways most studied category. Banks have developed and rigorously enforce a compliance policy: tellers hand over the contents of their till, make no effort to resist, and activate the silent alarm only after the robber has departed. This policy has been remarkably effective. In Canada, only two bank tellers have ever been killed in the course of a bank robbery. One of those deaths is discussed in Desroches’ study. The banks’ concern is not primarily with the financial loss — the average take from a single bank robbery is roughly $2,000 to $2,500, a trivial sum in the context of a major financial institution’s operations — but with the physical welfare of staff and customers and the potential liability from lawsuits. In one case Desroches describes as an expert witness, a Montreal bank that deviated from the compliance standard by refusing to hand over money saw a customer shot and rendered paraplegic by a frustrated robber; the bank’s initial response of offering the paralyzed customer a loan at a reduced interest rate drew widespread public ridicule.

The Robber and the Victim

Unlike homicide, domestic assault, or sexual violence — offences in which the victim and offender most commonly know one another — robbery is characteristically a crime between strangers. This is not accidental. The logic of robbery demands anonymity: an offender who robs someone they know creates a witness who can identify them by name. Robbing a stranger preserves the offender’s anonymity and thus their chances of escape. Exceptions occur when both parties are involved in illicit activity — a drug dealer robbed by a customer, or a client robbed by a sex worker — because both parties assume the other cannot seek police protection without exposing their own conduct.

The moment of robbery involves sudden, intense victim confrontation. A teller working through a routine morning shift is suddenly facing a person demanding money, perhaps wearing a balaclava, perhaps displaying a weapon, almost certainly uttering a verbal threat. This confrontation is deliberately calculated to produce shock, fear, and paralysis in the victim — all of which serve the offender’s goal of compliance. Robbery is an instrumental rather than expressive crime: the force or threat of force is not the goal but the means. The robber is not motivated by anger or a desire to harm the victim but by the money. Violence is deployed only insofar as it secures that money.

Victim management is the art of gaining compliance with minimum risk to the offender. Note pushers rely on speed, surprise, and the knowledge that bank policy will produce cooperation. Those using more aggressive takeover methods rely on the overwhelming display of force. In both cases the underlying calculation is the same: prevent resistance, get the money, escape. Resistance is the robber’s most feared variable, because it requires the escalation of violence and transforms the charge from robbery into assault, assault causing bodily harm, or, in the worst case, manslaughter or murder.

The Robbery Rate: Urban versus Rural

The Canadian robbery rate declined substantially across the decade from 2000 to 2011, largely for demographic reasons. Crime is strongly age-graded, with the peak years for offending falling in the late teens and early twenties. Canada’s population has aged — the median age settled around 40 — and the criminogenic cohort of young men makes up a shrinking proportion of the total population. The proportion of robberies involving firearms has also declined, partly due to demographics and partly due to the introduction of mandatory minimum sentences for firearm-related indictable offences, which now carry additions of up to four years. Offenders in Desroches’ sample frequently cited the firearms enhancement as a reason for choosing to rob without a weapon.

The American robbery rate has historically been two to three times the Canadian rate, despite broadly similar demographic profiles. The most compelling explanation lies in the distribution of income: the United States has a substantially larger proportion of the population living in poverty, and poverty is where robbery is concentrated. When legitimate means to financial success are structurally blocked — through racism, inadequate schooling, discrimination in hiring — the conditions for anomie, in Robert Merton’s sense, are created. Illegitimate means, including robbery, become rational adaptations to blocked opportunity.

Robbery is also overwhelmingly an urban crime. Rural communities are too small: people know one another, a disguise may still be penetrated by recognition, and getaway routes are limited. Cities offer the opposite: dense anonymity, multiple targets within walking distance, a variety of escape routes, and the ability to disappear into foot traffic within a block of the crime. As one offender described to Desroches, moving two or three blocks from a robbed bank in a major city means dissolving into crowds of tens of thousands of people. The subway, the taxi stand, the underground concourse — all become instruments of escape.

Socioeconomic Status, Race, and Ethnicity

person in hooded sweatshirt sitting next to graffiti

The correlation between robbery and lower socioeconomic status is one of the most consistent findings in criminological research, and it is strongly reflected in Desroches’ sample of 80 men, the vast majority of whom came from clearly lower-class backgrounds. Merton’s anomie theory provides the standard explanatory framework: individuals across all social strata are socialized to value financial success, but legitimate access to that success — through education, stable employment, and professional networks — is unevenly distributed. Those whose legitimate pathways are blocked by racism, inadequate schooling, or structural unemployment find themselves in a condition of anomie and may turn to crime as an illegitimate means toward approved goals.

In the United States, race is a powerful correlate of robbery. Black Americans constitute approximately 12 per cent of the national population but account for roughly two-thirds of robbery arrests. Gabor and colleagues, in their influential 1987 study, applied both anomie and conflict theory to explain elevated robbery rates among Black Americans and French Canadians. The Quebec case is striking: the province contains roughly 23 to 24 per cent of Canada’s population but accounts for approximately 60 per cent of its robberies, including a disproportionate share of bank robberies. At the time of Desroches’ research, the average sentence for bank robbery in Quebec was half the national average — a fact that attracted strong lobbying by the Canadian Bankers’ Association and subsequently prompted upward revision of sentences.

Gabor’s conflict theory explanation for Quebec frames bank robbery as a form of symbolic resistance: French Canadians, long subordinated economically and politically by an Anglophone establishment that controlled the banks, industries, and higher education, channelled their resentment into a form of crime that targeted those very institutions. Bank robbery acquired something of a folk-hero status in Quebec, and certain prolific offenders developed cult followings. The analysis is not without its limitations — it applies most persuasively to bank robbery and much less convincingly to muggings, where the victims are frequently other poor people from the same communities, not the Anglophone elite.

American sociologist Jack Katz offers a parallel, if more culturally specific, argument. He contends that within poor urban Black communities, the “hard man” or “bad-ass” constitutes a distinctive form of masculinity in which status is claimed through criminal toughness precisely because legitimate avenues to status — occupational prestige, income, professional achievement — are closed by structural racism. Robbery becomes, in Katz’s formulation, a way of being bad as a collectively celebrated mode of existence that transcends conventional moral categories. In his words, “a black version of the hard man has long had an appeal far beyond the ghetto.” The critique of this position is also significant: if the victims of robbery are largely the offender’s own neighbours and community members, not the sources of oppression, the expressive logic of striking back at the powerful breaks down.

Drug Usage, Addiction, and Gambling

The relationship between illicit drug use and robbery has been explored through two competing hypotheses. The drug addiction hypothesis holds that people become addicted to expensive illegal substances, exhaust legitimate means of financing their habit, and are driven to crime out of physiological desperation. The criminalization hypothesis (also called the deviant lifestyle hypothesis) reverses the causal arrow: people are already involved in criminal activity and a deviant social world before they encounter drugs, and exposure to drugs is a consequence of that lifestyle rather than its cause.

Desroches’ study provides evidence for both. He asked each of his 80 interviewees whether they would describe themselves as heavily addicted to illicit drugs prior to their first bank robbery. Only 10 men — 12.5 per cent — identified themselves as drug addicts at that time, with addictions to heroin, speed, and cocaine. An additional three reported heavy marijuana use. All 13 of these men acknowledged that drug needs formed part (though not the entirety) of their initial motivation to rob. A further 54 men (67.5 per cent) reported recreational or moderate illicit drug use before they began robbing banks, but none of them cited drugs as a motivation for their first robbery.

What emerged as the more significant finding is that of those 54 recreational users, approximately half reported that their drug consumption increased substantially after they began robbing banks — and several became addicted in the course of their robbery careers. The pattern mirrors that found for gambling: of the six men for whom gambling was a factor, only one said it contributed to his initial motivation. The other five used gambling as an occasional leisure activity before their first robbery but escalated dramatically once they had money from robbery to spend. In both cases — drugs and gambling — Desroches concludes that these factors are more important in explaining the motivation to continue robbing than the initial decision. The sequence is: robbery generates cash, cash funds a partying lifestyle that includes drugs and gambling, the expense of that lifestyle creates a renewed need for cash, and the cycle repeats.

Unemployment and Robbery

person sitting against wall with hat on ground to catch change

At the aggregate level, the relationship between the unemployment rate and the crime rate is surprisingly weak or inconsistent. Numerous studies have found little or no causal connection: as unemployment rises, crime does not reliably follow; as it falls, crime does not reliably decline. This finding runs against the intuitions suggested by anomie theory, conflict theory, and social control theory — all of which would predict that joblessness should increase crime. The best that the research literature can assert is a very modest positive relationship in some studies.

At the individual level, however, the picture looks very different. In Desroches’ sample, 64 out of 80 men — 80 per cent — were unemployed at the time they committed their first bank robbery. Yet when pressed, only 19 per cent of those unemployed men reported actively looking for work beforehand, and even most of those admitted they were merely going through the motions. Only four men said they genuinely believed that finding employment would have deterred them from robbery.

Desroches offers five reasons why an improved job market would not have prevented most of these men from robbing banks. First, crime is already their way of life — they have criminal records extending back to young offenders’ institutions, and robbery is simply the next step in an ongoing criminal career. Second, they lack the work ethic and the employment skills that steady jobs require; many describe themselves as lazy, institutionalized by repeated prison sentences into a pattern of lethargy and dependence. Third, crime offers immediate gratification without the long-term commitment that employment demands; after extended incarceration, these men wanted what they had been denied and they wanted it quickly. Fourth, the jobs actually available to them — parking attendant, short-order cook, manual labour — offer low pay, low status, and poor conditions, and they find these genuinely unattractive when set against the apparent rewards of crime. Fifth, they want money for a partying lifestyle, and legitimate employment is far too slow a route to funding it.

The macroeconomic unemployment rate and individual criminal decision-making operate at different levels of analysis. Demographic variables — the proportion of young men in the population — and structural poverty are more powerful determinants of the aggregate robbery rate than unemployment statistics.

Typologies, Specialization, and Recidivism

Desroches organizes his bank robbers into three M.O.-based typologies, drawn from the categories used by police Hold-up Squads: note pushers, bank robbery crews, and solo gunmen. These typologies are grounded in observed behaviour rather than theoretical abstraction. Men who use the note pusher method do not typically graduate to commando-style crew robberies, and vice versa; the typologies are empirically distinct. A typology is, by definition, an abstraction — it highlights central tendencies while suppressing individual variation — but these three categories accurately capture the major fault lines in the bank robbery population.

The concept of crime specialization requires careful handling. Popular and media representations of serious criminals often portray them as specialists: the safecracker, the forger, the bank robber. In practice, the men in Desroches’ sample are better described as garden variety criminals — engaged over their lifetimes in a heterogeneous range of offences including assault, drug trafficking, theft, impaired driving, and break and enter. They specialize in bank robbery only for short, intense periods — typically a few weeks or months — before arrest. Even during those periods some are committing other offences simultaneously.

Criminal recidivism is the defining feature of these men’s criminal careers. Studies by the RAND Corporation and others have shown that approximately 15 per cent of the prison population — a small but extraordinarily active subgroup — accounts for a vastly disproportionate share of violent crime. These chronic offenders cycle through the criminal justice system repeatedly, and Desroches found that a substantial number of his original 80 interviewees had reappeared in Hold-up Squad files after release. The average age at interview was around 30, and the criminal records of most participants stretched back to their juvenile years. The one consistent finding about criminal careers is also relevant here: most offenders, even persistent ones, age out of crime. Crime rates begin to fall as offenders enter their thirties and are remarkably low by the time they reach 40. The mechanisms behind this maturational reform are discussed in Module 08.

Robbery Is a Dumb Crime

person in balaclava with crowbar looking through window

The case against robbery as a rational criminal enterprise is almost overwhelming. It is a predatory crime with a live victim who will almost invariably call the police; in bank robberies there are also cameras. The presence of a victim means resistance is possible, and resistance can escalate a robbery charge to assault, bodily harm, or murder. In bank robberies specifically, the financial returns are small: $1,500 to $2,000 is a typical single-robbery haul, and if that sum is split among crew members it shrinks further. In an unpublished study shared at an FBI conference that Desroches attended, over half of incarcerated American robbers said they would consider robbery if they could be certain of netting just $75. Robbery is a crime committed by people who will risk years in maximum security for amounts that most employed people spend in an afternoon.

Robbery is also unsophisticated. It requires no specialized knowledge, no investment of resources, and almost no planning. The typical robber has minimal education, minimal employment history, and minimal marketable skills. If they have a gun, people comply. That is essentially the entire skill set required. And the lack of sophistication works against them: they take minimal precautions, wear inadequate disguises, leave evidence, and are captured at high rates. Unlike high-level drug trafficking — which Desroches contrasts as an example of a relatively intelligent criminal enterprise — robbery offers poor financial returns, high legal exposure, and guaranteed victim witnesses. It is not a crime that pays, and most robbers eventually prove this by serving long sentences in maximum-security institutions.

Key Concepts: Types of robberies: muggings, commercial robberies, and robberies of financial institutions Stranger and victim, victim confrontation, and victim management Characteristics of offenders: age, gender, socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity Drug usage, gambling, and robbery — drug addiction and criminalization hypotheses Unemployment and robbery Offender typologies — crime specialization and garden variety offenders

Module 08: The Motivation to Robbery

Objectives: This module asks students to distinguish between initial motivation and the motivation to continue, explain and critically evaluate the various motivational components that operate in robbery, analyze rational choice theory as it applies to robbery, assess the role of the mass media in motivating robbery offenders, explain how peers and social networks influence the decision to rob, describe the lifestyle and spending patterns of robbery offenders, and critically evaluate research on the decision to leave crime.

Reading: Force and Fear, Ch. 3, pp. 67–97 and pp. 103–106; Behind the Bars, Introduction, pp. ix–xi; Ch. 1, pp. 1–19; Ch. 2, pp. 21–48; Ch. 3, pp. 49–64.

Rational Choice Theory and Robbery

person in suit juggling money while wearing handcuffs

Rational Choice Theory originated in economics, where it was developed to model decision-making aimed at maximizing benefit and minimizing cost. When applied to crime, it anticipates that offenders would carefully research targets, plan their approach, take extensive precautions, and update their behaviour based on experience. What Desroches found was almost the inverse. Bank robbers in his sample did remarkably little planning. They chose targets based on a five-minute assessment. They frequently did not know where the nearest police station was. Some experienced robbers took fewer precautions over time, not more, as overconfidence replaced caution.

Yet rational choice theory is not rendered useless by these findings. What it actually captures is bounded rationality — or limited or partial rationality, as Desroches terms it — in which offenders reason within the constraints of limited information, limited time, and limited cognitive investment. From the offender’s own perspective, robbing a bank makes sense. They need money quickly, they believe the risk is manageable, they know that bank policy favours compliance, and they see the execution as straightforward. This is subjective rationality: the offender is not objectively rational, but they act on what they believe to be true, and those beliefs shape their behaviour. If an offender thinks the probability of getting caught is low — even if it is objectively high — they will act on that mistaken belief. The subjective assessment is what matters for understanding motivation.

The retrospective dimension is also important. When interviewed in prison, many of Desroches’ subjects looked back on their decision-making with clear-eyed scepticism. They acknowledged that their assumptions had been wrong, that their planning had been inadequate, and that the financial rewards had not justified the sentence. With the benefit of hindsight, they could articulate their errors. But at the moment of decision, the logic had seemed compelling — and it was that in-the-moment, subjective logic that drove them to action.

Motivational Components: Initial Motivation

Desroches frames motivation not as a single cause but as an ensemble of motivational components — individual variables that, taken together, explain why someone commits robbery. Money is the primary component, but money alone is insufficient: nearly everyone needs and wants money, yet very few people rob banks. The desire for money becomes a motive only when combined with other factors.

When Desroches asked his subjects what specific financial need had driven their first robbery, the answers were strikingly mundane. Men needed to pay rent, settle small debts, buy Christmas gifts, keep a small business solvent, fund a drug or alcohol habit, or support themselves after release from prison. Three men — in fact four — had upcoming weddings and wanted their own money to contribute to the celebration. The amounts involved were modest: $1,500 to $2,000 was typically described as sufficient to meet the need. The attraction of robbing a bank is not only the amount but the certainty of a payoff: unlike break and enter, where the contents of a house may be worthless, banks always have money. The quantity is predictable, the target is accessible, and the whole transaction — in the note pusher’s mental schema — can be completed in under a minute.

Bank robbery also appeals to first-time offenders because most of them, at the initial stage, perceive it as non-violent and low-risk. Note pushers in particular tend to reduce the crime to its minimal components: stand in line, pass a note, take the money, leave. They often do not intend to harm anyone, do not believe they will ever actually fire a gun, and see the bank’s compliance policy as a guarantee that the transaction will proceed smoothly. This subjective construction of the crime as manageable and non-serious is itself a motivational component — a form of neutralization that makes robbery cognitively available as an option.

Power and Excitement

person pointing gun at woman in a white room

Some theoretical accounts of robbery have emphasized expressive motivations — specifically the desire for power and the thrill of excitement. Robbery does involve dramatic control over others, and it can generate adrenaline and a sense of invincibility. When Desroches systematically asked his 80 subjects whether power or excitement had motivated them, however, the vast majority firmly denied it. They said they were frightened during the robberies, not exhilarated, and that the pleasure came not from the act itself but from counting and spending the money afterward. Several said they found the experience nerve-wracking and that they had to force themselves to go through with it, particularly as they grew older and the criminal justice system had extracted increasingly harsh penalties from them.

A small number of younger offenders — those in their late teens and early twenties who had not yet experienced serious imprisonment — did speak of the excitement as a secondary gain. One described it as analogous to performing as a male stripper, another said he saw himself as living glamorously. But even these men, when pressed on whether excitement was their primary reason for robbing banks, said no. Excitement and power were byproducts, not goals. The goal was always money. Moreover, many offenders expressed genuine regret about the fear they had inflicted on tellers — women trembling or crying during the robbery — and described feeling embarrassed rather than gratified by that dimension of the crime.

Deterrence and a Nothing-to-Lose Attitude

A fundamental question for any theory of robbery motivation is why the possibility of arrest and lengthy imprisonment does not deter these men. For most citizens, the prospect of a nine-year penitentiary sentence is a compelling deterrent. For the men in Desroches’ sample it was not, and understanding why requires engaging with what he calls the “nothing-to-lose” attitude — a mood of fatalism rooted in a candid and largely accurate assessment of one’s life circumstances.

Travis Hirschi’s social bond theory holds that people refrain from crime because they have too much to lose: jobs, families, reputations, homes, relationships. The men who commit robbery systematically lack these bonds. They have no stable employment and few prospects for any. They typically have no partner, no children, no car, no savings, no home of their own. Many have just been released from a prison sentence. Looking at their circumstances, they conclude — with a logic that is distorted but not incomprehensible — that they have very little to lose by taking the risk. If things go wrong they will simply be back in the position they were already in; if they succeed they will have money, freedom, and the capacity for pleasure they currently lack.

This fatalistic assessment is not quite despair — these men are not clinically depressed or suicidal — but it shades into a kind of dispirited resignation. They are not deterred because deterrence operates by making the costs of crime exceed the costs of compliance, and for people with no meaningful investment in conventional life, the costs of compliance are already very high. Retrospectively, of course, they recognize the flaw in this reasoning: time in prison is not neutral, and the years lost in maximum security are years that cannot be recovered. But that recognition belongs to hindsight.

Celebrity Status

police officer being interviewed next to police tape

Many cultures have produced bank robbers who achieve a kind of folk-hero status — Jesse James, Bonnie and Clyde, Billy the Kid, and in Canada the Boyd Gang. Bank robbery is a crime that lends itself to romantic portrayal: it is dramatic, it involves daring, and its target is an impersonal financial institution rather than an innocent individual. Three men in Desroches’ sample wrote books about their criminal careers that found commercial publishers: Roger Caron’s autobiography Go Boy, Mickey McArthur’s I’d Rather be Wanted Than Had, and Stephen Reid’s nominally fictional Jackrabbit Parole, which closely mirrors the activities of his own professional robbery crew, the Stopwatch Gang.

When Desroches asked his subjects whether this glamorous image of bank robbery had influenced their decision, most were careful to identify money as their primary motivation. But a number also acknowledged that their choice of target — banks rather than convenience stores — was partly shaped by their perception of bank robbery as a crime with a certain legitimacy: banks are large, impersonal organizations that exploit their customers, foreclose on homes and farms, and accumulate wealth at the expense of ordinary people. Robbing a bank could be framed, in the tradition of conflict theory, as striking back at the establishment. Whether consciously or not, celebrity status appears to have been a secondary motivational component, particularly in the selection of the bank as target over other crime types. It enabled offenders to construct a narrative about themselves as something more than petty thieves.

Choosing to Offend: The Wish to Be Independent

person looking menacing while eating chips

A striking finding from the interviews is that most of Desroches’ subjects explicitly rejected the characterization of themselves as desperate. They were not homeless or starving. Most acknowledged that they could have found another way to address their financial need — borrowing money from family, asking for help, getting by on less. They chose robbery; they were not compelled by circumstances beyond their control. This self-characterization as rational agents who choose to offend is itself a motivational component.

The desire to be independent — or to regain independence that had been lost — runs through many of the interviews. A 24-year-old man whom Desroches describes in a case example titled “Seeking Independence” had been living off his girlfriend’s income, while her family was paying for their upcoming wedding. He wanted his own money, his own contribution, his own self-respect. He said he was not desperate but that he had certain things he wanted and a certain pride in standing on his own feet. His case illustrates the interplay between pride, masculine identity, and financial motive. A Queen’s University student in the sample had been self-funding his education, accumulated a debt to a drug supplier, and chose to rob 17 or 18 banks rather than ask his parents for help — because asking would have compromised the independence he had spent years building. In retrospect he recognized the irrationality of this, but in the moment the desire to remain self-sufficient was a genuine motivational force.

The Motivation to Continue: A Partying Lifestyle

alcohol being poured into a glass full of ice

Desroches draws a crucial analytical distinction between initial motivation and the motivation to continue. The former involves a specific financial need and the first robbery that addresses it; the latter involves the decision to keep robbing after the initial need is met. The transition between the two is rapid and consistent: after the first robbery, offenders find that it was easier than expected, that they got away with it, and that their self-confidence has been substantially boosted. “Damn, I’m good” is the characteristic response to a successful first robbery. They had expected it to be frightening and complicated; it turned out to be quick and, in many cases, smooth. The logical conclusion they draw is: “Well, maybe just one more.”

That “one more” is never actually the last one. The robbery yields money; the money is spent on a hedonistic, partying lifestyle that includes bars, alcohol, recreational drugs, women, expensive clothing, taxis, restaurant meals, and rounds of drinks for friends and hangers-on. Many subjects describe these as the only periods of their lives when they felt genuinely affluent and genuinely free. The money is gone within days or a week, but the appetite for the lifestyle persists, and the solution is obvious: go back to the bank. The motivation to continue is not financial need but financial greed — or more precisely, the desire to sustain a hedonistic lifestyle that legitimate income could never support.

One particularly vivid case involves a man Desroches calls “The Travelling Bandit,” a salesman who supplemented poor months by robbing banks and committed 50 robberies over his career, each of which he told himself would be his last. He was, in his own words, always just about to stop. Two-thirds of the men in the sample said they used their robbery proceeds to increase their standard of living; the remaining third sought to maintain a standard of living that had slipped after losing a job or other income. Very few invested or saved anything. The money was spent on transitory pleasures, and the pattern — spend, run out, rob again — made serial offending practically inevitable.

The Close Call and the Robber’s Assessment of Risk

A close call — a near-arrest, a roadblock, a car chase, a police officer who almost stops the right car — is the kind of experience that most observers would expect to function as a deterrent. For the men in Desroches’ study it did the opposite. Rather than frightening them into retirement from robbery, close calls tended to reinforce their sense of competence and invulnerability. If they could handle that level of danger and still escape, it proved they were skilled and cool under pressure. The close call became evidence of their own capabilities rather than evidence of the narrowness of their margins.

They maintained this assessment in part by interpreting any past arrest as a fluke, a moment of bad luck, or some specific stupidity on their own part that would not be repeated. One man wore his hockey sweater — with his name on the back — to a bank robbery. Another drove away from a hold-up and then stopped to count the money in his car, in plain view of a passing police cruiser. Another returned a rental car with the balaclava and shotgun still in the trunk. These cases circulate through the prison system as cautionary tales about stupidity, reinforcing the view that getting caught is something that happens to incompetent people, not to someone with a sound M.O. and a bit of caution. The belief that one’s own arrest was a fluke allowed repeat offenders to re-enter the robbery cycle with their confidence largely intact.

Desroches identified, over his years of follow-up, that well over 30 of his original interviewees had re-offended — and he suspects the true figure is substantially higher, since he did not systematically track all of them. The close call does not function as a deterrent because the offenders’ framework for understanding risk is fundamentally different from an objective actuarial calculation.

Originating the Idea from the Media

blurry coin-operated newspaper vending machines

One of the most unexpected findings in Desroches’ research — one he did not anticipate at the outset and discovered only after the first few interviews — is that approximately one-third of his sample, 25 out of 80 men, originated the idea to rob a bank from media portrayals. Most of these drew their information from ongoing newspaper coverage of bank robberies rather than from films or television. Brief reports of successful robberies, mentioning that an undisclosed amount of money was taken and the suspect walked away in an unspecified direction, communicated a consistent message: bank robbery is non-violent, relatively simple, and apparently low-risk, since the person was never caught.

For eight of the 25, the idea lay dormant after first encountering it in the press, surfacing only when a financial crisis provided a trigger. The Queen’s University student who robbed nearly 17 banks over two and a half years is the case example Desroches develops in detail: the student had read about bank robberies years before his first offence, found the concept intriguing, filed it away — and then resurrected it when a debt to a drug supplier became pressing. The remaining 17 of the 25 encountered the idea and acted on it more directly, reading about a robbery and deciding relatively quickly that it was a viable solution to a financial problem they were currently experiencing.

An additional 11 men could not recall where the idea had come from, leading Desroches to suggest that the true proportion influenced by media, consciously or otherwise, was probably 40 per cent or more. The media’s influence was also not limited to originating the idea: 44 out of 80 men — 55 per cent — used information from media reports to develop and refine their modus operandi, including decisions about whether to carry a weapon, what wording to use in a note, which bank branches appeared to pay out larger sums, and what disguise to adopt. Counterintuitively, most of the media-influenced men chose not to arm themselves, because newspaper reports had persuaded them that tellers would comply without a visible weapon and that note-pushing was essentially non-violent.

Recidivism and the Decision to Leave Crime

person in dress shirt and polka-dot tie wearing handcuffs

Why do career criminals who have served long prison sentences go back to robbery? When Desroches re-interviewed men who had reoffended, he found that their reasons for the second (or third, or fourth) foray into robbery mirrored the original combination of need and greed: they needed money for the same mundane expenses as before, and they wanted to recapture the lifestyle they had briefly enjoyed. They attributed their original arrest to a fluke and believed that this time they would not be caught — “lightning doesn’t strike twice” was a phrase used by more than one. The criminal justice system, in their view, had been lucky before; it would not be lucky again.

Research on the decision to leave crime consistently shows that career criminals do eventually desist, but typically not until their late thirties or forties. This pattern is explained partly by what Cusson and Pinsonneault in their 1986 Canadian study termed delayed deterrence: the penalty of imprisonment, which had no deterrent effect when these men were young — because they believed they could do the time, had nothing much to lose, and saw no credible alternative — gradually becomes terrifying as they age. The components of this spreading fear include a reassessment of the probability of punishment (recognized as very high rather than very low), an increasing difficulty of doing time (older men find prison far harder to endure than younger ones did), awareness of the weight of prior convictions as an aggravating factor (the next sentence will be dramatically longer), and a fundamental reorientation toward time itself as a finite and already depleted resource.

Positive factors also matter. The studies by Irvine (1970s), Meisenhelder (1977), and Shover (1989) all identify meaningful relationships — typically with a partner, and the prospect of a family — as a critical positive bond that career criminals eventually develop and do not wish to lose. Involvement in legitimate work, even low-paid work, and in non-criminal social activities builds what Hirschi would call social bonds: investments in conventional society that carry real costs if abandoned. The combination of fear of renewed and harsher imprisonment and the emergence of things worth protecting produces, eventually, desistance.

Case Example: John Wayne

person counting money against a brick wall

The case Desroches titles “John Wayne” — after the way the offender saw himself — illustrates both the conditions that can motivate desistance and the fragility of those conditions. When first interviewed, this 29-year-old offender had a career total of 37 financial institution robberies, had escaped from prison multiple times, and had been described in press coverage as a one-man crime wave. While on the run following his most recent escape, he met a woman, fell in love, told her the truth about his criminal career, and was persuaded to surrender and serve his time so that she would wait for him. He married her in prison. He was paroled for the first time in his career — having previously always escaped rather than serving to parole eligibility. He had a child, a job, and a wife waiting for him. By any measure the social bonds were strong.

Two years later, Desroches heard on the radio that this same man had been arrested for 16 additional bank robberies. At a re-interview, the explanation emerged: on parole, he had been present at a gathering where another man was stabbed to death. Refusing to testify — bound by the inmate code — he was taken to have violated his parole conditions by associating with criminals, his parole was revoked, and he was returned to prison. His wife, having waited through the previous sentence, now left him, taking the child. He was back in prison with years to serve and nothing outside waiting for him. “To hell with it” was how he described his decision to escape and resume robbing banks. The positive bonds that had made desistance viable evaporated all at once, and without them the logic of crime reasserted itself immediately.

He was subsequently convicted of 18 additional bank robberies in two provinces and sentenced to an additional 20 years on top of the 19 already outstanding. As he calculated it, he had done approximately 10 years in total and would be eligible for parole before long, though he had little expectation of receiving it given his record. The case is a precise illustration of how desistance and recidivism are not individual character traits but contingent outcomes shaped by the circumstances of people’s lives.

Summary: Rational Choice Theory and Motivation

Rational Choice Theory is useful for understanding robbery motivation, but only if its version of rationality is recognized as subjective rather than objective. Young offenders reason with incomplete information, make assumptions they do not test, and act on beliefs that are often false — but they do reason, and that reasoning can be examined and explained. As offenders age and accumulate failures, their rationality becomes more objective: they start to recognize that the probability of arrest is high, that time in prison is genuinely costly, and that the financial returns from robbery are negligible measured against years of incarceration. The shift from youthful subjective rationality to the harder-won objective rationality of the older criminal is itself a developmental process.

A critical caveat is necessary: Rational Choice Theory risks making behaviour appear more coherent and calculated than it actually was. Drug addiction, gambling, impulsiveness, fatalism, and emotional desperation all play roles that cannot be fully accommodated within a rational-choice framework. The men in Desroches’ study were not simply calculating utility maximizers operating in a criminal market; they were impulsive, hedonistic, often poorly informed, and prone to telling themselves comforting fictions. Rational Choice Theory illuminates some dimensions of their behaviour, but it should not obscure the extent to which robbery is also a crime of poor judgment, addiction, desperation, and limited imagination.

Key Concepts: Rational choice theory Techniques of neutralization Initial motivation and the motivation to continue Motivational components The role of the mass media The influence of others A partying lifestyle The wish to be independent The close call Delayed deterrence

Module 09: Modus Operandi and Robbery

Objectives: This module asks students to describe and analyze the three major bank robbery modus operandi, explain the key decisions robbers make regarding weapons, getaways, and partners, and explain why bank robbers almost never change their M.O. between crimes.

Reading: Course Reserves: “Robbers and Heroes,” Canadian Banker, pp. 21–24; Force and Fear, Ch. 4, pp. 107–125 and pp. 129–170.

Introduction: What Modus Operandi Means

Modus operandi (M.O.) refers to the characteristic method by which a criminal commits a crime. Because robbery is a serial crime — offenders typically commit many robberies before they are arrested, since the proceeds are small and spent quickly — the M.O. tends to be repeated with remarkable consistency from one offence to the next. This consistency is simultaneously the offender’s comfort and their undoing: it makes them efficient but also identifiable.

Hold-up Squads attach a pair of investigators to each reported robbery. These investigators compile all available information — physical description, verbal behaviour, type of note used, getaway method, disguise — and use computer matching to connect individual offences to the same offender. They then assign the offender a nickname based on some distinctive feature of their M.O. or appearance. Desroches catalogs a vivid array of these: the “John Denver Bandit” (who resembled the folk singer in appearance and dress), the “Relax Bandit” (who misspelled “relax” — sometimes writing “relaxs” — in every one of his 13 robbery notes), the “Back Back Gang” (whose verbal instructions were always “back, back, back against the wall”), the “Crown Royal Bandit” (who produced a Crown Royal whisky bag and ordered tellers to fill it), the “Friday Afternoon Bandit” (who robbed west-end Toronto banks on Friday afternoons until police placed the whole district under surveillance and caught him mid-robbery), and many others including the “Polite Bandit,” the “Gentleman Bandit,” the “Expo Bandit,” the “Bible Bandit,” and “The Subway Bandit” — the last eventually apprehended when police stopped subway trains and searched cars.

The M.O. helps police connect an arrested person to dozens of prior offences, substantially increasing the sentence. A conviction on 17 robberies rather than one or two means years of additional incarceration. The three M.O. types that structure Desroches’ analysis — note pushers, bank robbery crews, and solo gunmen — map directly onto the police typologies, and each is associated with a distinct risk profile, level of violence, and financial return.

Planning the Crime

The media image of bank robbery is of a skilled, professional operation: the crew who cased the building for weeks, studied the guards’ schedules, synchronized their watches, and executed a precisely rehearsed plan. Research consistently demolishes this image. A 1986 California study by Feeney of 113 robbers found that half had done no planning at all and another third had engaged only in minimal same-day preparation. Only about 5 per cent had planned in any meaningful detail. Approximately 60 per cent had not even considered the possibility of being caught.

Desroches entered his study with some expectation that bank robbers would be more deliberate than retail or mugging offenders. He was consistently surprised. Men about to commit a crime for which they could receive a life sentence frequently could not tell him where the nearest police station to their target bank was. Several found out the hard way — arrested in the immediate vicinity. One particularly extreme case: the offender who killed a teller in Montreal had driven downtown with a partner he barely knew, pointed at a bank at random, went in having never fired a gun before and having undertaken no reconnaissance, and committed the crime with such a cascade of failures that a teller died as a result.

The limited planning is itself explained by the characteristics of the offender population: they are impulsive, impatient, and focused on immediate gratification. Taking three days to research a target is three days of not having money. For most of them, the basic requirements of bank robbery are so minimal that extensive planning feels unnecessary. You need a note or a weapon, a destination teller, and a way out. The rest, most of them believe, will take care of itself.

Selecting a Target

Target selection follows from the M.O. and is shaped primarily by the getaway. Most offenders do not enter the bank before the robbery; they assess it from the street, reasoning that there is no need to go inside and expose themselves to security cameras. As one offender explained, the only two things he needed to know were where the door was and where the money was — and both were self-evident from the entrance. For convenience store robberies, the same logic applies: the layout of every corner store is familiar, and a brief external assessment is sufficient.

For bank robbery crews and solo gunmen, the choice of which bank to hit within a particular area tends to be made on the day of the robbery rather than through extended reconnaissance. The getaway preference is typically decided first — public transit, foot, bicycle, or car — and target banks are then selected along the route that makes the preferred getaway feasible. For mugging offenders, target selection is governed by vulnerability: they seek victims who are alone in spaces where no assistance is available, in neighbourhoods they already know.

Getaways, Alarms, and Cameras

The getaway is the dimension of the robbery that most offenders report spending the most thought on — and even here, most of them invest very little time or imagination. The basic logic is to be out of the immediate area before police arrive. Offenders generally assume that the silent alarm will be pressed during the robbery; they know the alarm company must first call the bank to confirm an emergency before dispatching police; and they estimate that police will not reach the bank for at least five to ten minutes. Their goal is to be several blocks away within a minute of leaving. In practice, police response times often exceed ten minutes, meaning that the window for escape is somewhat wider than offenders assume — but that assumption is one of the few they make that is broadly accurate.

Getaway methods are adapted to available infrastructure. Some offenders use public transit: subway lines, bus routes, or taxi stands outside nearby hotels. One man robbed only banks from which he could turn right all the way home, never once stopping at a red light — and robbed the same bank three times before being caught. Others use bicycles, on-foot escapes through urban crowds, or cars, which offer the greatest flexibility but also require parking in advance and avoiding traffic jams (several offenders were arrested because their car was caught in rush-hour congestion while police closed in).

Bank cameras are a concern but not a deterrent. Most note pushers wear minimal disguise — sunglasses, a baseball cap, occasionally a change of clothes — and assume that camera images will be unclear enough to prevent identification. This assumption is frequently wrong: the clearest images tend to be the ones police keep in their files, while the fuzzy ones are the ones published in newspapers. Many note pushers are identified from camera footage because they have criminal records, and the police can match a clear image to an existing photograph. Bank robbery crews and solo gunmen wear full balaclavas and are unconcerned with cameras. Most offenders do not check whether a specific bank has cameras before entering.

Doing the First Robbery

For most offenders, the first robbery is the most psychologically demanding moment of their criminal career. One young offender described his heart pounding so hard he thought other people could hear it. Another said it took him three and a half hours to build the nerve to enter the bank, circling the block repeatedly, and that he went in five minutes before closing time. More than one arrived at the bank after finally steeling themselves, only to find it already closed; they had to start the process again the next day. Crumpled hold-up notes are found in bank rubbish bins with some regularity — evidence of offenders who made it inside but lost their nerve before approaching a teller.

Once committed — once the offender crosses the threshold and enters the bank — the “mad rushing fear” characteristically dissipates. They find themselves calm relative to how frightened they were outside. Desroches draws an analogy to team sports: the butterflies before the game dissolve with the first tackle or the first body check, because the athlete is now in action rather than in anticipation. Taking control of the situation — becoming the person to whom others are responding — also contributes to the reduction of fear. The second robbery is substantially easier than the first; the third easier than the second. After fifteen or twenty robberies, some offenders report being so comfortable that they are mentally counting the money and planning their spending while still standing in line.

M.O. and the Influence of the Mass Media

As discussed in Module 08, approximately 25 out of 80 men (about one-third) originated the idea to rob a bank from the media. Beyond originating the idea, the media shaped operational decisions for 44 out of 80 men (55 per cent) in the study. These men used specific information gleaned from newspaper reports to develop their M.O. — choice of weapon (or decision not to carry one), note wording, target selection, area of the city, getaway method, and disguise.

The most striking pattern was counterintuitive: media exposure led the majority of influenced robbers toward an unarmed approach, not a violent one. Of the 25 who originated the idea from the media, only 7 went armed on their first robbery; the other 18 chose not to because newspaper accounts had convinced them that tellers would comply with a demand note even without a visible weapon. Several of those 18 said the non-violent character of the note-pusher M.O. was one of its appeals — it did not require them to do anything that felt genuinely dangerous. A few offenders cited movies as a source, and a couple of those did draw on violent portrayals to justify carrying firearms, but this was the minority pattern.

The media’s most significant impact may be its creation of a false impression of robbery as a low-risk, high-success enterprise. By definition, newspapers report each successful robbery (someone robbed a bank and escaped) but report an arrest only once, even if that arrest covers 15 or 20 prior offences. Readers encounter many accounts of successful robberies and few accounts of arrests, creating the illusion that most robbers are never caught.

The Decision to Use a Weapon

Of the 80 men in Desroches’ sample, 46 were armed with real firearms, 11 used replica weapons, and the remainder were unarmed. Using a replica weapon attracts the same charges as using a real one under Canadian criminal law. Among note pushers specifically, only 3 of 31 carried loaded firearms; another 5 had replicas. The decision whether to carry a weapon is among the most consequential in robbery, because it determines the seriousness of the charge, the minimum sentence, and the probability of injury escalating to a fatal outcome.

A weapon serves instrumental goals: it creates a buffer zone, intimidates victims, and facilitates compliance without requiring the robber to take any physical action. As Stephen Reid explained to Desroches, a gun allows the robber to direct people to move left or right, to step back, to remain still — with the single exception that no one will willingly walk toward the barrel of a gun. If a teller calls a note pusher’s bluff and demands to see the weapon, showing it is typically sufficient to resolve the impasse. One note pusher described the gun as the psychological centrepiece of the interaction: “Bank robbery is part mind game. The gun drives home the point. It’s a symbol of dominance in the game’s psychology.” Without the gun, a teller who refuses creates a standoff that wastes time and ends with the robber leaving empty-handed; with it, the impasse is resolved in seconds.

Weapons also provide expressive benefits — a sense of security and confidence — that offenders are less likely to acknowledge voluntarily but that are observable in their behaviour. The choice of M.O. largely determines the weapon decision: note pushers can often operate without one; bank robbery crews and solo gunmen use the commando-style takeover approach that effectively requires a firearm to control multiple staff and customers simultaneously.

An Unchanging M.O.

a person wearing a stocking over their head in handcuffs

One of the most practically counterproductive behaviours of robbery offenders is their refusal to change their M.O. The very distinctiveness that enables police to link an offender to a dozen or more robberies is something that could, in principle, be disrupted by simple variations — a different getaway method, different phrasing in a demand note, a different disguise. Most robbers never attempt this, and when Desroches asked why, several explanations emerged.

The dominant reason was adherence to a winning formula: if the approach has worked fifteen times, there is no reason to tamper with it. A closely related reason was an inability to conceive of improvements — the M.O. felt optimal. A third was superstition: these men thought of themselves as being “on a run,” the way gamblers speak of hot streaks, and changing anything felt like tempting fate. A fourth reason — perhaps the most revealing — was a function of denial. Changing the M.O. would implicitly acknowledge that the robber intended to commit more robberies; since every robber tells himself this is his last one, there is no need to plan for a future pattern that will not exist. The denial is self-reinforcing: the decision not to change the M.O. is itself evidence of the depth of their commitment to the fiction that they are about to stop.

When they are eventually arrested, the police produce files linking them to every robbery committed in the same distinctive manner. The “Relax Bandit,” who misspelled “relax” consistently across 13 robbery notes, was genuinely surprised when investigators confronted him with the entire file. His M.O. was so distinctive that the police had assembled a complete picture of his career before he walked into the interview room.

Heroes and Resistance in Robbery

a person holding a pistol to another person's chin

Desroches’ article “Robbers and Heroes,” published in The Canadian Banker in 1997, examines the bank policy of compliance in light of what happens when it breaks down. Bank robbers hold a coherent, if disturbing, moral position on the subject of heroes — people (staff, customers, or bystanders) who physically intervene to stop a robbery. From the robber’s perspective, the hero has no legitimate business intervening in what is “not their money” and “not their business.” By interfering, the hero violates the cultural norm of minding one’s own affairs and, in doing so, becomes a deserving victim. The robber frames any violence directed at a hero as self-defence — a last resort in response to being attacked.

Across the hundreds (probably thousands) of robberies represented in his 80-subject sample, Desroches found only 12 documented instances of physical resistance or confrontation. In four of those cases, the robber discharged a firearm; in 10 of the 17 total interference incidents (Desroches notes a discrepancy in his own count due to different incidents across the sample), armed robbers said they would have or likely would have shot the hero had they not backed down when the gun was levelled at them. The low frequency of heroic intervention is itself evidence that the M.O. works: most customers and staff comply, standing back and trying to memorize descriptions that might help identify the robber later.

The compliance policy is not just morally tidy — it is empirically effective. Only two Canadian bank tellers have ever been killed in bank robberies. The policy of non-resistance has saved lives. The legal and moral environment around bank robbery has accordingly settled on a clear recommendation for anyone who encounters an armed robbery in progress: do not play hero.

The Note Pushers

Note pushers — sometimes called beggar bandits by police — employ a surreptitious M.O. that attempts to conduct a robbery while attracting as little attention as possible. The note pusher blends into the ordinary flow of bank customers: standing in line, waiting for the next available teller, approaching with a written demand note (occasionally making a verbal demand), collecting the money from the teller’s till, and walking out. In the ideal execution, nobody else in the bank realizes a robbery has taken place. Desroches describes watching footage from an Australian bank in which a film crew happened to be setting up a commercial when a note pusher walked in, quietly robbed a teller, and left — the entire transaction completed in seconds with no one else aware it was happening.

Thirty-one of Desroches’ 80 subjects were note pushers. In reality, note pushers account for approximately 90 per cent of all bank robberies in Canada today, having largely displaced the more aggressive M.O.s that were common in earlier decades. The typical note contains a brief demand — “This is a robbery. Give me your large bills. Don’t make any noise” — and may or may not claim the robber is armed. Banks hold a limited float in each teller’s drawer, typically $1,500 to $2,000, and larger amounts are secured behind time-locked safes that require five minutes to open. The note pusher is not willing to wait five minutes, so they take what is immediately available and leave.

Note pushers are generally unconcerned about silent alarms (which they know cannot produce police within their one-minute window), minimally concerned about cameras (toward which they may adopt a hat and sunglasses), and not worried about fingerprints. They are concerned about bait money — specially prepared bills with a concealed dye pack that explodes when the money exits the bank — and typically instruct tellers not to include any of it, which usually works. What consistently shocks note pushers, upon arrest, is the severity of the legal response: they have been treated by the police as violent criminals, face maximum-security classification, and are sentenced to years in prison for what they subjectively regarded as a non-violent financial transaction.

Bank Robbery Crews – Part I

two people on a couch with money and shotgun on table

A bank robbery crew consists of two or more people employing a commando-style or takeover M.O. in which the robbery is overt, announced, and executed rapidly with visible weapons. The doors burst open, masked figures enter with guns, commands are shouted, tellers are ordered to hand over money from multiple drawers. It is a terrifying experience for everyone in the bank.

The decision to commit robbery with others involves weighing several considerations. Going alone avoids splitting the proceeds and eliminates the risk of a partner informing on you; many offenders say they simply did not have an available, trustworthy partner. Going with others provides safety in numbers, makes it easier to control a large bank, provides emotional support particularly for a first robbery, and — because crew robberies typically clean out multiple tills rather than one — often results in a larger per-person take than a note pusher achieves working alone.

Partners are chosen carefully and from people already known and trusted. One consistent finding, confirmed in Eisenstadter’s 1969 study of 25 serious robbers and replicated in Desroches’ work, is that proceeds are split equally among all participants, including getaway drivers in most cases. The reasoning is that risk is shared equally, so reward should be too. Another firm norm is that arrested partners are expected to remain silent — not to inform. There are no acknowledged leaders. Decisions are made through consensus, and nobody is pressured to participate in a specific robbery if they are having doubts on a given day.

Bank Robbery Crews – Part II

three people leaning against the wall looking threatening

The division of labour within a bank robbery crew follows a clear functional logic. At least one member takes the role of doorman/gunman: stationed near the entrance with a displayed firearm, this person’s job is to prevent anyone from leaving the bank, deter any would-be heroes, and ensure that nobody presses an alarm or attempts to overwhelm the other crew members from behind. The doorman/gunman is the last to leave. The other members — the bagmen — jump the counter and move through the tills as rapidly as possible, filling bags with cash. If drawers are locked, they locate the head teller and demand they be opened. The speed of the operation is typically 30 to 60 seconds; speed is the M.O.’s greatest advantage and the crew’s primary protection.

Thirty-one of the 35 bank robbery crew members in the sample used loaded weapons; the other four used replica firearms. The seriousness of the M.O. demands real weapons because the commando-style attack requires controlling an entire bank full of people simultaneously, not a single teller in a quiet interaction. The choice of who holds the gun is the most significant pre-robbery discussion: crew members are explicit with one another that the gunman must be reliable and restrained, not a “hothead” who might fire impulsively. If one candidate is considered too volatile, they will be assigned the bagman role instead.

Crew members wear full balaclavas rather than simple hats and glasses. They typically walk to the bank without disguise and pull the balaclava on as they approach the entrance. The psychological impact on witnesses is severe: customers cry, hide under desks, and in some cases sustain lasting psychological trauma. Tellers who have experienced a commando robbery sometimes find it impossible to return to work. Police and correctional authorities treat crew members with particular seriousness, and the sentences associated with armed takeover robberies are among the longest in the robbery category.

The Solo Gunman

person in balaclava holding a pistol casually

The solo gunman combines the aggressive commando-style M.O. of the bank robbery crew with the independence of operating alone. He enters the bank wearing a balaclava, announces a robbery in progress, displays a firearm, and attempts to control all staff and customers while simultaneously collecting money from multiple tills. There were 14 solo gunmen in Desroches’ sample. Twelve of them — over 85 per cent — used loaded firearms. Thirteen of the 14 had previous criminal convictions, most of them including prior robbery offences. The sole exception was a former RCMP officer who had been demoted from selling luxury cars to economy models, found himself unable to admit to his wife that their income had dropped substantially, and — in a rare case of a middle-class professional entering serious crime — robbed banks along expressway routes roughly once a month for over a year before being caught.

The solo gunman is more vulnerable to physical interference than a crew, since there is no partner covering his back. He compensates with a set of specific tactical adaptations: he avoids turning his back on customers, orders staff and customers to move away from him, maintains close proximity to the door, and typically does not jump the counter (instead ordering tellers to put money up where he can collect it while keeping his eye on the room). Some use a bag attached by wire to their left forearm so they can scoop money into it with one motion while holding the gun in their right hand throughout. They describe themselves, when discussing their mental state during robberies, as very focused, very determined, and quite calm — notably absent are the words “nervous” or “scared” that note pushers use.

Solo gunmen are serious criminals who take pride in their work and tend to be more selective and more cautious than other robbery types. They often work different cities to avoid police recognition, wear gloves to prevent fingerprint evidence, plan their getaways more carefully, and may operate only once every month or two rather than weekly. Because they get more per robbery — hitting five or six tills, potentially netting $8,000 to $10,000 — they are under less financial pressure to offend frequently. One particularly skilled solo gunman targeted Montreal banks with armed guards, disarming the guard and accessing the much larger float that such banks maintain ($5,000 to $6,000 per teller rather than $1,500), and regularly walked out with $30,000 to $50,000 per robbery.

Armoured Vehicle Robberies – Part I

Armoured vehicle robberies represent the upper tier of the robbery world — the robbery of Brinks, Loomis, Wells Fargo, and similar cash transport companies — and the men who commit them are regarded by both police and by other criminals as professionals. This is a contested designation: the word “professional” in criminology is imprecise when compared to legitimate professions, and it is used loosely. But in the specific context of robbery, it denotes a cluster of attributes: serious criminal experience, careful planning, the willingness and capacity to target armed guards, and the ability to execute high-value scores cleanly. Armoured vehicle robberies can yield six-figure sums; in some cases the proceeds have run to millions of dollars.

The history of bank robbery in Canada from the 1930s through the 1960s was dominated by professional armed crews, many based in Montreal, who targeted bank vaults and managers. Time-lock technology, introduced in the 1960s, effectively ended the vault robbery era by limiting accessible cash in bank premises to modest floats. A brief subsequent period in the 1970s saw a wave of kidnappings in which managers’ spouses and children were taken and held until the manager provided bank access; 120 such incidents occurred in Montreal alone in a single year. This M.O. was also extinguished through a combination of intensified police investigation and severe sentencing.

Armoured vehicle robbery is now the last remaining opportunity for robbers who want a large payday. Ten such offenders were identified and interviewed over the eight years of Desroches’ study — a very small number, reflecting the rarity of this type of crime. Their median age was 35, the average age 39; they were substantially older and more experienced than typical bank robbers. All operated in crews. One was 64 years old and had spent approximately 50 years of his life in prison. All but one had spent extensive time in institutions. Nine of the ten had escaped from prison or attempted to do so.

Armoured Vehicle Robberies – Part II

These ten men inhabited a criminal world of extraordinary violence. All had acquaintances killed in holdups, in prison, or through drug-related conflicts. One member of the group was serving a life sentence for murder; his partner had been acquitted on a separate murder charge. Between them, the ten accumulated charges for narcotics, abduction, kidnapping, assault, attempted murder, break and enter, escape, resisting arrest, and extortion. Several described being beaten by police following arrest. All but one had spent many years in penitentiary.

Desroches notes that, counterintuitively, he did not find the interviews frightening. Most of the armoured vehicle robbers were accommodating, articulate, and at times genuinely funny. The exception was one man he simply did not like — arrogant and condescending, unlike the majority, who were modest in the way of people who know they are sitting in prison. There was one frightening moment, when a subject named John began role-playing a conflict during an interview, pressing his face close to Desroches’ and threatening him as if he were the antagonist in the story. Desroches maintained his composure, did not hit the panic button in the interview room, and later played back the recording to check whether his voice had cracked. It had not. When he told John about this on a subsequent visit, John laughed and said he had not even realized he had frightened anyone.

A significant geographic pattern in the data: six of the ten armoured vehicle robbers were from Montreal, and the other four from the Ottawa-Hull region — both Quebec-connected. Police investigating armoured vehicle robberies in other provinces routinely check first for Quebec connections, because historically almost all of this activity originated there. In Quebec, security guards carry their weapons in their hands; in other provinces guards are required to keep their guns holstered. This makes it harder to disarm a Quebec guard without shooting them, which is one reason armoured vehicle robberies in that province tend to be more violent. Guards have been killed. The job carries genuine danger, a fact the men who hold it understand.

Armoured Vehicle Robberies – Part III

Unlike the improvised approach of most bank robbers, armoured vehicle robbers invest substantially in planning. An out-of-province heist typically requires renting an apartment and a car, spending weeks observing the target armoured vehicle’s routes, identifying a moment of security breakdown — perhaps a narrower street, a doorway requiring both hands, a regular delivery that leaves a guard briefly isolated — and timing the approach and escape. The crew may conduct dry runs and time themselves. Some have placed false road blocks or detour signs to impede police response. Police scanners are used to monitor police frequencies and codes. One crew created a false robbery call in another part of the city to draw police attention before executing their actual robbery.

The crews that do this work are fluid: the pool of people in Canada willing and capable of targeting an armed guard for a serious payday is small, and men with reputations in this area are approached by different crews when their usual partners are unavailable. One man Desroches calls Billy worked with at least six different Montreal-based crews, having earned his reputation partly through helping to organize a prison escape from Millhaven Institution.

The within-group ethic of this community is sharply revealing. Desroches describes two high-profile armoured vehicle robberies that occurred in quick succession in Ontario. In the first, a crew identified that their target company was using an ordinary van while their armoured truck was in for repairs; they intercepted it on the street, handcuffed the guards, drove to an underground parking garage, unloaded the money, and escaped cleanly without hurting anyone. This robbery was admired by every man in the study — it was the textbook job, a display of professional skill and restraint. The second robbery involved two gunmen shooting two security guards in the back of the head at point-blank range in a mall, killing them both, then taking the cash and escaping. Desroches’ subjects were uniformly disgusted. These were “goons,” not professionals. A professional gets the money and leaves everyone alive. Killing people who are simply doing their jobs for a paycheque, without necessity or justification, violates the moral code of the community, just as killing hostages during prison riots is condemned. The armoured vehicle robbers, for all their violence and serious criminality, maintain a code that draws a clear line between the skilled professional and the careless killer.

Disarming the Armed Guard

person wearing gloves holding bag of money and assault rifle

The central technical problem of armoured vehicle robbery is disarming a guard who is alert, trained, and carrying a weapon — without producing a confrontation that results in someone being shot. Simply pointing a gun at an armed guard and demanding money is too unpredictable: people under stress sometimes act on training or impulse, and a guard who reaches for their weapon forces the robber into a choice between shooting them or running, neither of which is acceptable.

The professional technique involves a different approach entirely. The robber waits for a moment of security breakdown — a doorway the guard must navigate while pushing a cart, an aisle in a store where the guard is briefly out of sight of the truck — and approaches close enough to physically cover the guard’s holster with one hand while simultaneously pressing their own weapon against the guard’s body. The message delivered in that moment — sometimes verbally, as in “It’s not your money, asshole” — combined with the physical reality that any movement toward the holster is immediately countered, is typically sufficient to produce compliance. Once the gun is taken, the robbery can proceed. The key, these men emphasize, is to prevent the guard from having the option to draw, because a guard who panics and draws in a narrow doorway creates a situation in which someone will likely die — and that is an outcome every serious professional actively works to avoid.

Desroches closes the discussion with a personal anecdote that reveals something about the world he inhabited during his years of research. Observing an armoured delivery in downtown Montreal one afternoon while waiting to pick up Roger Caron from the airport, he noticed how vulnerable one elderly guard was while manoeuvring a loaded cart through double doors alone. He described the scene to Caron on the drive back. Caron wanted to return immediately. A week later Caron telephoned with a plan for the two of them to do the robbery together. When Desroches declined, Caron called him a chicken, hung up, and their friendship effectively ended. A few months later, Caron — who had been out of crime for nearly a decade — was arrested for a new series of robberies. His story, like so many in this study, traced the cycle back to cocaine dependency, debt to drug suppliers, and the path of least resistance for a man who had spent most of his adult life robbing banks. He was eventually released in his seventies on medical and compassionate grounds, his health destroyed by Parkinson’s disease and heart surgery. His parole board concluded he was unlikely to rob again. He is, in every dimension, emblematic of the patterns this course has examined.

Key Concepts: Modus operandi (M.O.) Surreptitious versus commando-style M.O. The influence of the mass media on the choice of M.O. An unchanging M.O. Note pushers Bank robbery crews and the division of labour The solo gunman Armoured vehicle robbers and professional criminals

Module 10: Humphreys’ Research Methodology

Objectives: By the end of this module you should be able to describe and critically analyze Humphreys’ research sample and methodology, compare Humphreys’ study to Desroches’ sample of tearoom participants, define and explain the watchqueen and other voyeur roles, critically analyze ethical issues related to Humphreys’ study, explain how tearooms are located, and describe the research value of Humphreys’ in-depth interviews with a dozen participants.

Reading: Tearoom Trade, Ch. 1 (pp. 1–15) and Ch. 2 (pp. 16–44); “Tearoom Trade: A Research Update,” Qualitative Sociology, pp. 39–46; newspaper articles and clippings (Course Reserves).

Defining Tearooms

The third major topic of this course turns to a form of deviant behaviour that most students will never have encountered before: tearoom behaviour, meaning the practice of men frequenting public washrooms in search of impersonal sex. Laud Humphreys described it as “impersonal sex in public places” and called it “kicks without commitment.” The term tearoom is primarily North American; in England the equivalent practice is called cottaging, a word derived from the small cottage-like structures that housed park washrooms. The origin of “tearoom” is less certain, though one plausible explanation traces it to an abbreviation of toilet room, gradually transformed into a written form resembling the word tea.

Humphreys argued that tearoom behaviour is both widespread and almost entirely unstudied. This assessment holds: the only two scholarly studies of tearoom activity of which the instructor is aware are Humphreys’ own book, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (1970), and Desroches’ follow-up study, “Tearoom Trade: A Research Update,” published in Qualitative Sociology in 1990. Tearooms exist in most large urban areas and are particularly common in shopping malls, large office buildings, universities, and public parks. Small Ontario cities — Stratford, Midland, Owen Sound, Guelph, Waterloo — have all seen police investigations into tearoom activity. Despite this prevalence, the behaviour stays beneath public radar because police rarely investigate it and there is no complainant in the traditional sense.

Tearoom behaviour involves men exclusively. There is no evidence that women seek out sex partners in public washrooms; this appears to be entirely male behaviour. It is also criminal behaviour, though barely so. Under the Criminal Code of Canada it is classified as an indecent act — a summary conviction offence carrying a maximum of six months imprisonment, though no one is sent to jail for tearoom sex. The criminal classification stems not from any coercive element — tearoom encounters are voluntary between adults — but from the public nature of the setting. Courts have consistently ruled through case law, even when challenged on constitutional grounds, that engaging in sexual conduct in a public washroom constitutes an indecent act that seriously transgresses community morals. The behaviour is not defined in the code itself; it is defined by judicial precedent.

Purpose and Scope of Humphreys’ Research

Humphreys conducted his study as a PhD dissertation at Washington University in St. Louis. His defense was contentious, and although he passed, he was subsequently dismissed from his faculty position — a consequence of both the subject matter and, more critically, the ethical questions raised by his methodology. When he published the dissertation as a book, controversy intensified.

The study is ethnographic in character: detailed, descriptive, and analytical, modelled on the anthropological tradition of studying a particular group or behaviour in its full social context. Humphreys had come to know about tearoom activity during his earlier career as an Episcopalian parish priest, where he counselled homosexual parishioners and gained a non-judgmental familiarity with gay life. That background informed both his sensitivity toward participants and what many critics read as an undisguised sympathy: Humphreys consistently portrays tearoom participants favourably, is sharply critical of police, and advocates that society should simply leave these men alone. He was married and publicly identified as heterosexual at the time of the study, but later came out as gay and became a prominent activist in the California gay community. Whether he himself participated in tearoom activity — which he denied — cannot be resolved, but the question was raised by readers of his richly intimate descriptions.

The ethical controversy centred on two practices. First, Humphreys observed men engaged in what is simultaneously private sexual behaviour and criminal activity, without their knowledge or consent, by posing as a participant. Second, and more egregious in the eyes of critics, he recorded the licence plate numbers of participants’ vehicles, identified them through police contacts, and a year later interviewed fifty of these men in their own homes — in disguise, under the pretext of conducting a community health survey, without ever disclosing that he had watched them in a tearoom. These practices could not be replicated today: all universities now require ethics review and informed consent from human research subjects. Humphreys’ study sits alongside Zimbardo’s prison simulation and Milgram’s obedience experiments as a touchstone for the reform of research ethics in the social sciences. Despite its ethical infirmities, the study won the C. Wright Mills Award, given only to works of outstanding sociological merit, and it remains one of the most celebrated and cited pieces of research in the sociology of deviance.

The goals of the study were essentially exploratory. Humphreys wanted to know who these men were, what exactly happened inside tearooms, what norms and roles governed their behaviour, what risks they faced, and why they engaged in this activity. He answered most of these questions in remarkable depth.

Humphreys’ Research Methodology – Discovering the Tearooms

Humphreys employed three distinct data-collection techniques. He made direct covert observations of tearoom encounters by posing as a participant; he conducted in-depth interviews with twelve men — the intensive dozen — who came to know him and consented to be interviewed; and he conducted covert interviews in the homes of fifty men he had identified via their licence plates. It is the first and third methods that attracted the most ethical criticism.

Discovering tearooms, once Humphreys set out to look, proved straightforward. He knew from his background that park washrooms tended to be used, and he began inspecting isolated public facilities, watching for physical evidence of activity. The ideal tearoom, as he described it on page 7 of Tearoom Trade, is “a washroom which is situated on an island of grass with roads close by on every side. The getaway car is just a few steps away. Children are not apt to wander over from the playground. No one can surprise the participants by working or walking in from the woods or from over a hill.” Multiple cars parked outside, men entering and spending far more time than any legitimate use would require, and graphic homosexual graffiti — sometimes explicitly instructional, telling readers how to signal interest — were all reliable indicators. A broken window pane was another sign: Humphreys discovered that the hole left by a broken pane was used as a lookout point from which a sentinel could scan the surrounding park and warn those inside of approaching strangers.

Police in Desroches’ later study identified active tearooms through the same telltale signs. In Orillia, officers noticed vehicles parked outside a public washroom and men sitting in them waiting before entering and remaining inside for twenty to thirty minutes — far longer than legitimate use would explain. In Victoria Park, Kitchener, the same patterns drew police attention. Graffiti also provided directions: phrases like if you want a blowjob, tap your foot were found in stalls, inadvertently recruiting new participants. Today, the internet has largely taken over this discovery function; detailed information about specific locations, where to park, and how to avoid detection is easily found online.

A memorable finding from Desroches’ Oakville sample illustrates how tearooms can be discovered through interpretation of ambient cultural signals. Police puzzled over why a particular Hudson’s Bay washroom attracted so much activity when less conspicuous locations were available. When arrested men were asked, the vast majority gave the same answer: they had interpreted the store’s advertising slogan — Meet me at The Bay — sexually, and assumed that other men with similar interests would do the same. Hudson’s Bay security confirmed the problem was company-wide.

Desroches’ Study – Discovering Tearooms

Desroches’ own study originated through a professional connection: a former student who had become Superintendent of Special Services at Peel Region invited him to observe an ongoing investigation of tearoom activity in three Peel shopping malls. The data ultimately drew on police investigations in five Ontario communities — Kitchener-Waterloo (Victoria Park), Orillia (the Opera House), Peel Region (three mall washrooms, including one in Square One), Oakville (Hudson’s Bay), and St. Catharines — yielding a sample of 190 men arrested and charged across seven washrooms. Desroches did not interview any of the men himself; his data are police-generated, consisting of surveillance observations, written files, and interviews with fifteen investigating detectives.

Men discover tearooms through several routes. Some locations — Victoria Park, Kitchener — carry long-standing community reputations as cruising areas, and media coverage of past police actions reinforces that knowledge. Others are discovered accidentally: men sitting in washroom stalls encounter sexual overtures they were not expecting and become drawn in. Graffiti functions as both instruction and invitation. Glory holes — openings punched through stall partitions — expose occupants to the sexual activity next door. And for those with an interest and the right orientation, the threshold for noticing the signs is low; signals that would be invisible to most people are immediately legible to those who are looking for them.

Humphreys’ Study – The Watchqueen Role

The methodological breakthrough at the heart of Humphreys’ direct observations was his discovery of the watchqueen role. Tearooms operate under conditions of acute risk: participants are engaged in conduct that is both sexually stigmatized and criminal. Strangers entering the space while sex is in progress represent a serious threat. Humphreys found that some men stationed themselves at the broken window pane and served as lookouts, coughing or otherwise signalling when someone approached. Others stood in the washroom as voyeurs, watching the sexual activity, sometimes masturbating while observing, and occasionally participating after the original couple separated. A third category, which Humphreys called waiters, lingered without participating. Desroches interprets these waiters differently (see Module 11): he argues that they were likely men hoping for an insertor-role encounter and departing when no one willing to play insertee appeared.

Humphreys adopted the watchqueen role himself: standing near the broken pane, visibly watching the action. This positioned him as a recognized participant in the social order of the tearoom rather than a suspicious outsider, which solved what researchers call the control effect — the tendency of observed behaviour to change when subjects know they are being watched. Because participants accepted his role as legitimate, they behaved as they would without him. It also enabled him to observe encounters directly and to connect participants to their vehicles in the adjoining parking area, gathering the licence plate numbers that would later allow him to identify and interview fifty men in their homes.

Desroches found no equivalent watchqueen role in his sample. The architecture of shopping mall washrooms — enclosed by multiple sets of doors, with no windows to a visible exterior — makes a lookout position physically impossible. Whether or not a lookout can see the action inside the washroom depends entirely on whether stall doors have been removed, as they had been in the parks Humphreys studied. Mall stalls all had doors, so the voyeur-lookout configuration that suited park washrooms simply did not arise.

Humphreys’ Sample – In-Depth Interviews

Because tearoom encounters take place in silence — no names are exchanged, no words are spoken — purely observational data can describe the mechanics of the behaviour but cannot illuminate the subjective experience of the participants. Humphreys overcame this limitation by gradually developing trust with twelve men whom he encountered repeatedly. He eventually revealed himself to them as a researcher, and over meals and drinks, these men allowed him to interview them at length, with some sessions tape-recorded. He called them the intensive dozen, and credited them with providing the richest insights in his entire study.

These twelve men are not representative of tearoom participants generally. Humphreys acknowledges that they were more overt in their sexuality, less defensive, and better educated than the average participant. Men who are highly secretive and anxious — and many are — would never have allowed themselves to be approached in this way. The intensive dozen are those willing to be known to a researcher, and that willingness itself marks them as atypical. Nonetheless, they provided invaluable accounts of norms, role perceptions, the experience of risk, and the motivational logic that observers can only infer from the outside.

This part of Humphreys’ methodology, unlike his covert observations and his home interviews, broadly conforms to the norms of informed consent: the men knew who Humphreys was and chose to participate. It is therefore the least criticized element of an otherwise ethically fraught research design.

Key Concepts: Tearoom behaviour and the law — classified as an indecent act; a minor summary conviction offence The purpose and scope of Humphreys’ ethnographic study — exploratory, richly descriptive, C. Wright Mills Award Humphreys’ and Desroches’ research samples — 50 home interviews (Humphreys); 190 police-generated cases in five Ontario communities (Desroches) Watchqueen role — voyeur-lookout; enabled covert observations; overcame control effect How tearooms are discovered — location, graffiti, glory holes, cars outside, the internet Waiters, masturbators, and voyeurs — secondary voyeur roles within the tearoom setting

Module 11: Rules, Roles, Players, and Risks of the Game

Objectives: By the end of this module you should be able to discuss the rules of the tearoom game and the functions those rules serve, explain the roles participants play, critically analyze the insertee and insertor roles and the aging crisis, outline how participants communicate through non-verbal gestures, and explain the various risks — police, toughs, blackmail, and venereal disease — that players face.

Reading: Tearoom Trade, Ch. 3 (pp. 45–58) and Ch. 6 (pp. 108–109); “Tearoom Trade: A Research Update,” Qualitative Sociology, pp. 46–49 and 53–56.

The Rules of the Game

Both Humphreys and Desroches approach tearoom activity through the lens of sociological analysis, looking for the norms — or rules — that organize behaviour within the setting, and the roles that participants occupy. Humphreys employs a game analogy: not because tearoom sex is trivial, but because, like a game, it has a defined goal, a set of rules, and real risks. The goal is sexual gratification; the rules are largely implicit; the risks — arrest, public exposure, loss of family and employment — are entirely real.

Three principal rules govern tearoom encounters in both studies. The first is no exchange of biographical information: encounters take place in silence, with no names, addresses, or identifying details ever disclosed. The second rule is no sexual contact with children or teenagers. The third is no coercion: all activity is consensual, and there is no exchange of money.

These rules are not arbitrary. Each one functions primarily to reduce risk. The silence norm means that participants cannot be identified or traced outside the washroom — no blackmail, no public exposure through another person’s disclosure. Avoiding minors removes the most severe criminal exposure; sex with a person under the age of consent is categorically more serious than an indecent act between adults, and would attract the kind of police attention that the tearoom subculture has a shared interest in avoiding. The prohibition on coercion similarly keeps the activity within the territory of victimless deviance, where police involvement is unlikely and community harm is minimal. Silence also reinforces the impersonal quality of the encounter — no voice, no name, no person — which serves to protect the heterosexual self-concept of many participants, a point discussed further in Module 15.

Humphreys noted that the silence norm occasionally broke down when outside threats forced participants to communicate — most notably, an incident in which a gang of toughs attacked the washroom and the men inside had to barricade the door together. In Desroches’ sample of 190 men observed by police, only one encounter involved any speech between participants. The three core rules also held: no children were involved, and no coercion was observed.

The Players

Several distinct categories of person occupy the tearoom at any given time. Straights are men who have entered for entirely legitimate purposes. They move quickly, make no eye contact, and leave. Tearoom participants are skilled at identifying them, largely because straights display none of the lingering, looking-around, or eye-contact behaviour that signals sexual interest. In Desroches’ sample the police recorded only two instances in which a straight person was approached — one received a kick to the head when a man looked under his stall, another a kick to the leg — confirming that approach errors are uncommon.

Agents of social control — police, park officers, mall security — represent the primary external threat. Among them, police are by far the most potent: trained, legally empowered, and capable of obtaining warrants and deploying surveillance equipment. Mall security typically handles incidents with caution notices or trespass orders rather than arrests, and they lack the investigative resources the police command. Humphreys characterized police tactics in his study as harassment; Desroches found the Canadian police in his sample considerably more systematic, conducting covert video surveillance that ultimately yielded 190 convictions.

Teenagers occupy several roles. Most are simply straights passing through. A small number are enlisters — young men curious about joining the activity — and these are typically avoided, given the risk of any sexual contact with minors. Some are toughs: young men who harass or assault tearoom participants out of homophobia. Humphreys describes a frightening incident in which a group of teenagers besieged a washroom for half an hour, throwing bottles and stones. In Desroches’ Ontario sample, no comparable gang threat was observed; gang delinquency of this type appears to be more common in the American urban context Humphreys studied. Teenagers may also appear as hustlers — young men seeking payment for sexual services — whom adult participants equally avoid, for the same reasons they avoid enlisters. This configuration was described as early as Albert Reiss Jr.’s 1961 study, “The Social Integration of Queers and Peers,” published in Social Problems, which found that delinquent boys in juvenile institutions would prostitute themselves to homosexual men — receiving fellatio but never providing it, doing so only for money, and maintaining strict norms that preserved their heterosexual self-concept.

Insertee and Insertor Roles

a person cupping another person's chin in a washroom

The predominant sexual act in tearoom encounters is fellatio, and a distinctive feature of that act is that it is virtually never reciprocated. The man who performs oral sex — the insertee (Humphreys’ term fellator) — does so on the man who receives it — the insertor — and that asymmetry is consistent and normative. Humphreys observed 53 acts of fellatio and found that the insertee was older in 40 of those cases, approximately the same age in 3, and younger in only 10. Desroches’ police data showed the same pattern. The insertor typically departs immediately after climax; the insertee may remain and fellate several subsequent men.

The age-role relationship suggests what Humphreys called an aging crisis. The insertor role is socially preferred: the insertor receives sexual service without performing any act on another man, which is important for those who conceptualize their participation in heterosexual terms. Younger, more physically attractive men can negotiate this preferred role more easily. As men age and become less attractive to potential partners, they may find that maintaining the insertor role is no longer possible — and must either accept the insertee role or withdraw from tearoom activity altogether. For some men, this transition also coincides with a gradual acceptance of their homosexual or bisexual orientation, which makes the insertee role less psychologically threatening.

The question of which role each man will play is resolved through the insertee’s initiative. It is the insertee who makes the first unambiguous sexual move: sitting in an open stall and beckoning, reaching over to touch another man’s erection, or otherwise signalling willingness to perform. The insertor, by simply allowing this to happen, maintains his psychological distance from actively homosexual behaviour. Both studies found that most sexual activity occurred in stalls rather than at urinals, the latter requiring one man to kneel on the washroom floor — uncomfortable and more visually exposed — while the former allowed the insertee to sit and the insertor to stand, with relative ease of concealment if someone entered.

Men whom Humphreys called waiters — individuals who lingered without making sexual contact — Humphreys interpreted as seeking prearranged rendezvous. Desroches rejects this interpretation: because these men never communicate inside or outside the washroom, prearranged meetings are logistically implausible. Instead, Desroches argues that the waiters are insertor-role seekers who are waiting for someone willing to play insertee. When no such person appears, they leave, and the men waiting with them do the same.

Non-Verbal Gestures and Tearoom Sex

a person staring into a mirror with hearts on walls

Given the strict silence norm, all communication between potential partners must occur through non-verbal signals. These signals have a characteristic quality: they are tentative, exploratory, ambiguous, and cautious. A signal that could plausibly be interpreted as accidental or innocent by a straight man will be recognized for what it is by a man with the appropriate orientation and experience. This ambiguity is a protective feature: men who approach strangers for sex in washrooms run the risk of a violent homophobic reaction, and signals that do not clearly identify their intent minimize that risk.

The sequence of signalling follows a cumulative, incremental logic. Lingering beyond the time required for legitimate use is itself a signal. Looking around and making eye contact — behaviours that straight men in washrooms conspicuously avoid — signals availability. If those cues are met with a reciprocal response, the participants edge closer: foot-tapping under stall partitions (instructed, in some washrooms, by graffiti: if you want a blowjob, tap your foot), gradual movement of a foot beneath the partition, mutual foot-touching, and ultimately physical sexual contact. At each step, the participant who initiated a gesture waits for a response before going further. The police in Desroches’ study observed this foot-tapping sequence as one of the most common forms of initial contact.

More experienced participants move through these stages quickly; novices are slower and need more reassurance. The role each man will play is also communicated non-verbally — the insertee typically signals his willingness through an explicit beckoning gesture or by physically initiating genital contact. The insertor’s passivity in the face of this initiative is itself a communicative act.

After the encounter, Humphreys described clearing the field: the insertor zips up and departs, sometimes with a brief thanks. The insertee may follow or may remain for further encounters. The two men leave separately — they did not speak on arrival, they do not acknowledge each other on departure.

Coping with Intrusions

When someone enters the washroom unexpectedly, three responses are available. The most immediate is to stop the action: zip up, turn toward the urinal, and behave as though nothing unusual has occurred. A second response is to look innocent by dissociating: moving apart, closing a stall door, washing hands, performing ordinary washroom behaviour. A third response is to observe the intruder and assess their purpose. If the new arrival is a straight person — identifiable by the speed and purposefulness of their movements and the absence of any signalling behaviour — participants typically wait them out. Straights rarely spend more than a few minutes in the washroom, and activity resumes once they have gone. If the new arrival sends off the appropriate signals, they may be absorbed into the encounter as voyeur or participant.

Humphreys argues that straight people are rarely accidentally exposed to tearoom sex in progress because participants are skilled at reading the signals of approach — the sound of a door, footsteps — and at appearing ordinary. Desroches’ police data confirm that this is largely accurate, though there were occasional instances where activity in Community 5 in particular spilled into the open area of the washroom and was inadvertently witnessed.

The Risks of the Game – The Police

Humphreys’ Chapter 5, “The Risks of the Game,” enumerates the hazards participants accept. The theoretical possibility of blackmail exists — if someone recognizes a participant and exploits that knowledge — but it is rarely actualized. Desroches found one instance in his 190-person sample: a man of community prominence was blackmailed by a previous sexual partner, payments were made, and the matter only came to light when the victim was arrested and disclosed it to police.

Park and mall security pose a moderate risk, typically resolved through caution notices and trespass orders rather than arrests. Police represent the severe risk. In Humphreys’ study, officers largely employed low-level harassment strategies — stopping men, demanding identification, recording names — to deter activity through intimidation. Humphreys himself was arrested after refusing to cooperate with police and invoking his civil liberties; his wife was called to retrieve him.

The police investigations in Desroches’ five Ontario communities were considerably more thorough. Officers obtained legal authorizations, conducted covert physical observations or video surveillance, and charged 190 men. In four of the five communities the names of those convicted were published in local newspapers. The consequences were devastating: marriages ended, jobs were lost, some men attempted suicide, and one — in St. Catharines — succeeded. He had kissed his wife and children goodbye before setting himself alight in his car, hours after being charged. His wife had had no idea of his activities; neighbours described him as a model citizen. The harm extended well beyond the individual men to their families.

Desroches argues that the police’s use of what he terms the crime control model — treat it as a crime, investigate, charge, convict — while legally effective (188 of 190 men were convicted) produced no lasting deterrence. Tearoom activity typically resumed within six months, either at the same location or nearby. A more humane and likely equally effective approach, he argues, is the order maintenance model: caution men, record their names, and warn them that a second offence will result in charges. Stratford police used this model in a later incident involving thirty-odd men, none of whom had their names published or received criminal records. Specific deterrence was achieved at far lower social cost.

Risks – Toughs and Venereal Disease

shadow of a person against a bathroom stall

Humphreys describes gang harassment by young toughs as a meaningful risk, culminating in the incident described earlier, in which three men inside a park washroom had to barricade themselves while teenagers threw bottles and stones for roughly half an hour. No injuries resulted, but the episode was genuinely frightening. In Desroches’ Ontario sample, no comparable incident was recorded, suggesting this risk is more characteristic of certain American urban environments than of Canadian communities.

On venereal disease, Humphreys is somewhat dismissive. He notes that fellatio carries lower transmission risk than anal intercourse, and that anal sex is uncommon in tearooms — a finding Desroches’ police data confirm, with only two instances of anal sex observed in the entire sample. One of the two men involved was subsequently found to be carrying syphilis and had infected a partner. Research since Humphreys’ time has established, however, that HIV and other sexually transmitted infections can be transmitted orally, and that the risk, while lower than for anal sex, is not negligible.

Humphreys’ overarching conclusion in this chapter is that tearoom sex is essentially victimless crime: the participants put themselves at risk of arrest and disease, but straight people are not coerced, children are not involved, and the only serious harm that befalls participants comes not from the act itself but from the consequences of police enforcement — the devastation of their families, careers, and reputations that follows arrest and publication of their names.

Key Concepts: Silence and gestures in tearoom encounters — the silence norm; tentative, ambiguous non-verbal signalling Straights, teenagers, and agents of social control — respective roles and relationships Insertee and insertor roles and the aging crisis — fellatio is not reciprocated; older men tend toward the insertee role Coping with intrusions — stopping action, dissociating, observing, waiting out straight visitors The risks of the game — blackmail (rare), toughs (more common in U.S.), park/mall security, police (principal threat), venereal disease

Multimedia: In 1998, pop star George Michael was arrested in a Beverly Hills park washroom by an undercover officer and charged with engaging in a lewd act. Rather than issue a quiet denial, Michael publicly came out as gay and responded with the music video Outside, which lampoons the police sting with cheerful irreverence. The video functions as a real-world illustration of tearoom risk, celebrity exposure, and the broader social debate about policing consensual adult behaviour in public settings.

*George Michael — "Outside" (1998)*

Module 12: A Typology of Tearoom Participants

Objectives: By the end of this module you should be able to discuss Humphreys’ research strategy for the “People Next Door” chapter, critically analyze his typology of tearoom participants, explain the concept of dependent and independent occupational status, and outline the characteristics of trade, closet queens, bisexuals, and gay participants in relation to the insertee/insertor role distinction.

Reading: Tearoom Trade, Ch. 2 (pp. 41–44) and Ch. 6 (pp. 104–130).

The People Next Door

Chapter 6 of Tearoom Trade, “The People Next Door,” reports on Humphreys’ most ethically controversial data: the fifty home interviews he conducted with men identified through their licence plate numbers. From his observational sample he compiled a list of one hundred men, reduced through attrition and refusals (thirteen men refused outright, others dropped out) to a final sample of fifty. He disguised himself, enlisted a graduate student to assist, and attached his own questions to a legitimate community health survey being conducted by a local research centre with which he had a professional connection. None of the men appeared to recognize him from the tearoom. To further ethical criticism, Humphreys went to great lengths to protect their identities in his published work, but the act of entering their homes under false pretences and gathering intimate biographical data remains the element of his study most widely condemned.

To generate comparative data, Humphreys took a further fifty cases from the health study itself — men with no tearoom involvement — as a control group. Both groups were interviewed about family background, occupation, marital and health status, religious beliefs, social history, and values, allowing him to describe tearoom participants in a full sociological profile.

The central finding of this chapter is startling in its ordinariness: fifty-four percent of his tearoom sample were married and living with their wives at the time of the study, and another eight percent were separated or divorced, meaning roughly sixty-two percent had been living a heterosexual domestic life. Desroches’ police data showed an almost identical figure: 58.4 percent currently married, 6.3 percent separated or divorced, and 3.15 percent common-law — totalling nearly sixty-eight percent with heterosexual domestic experience. There was no evidence that these men were unhappily marginal figures; most of them valued their families and sought to protect them, and their wives had no inkling of the tearoom activity, as the shock of arrest in Desroches’ communities confirmed. Humphreys argues that most of these married men pursued tearoom sex not out of exclusive homosexual orientation but as a fast, anonymous, and emotionally uncomplicated alternative outlet — “less lonely than masturbation and less involving than a love relationship,” as he wrote on page 115.

Humphreys’ Typology of Tearoom Participants – The Trade

To make analytical sense of his diverse sample, Humphreys constructed a typology based on two variables: marital status and occupational status, each classified as dependent or independent. A person in a dependent marital position has a spouse and family to whom they are accountable, and everything to lose if exposed. A person with a dependent occupation works in a job where moral turpitude — serious violation of community moral standards — can be grounds for dismissal. Teachers, police officers, bank managers, clergy, and community college administrators all fall into this category; self-employed individuals and those in secure independent careers do not.

The first and numerically largest type is Type I, the Trade: married men with dependent occupations. Desroches notes that Humphreys estimated the Trade at approximately fifty-four percent of his sample — making them the dominant category. They face the highest combined risk of exposure: both the family and the career can be destroyed. The Trade tend to be slightly lower in socioeconomic status and educational level than the other types, and they present as masculine and conventionally heterosexual in appearance and self-concept.

Humphreys’ portrait of the Trade is one of quiet desperation. He describes men in stagnant marriages, with little or no sexual intimacy with their wives, few friends, and an air of loneliness and isolation. On page 115 he concludes that they do not seek homosexual contact as such — they want orgasm-producing physical contact that is quicker and less fraught with complication than either masturbation or an affair. On page 116 he writes movingly: “It is difficult to interview the trade without becoming depressed over the hopelessness of their situation. They are almost uniformly lonely and isolated… en route from the din of factories to the clamor of children, they slip off their freeways for a few moments of impersonal sex in a toilet stall.” Many are devoutly religious — disproportionately Roman Catholic in Humphreys’ sample — which discourages divorce, binds them to marriages that offer them little, and intensifies the guilt surrounding their tearoom activities. Two-thirds of them play the insertor role exclusively, and they resist the insertee role precisely because allowing another man to fellate them is, in their self-understanding, categorically different from performing fellatio themselves: the former does not compromise their heterosexual identity; the latter would.

The Ambisexuals

Type II in Humphreys’ scheme is the Ambisexuals — in contemporary usage, bisexuals. These are men who are typically married but hold independent occupations, so they are vulnerable to losing their marriage if exposed but not their employment. Unlike the Trade, they swing both ways with equanimity. They are more liberal and experimental in their attitudes to sex, have fewer inhibitions, and find it far easier to discuss their sexual behaviour with a researcher. They often have friends with similar proclivities and sometimes maintain connections within the gay community. Three-quarters of them, in Humphreys’ data, will play the insertee role — they do not need to protect a heterosexual self-concept, because they do not claim exclusive heterosexuality.

An important feature of this group that Humphreys somewhat underplays is the risk they pose to their wives. Bisexuals in Humphreys’ sample were sexually active with a range of partners, including anal sex with male partners, which carries a significant transmission risk for HIV and other STIs. Their wives — unaware of their activities — are exposed to this risk. Unlike the Trade, bisexual participants report satisfying marital sex lives; tearoom activity for them is augmentation rather than substitution. They are not fleeing unhappy marriages. They are simply expressing a sexual orientation that includes attraction to both sexes, and they exploit the anonymity of tearooms to do so while maintaining a publicly conventional family life.

Gay Participants in Tearoom Sex

Type III is the Gay participant: unmarried men with independent occupations who identify openly as homosexual and participate in the gay community. They have the least to lose from exposure. They are not concealing a heterosexual identity, and their careers are not contingent on conventional sexual respectability. They will play either role in tearoom sex without concern.

Paradoxically, openly gay men constitute the smallest proportion of tearoom participants — only fourteen percent in Humphreys’ sample — for reasons rooted in the values of the gay community itself. The gay civil rights movement has long advocated for open, dignified, and accepted homosexual life, and in that context tearoom sex — anonymous, furtive, occurring in a public washroom with strangers — is widely regarded as degrading. The ideals of the gay community mirror those of the broader culture in valuing intimate personal relationships over impersonal promiscuity. Gay men who frequent tearooms typically conceal this from their social circle and, if partnered, from their boyfriend, for the same reason that heterosexual men conceal their activities from their wives. Gay men also have many legitimate alternatives — bars, bathhouses, social networks — and have less need to resort to tearooms as a sexual outlet.

Closet Queens

Type IV, the Closet Queens, are men whose sexual orientation is homosexual but who conceal this fact and remain outside the gay community. They are typically single, which distinguishes them from the Trade, but many hold dependent occupations and therefore fear job loss if exposed. They recognize their homosexuality but experience profound shame about it, often rooted in religious upbringing. Their social isolation is acute: not part of a heterosexual domestic world, and not part of a gay social network, they lack the normative constraints of either. Humphreys describes them as lone wolves — operating without the guidance of community norms in either direction, which increases the risk of predatory or self-destructive behaviour. He suggests they tend to pursue younger sexual partners, which creates legal risk on top of the risk of the tearoom encounter itself.

The term closet queen carries a negative connotation within the gay community, reflecting the view that remaining closeted both harms the individual and contributes to the stigma attached to homosexuality generally. Closet queens are very cautious in their tearoom activity, very furtive, and they engage in some of the riskiest behaviour in the taxonomy.

Key Concepts: The people next door — Humphreys’ covert home interview methodology; ~62–68% of participants are or have been married in both studies Marital and occupational status — the two axes of Humphreys’ typology; dependent vs. independent in each Trade and closet queens — married/dependent and single/dependent respectively; both present images of super-propriety Gays and bisexuals — least and second-least constrained by identity protection concerns Insertee versus insertor roles — trade strongly prefer insertor; bisexuals and gays willing to take either role Moral turpitude — the grounds on which dependent-occupation employees can be dismissed for sexual deviance

Module 13: The Breastplate of Righteousness

Objectives: By the end of this module you should be able to explain and analyze what Humphreys means by the breastplate of righteousness, compare Humphreys’ and Desroches’ findings on this phenomenon, critique Humphreys’ protection hypothesis, and explain and critically assess the reaction formation hypothesis, the self-validation hypothesis, and the cause-or-effect hypothesis.

Reading: Tearoom Trade, Ch. 7 (pp. 131–148); “Tearoom Trade: A Research Update,” Qualitative Sociology, pp. 49–51.

The Breastplate of Righteousness

Chapter 7 of Tearoom Trade describes one of the most striking and sociologically important findings in Humphreys’ study. Men who engage in tearoom sex — particularly the covert deviants: the Trade and the Closet Queens — present themselves to the outside world in a strikingly uniform way. They cultivate an image of super-propriety: conservative in dress, neat in appearance, religious in practice, and scrupulous in the performance of social roles as husband, father, neighbour, employee, and citizen. This presentation is what Humphreys called the breastplate of righteousness, borrowing the biblical metaphor of armour that deflects attack. On page 135 he writes: “In donning the breastplate of righteousness, the covert deviant assumes a protective shield of super-propriety… His whole lifestyle becomes an incarnation of what is proper and orthodox. In manners, in taste, religion and art, he strives to compensate for an otherwise low resistance to the shock of exposure.”

The physical markers are specific and consistent: late-model, clean, polished vehicles; well-tailored conservative suits; impeccable grooming; immaculately maintained homes. The attitudinal markers are equally distinctive: religious participation, often in authoritarian denominations (Humphreys counted eighteen Roman Catholics among his Trade and Closet Queen subjects), pro-police attitudes, and what he described as strong conservatism. These men are not merely conventional — they are conspicuously, almost theatrically, proper.

Humphreys interprets this as a sub-strategy of concealment, a form of misdirection that draws public attention toward respectability and away from the washroom encounters. He uses the term refulgence — almost blinding brightness of polish — to capture the quality of the image these men project.

The Breastplate of Righteousness – Desroches’ Study

When Desroches described Humphreys’ finding to the fifteen detectives he interviewed, they responded with unanimous agreement. Men in these communities presented exactly as Humphreys described: well-dressed in suits and ties, conservatively groomed, with neat homes and late-model cars. Police files containing photographs of participants entering and leaving the washrooms visually confirmed the pattern. The detectives’ assessments are admittedly impressionistic, not rigorous data, but the unanimity of professional observers who had met these men, reviewed their circumstances, and in some cases sat with them through emotional crises carries evidential weight.

One case stands as a powerful illustration. A 42-year-old sales manager from St. Catharines — who died before trial and was therefore not counted among the 190 in Desroches’ sample — was reported in a newspaper article as “normal in every sense of the word”: a dedicated family man married fifteen years, active in his church, a Sunday school teacher, a children’s soccer coach, a man who flew the Canadian flag on public holidays. He was arrested for gross indecency connected to washroom activity in a local shopping mall. Hours later, he drove to a nearby village, doused himself in gasoline, and flicked a lighter. The newspaper described him as “a model citizen who was a victim of his secret life.” His breastplate, once shattered, had nothing beneath it but exposure and unbearable shame.

The Protection Hypothesis – Humphreys

Humphreys’ explanation for the breastplate is the protection hypothesis: these men cultivate super-propriety strategically, as a shield against suspicion, to protect themselves from exposure of their deviant activities. Desroches offers two fundamental criticisms of this account.

First, the breastplate does not actually protect anyone from police surveillance. Police who investigate tearooms do not select targets based on whether a man attends church or has a well-kept lawn. They put cameras in washrooms and catch people in the act. The respectable presentation makes no practical difference to the likelihood of arrest. The protective function that Humphreys attributes to the breastplate simply does not operate in the world as described.

Second, and perhaps more damaging, when exposure does occur, the breastplate actively intensifies the harm. These men have climbed to a higher moral pedestal than the average person, which means they fall further and harder. People who believed in their respectability feel conned; betrayed trust generates hostility rather than sympathy. Community reaction to tearoom arrests in Desroches’ sample was in many cases more venomous than it might have been toward a more ordinary person, precisely because of the piety and conventional virtue these men had spent years projecting. If the breastplate was a protection strategy, it had the opposite effect when it failed.

The Reaction Formation Hypothesis – Desroches

Desroches’ first alternative explanation is borrowed from psychology: reaction formation. This is the clinical concept of an exaggerated, expressive, and not wholly rational response to internal stress. The hypothesis holds that tearoom participants develop super-propriety as an emotional response to the guilt and anxiety produced by their deviant activities — not as a rational strategy for external consumption, but as an internal, personal coping mechanism.

In this reading, the breastplate is a form of emotional catharsis: by acting proper, conservative, and righteous in daily life, these men symbolically cleanse themselves of the moral stain accumulated in the tearoom. The good that they perform — exemplary fatherhood, community service, church attendance — does not erase or justify the bad, but it provides psychological compensation, a way of living with the dissonance between private behaviour and public identity. Crucially, this hypothesis reverses the direction of Humphreys’ account: rather than performing for an external audience in order to deceive, the men are performing for themselves in order to cope.

The Self-Validation Hypothesis – Desroches

The second alternative is the self-validation hypothesis, which is closely related to reaction formation but emphasizes a slightly different dynamic. Where reaction formation stresses catharsis from guilt, self-validation stresses the defence of self-concept. These men know that what they do would be seen by others — and perhaps by themselves — as degrading and shameful. The breastplate is a way of asserting, to themselves as much as to anyone else: I am really a good person. The conservatism, the religion, the impeccable fatherhood, are not a mask so much as a parallel identity, one they sincerely inhabit. By investing deeply in that identity — by becoming genuinely good husbands, genuinely involved parents, genuinely devout churchgoers — they can compartmentalize the tearoom activity as a segment of life that does not define them. The tearoom self is bracketed; the respectable self is the real one. This is how they are able to continue visiting tearooms for years, sometimes decades, without chronic psychological breakdown. The breastplate makes sustainable what would otherwise be untenable.

Hypothesis #4: Cause or Effect? – Desroches

two people in bed, one sleeping one troubled

The fourth hypothesis challenges an assumption shared by all three preceding accounts: that tearoom behaviour comes first, and the conservative lifestyle follows as a response. Desroches argues this temporal sequence is implausible. Religious conviction, conservative values, and morally exacting lifestyles are not typically acquired in adulthood in response to guilt about sexual deviance. They are products of socialization — absorbed in childhood and adolescence from families, churches, and communities. The men in both studies are middle-aged, typically in their forties when arrested. Their religious commitments and conservative lifestyles long predate their involvement in tearoom sex.

The cause-or-effect hypothesis inverts the causal arrow: the conservative lifestyle does not follow tearoom behaviour; it precedes and may even contribute to it. Men raised in sexually repressive environments — with rigid religious constraints on sexual expression, wives who share those constraints and who provide little sexual intimacy in the marriage — may develop deviant sexual expressions as an outlet for drives that have been denied, distorted, or redirected. Studies of sexuality suggest that repressive upbringings can correlate with unconventional and sometimes deviant sexual interests. Humphreys himself noted on page 137 that Roman Catholics and Episcopalians — both demanding, tradition-bound denominations — were disproportionately represented in his sample. Their religious commitment came first.

All four hypotheses may carry partial validity. Desroches regards the fourth as the most logically compelling, but concedes that interview-based research would be needed to test any of them rigorously. It is plausible that a man raised in a sexually repressive home, who engaged in tearoom sex over many years, would exhibit reaction formation, self-validation, and possibly even the (ineffective) protection strategy simultaneously — while also having been conservative and religious before he ever set foot in a tearoom.

Key Concepts: The breastplate of righteousness — an image of super-propriety cultivated by covert deviants (Trade and Closet Queens) Trade and closet queens and super-propriety — religious practice, conservative dress, impeccable home life; confirmed by Desroches’ detectives The protection hypothesis (Humphreys) — breastplate as external misdirection; critiqued as neither effective nor logically consistent The reaction formation hypothesis (Desroches) — breastplate as internal catharsis; emotional compensation for guilt The self-validation hypothesis (Desroches) — breastplate as defence of self-concept; compartmentalization of deviance The cause-or-effect hypothesis (Desroches) — conservative lifestyle precedes and may cause tearoom involvement; religiosity is primary, not reactive

Module 14: Desroches’ Research on Tearooms

Objectives: By the end of this module you should be able to compare and contrast the two research methodologies, explain why shopping malls have emerged as the preferred location for tearoom activity, compare the age and occupational profiles of participants in both studies, examine marital status data comparatively, and discuss the range of sexual behaviours Desroches’ police data document.

Reading: “Tearoom Trade: A Research Update,” Qualitative Sociology, pp. 39–49, 52–56, and 59–60; newspaper articles and clippings (Course Reserves).

Desroches’ Study of Tearooms – Data and Research Methodology

Humphreys conducted his observations in a single American city — St. Louis, population approximately two million — over one year (April 1966 to April 1967), observing nineteen washrooms across five parks. Desroches’ study was conducted twenty years later in a different country, drawing on police investigations in five Ontario communities ranging in size from 24,000 (Orillia) to 600,000 (Peel Region). The seven washrooms in his sample were located in a park (Victoria Park, Kitchener), a performing arts venue (the Orillia Opera House), and five shopping mall locations. The sample comprised 190 charged individuals.

Desroches’ data are police-generated: surveillance observations, written case files, and interviews with fifteen investigating detectives. He did not interview any of the arrested men himself. Police files were unexpectedly rich: investigators cross-referenced individual visits, assigned each man a number, and tracked their behaviour across multiple visits (the average man in the surveilled communities attended 2.3 times per week). Notes described sexual acts in detail sufficient to confirm or refute specific hypotheses from Humphreys’ study — including the age-role relationship in fellatio, which Desroches found replicated in his data.

Despite significant differences in time, country, methodology, and urban context, the overall finding was one of remarkable consistency. As Humphreys wrote on page 21, the rules of the game and the profile of the players are applicable to any place; Desroches’ data broadly support this claim. The two notable divergences concern location (mall washrooms having supplanted park washrooms as the primary site) and the absence of a voyeur-lookout role in Desroches’ sample — which, as discussed in Module 10, is explained by the architectural differences between open-doored park facilities and enclosed mall stalls.

Shopping Malls as a Favourite Location for Tearoom Activity

Tearooms are found wherever out-of-the-way washrooms exist: large office buildings, universities (the University of Toronto, York, Guelph, and Queens have all experienced problems), and corporate campuses. But shopping malls have become the dominant location, for several interlocking reasons.

Mall washrooms are typically located in commercially undesirable spaces — basements, far ends of corridors — that the owners cannot profitably rent to retailers. This makes them remote from pedestrian traffic, so that the great majority of men who use them are there for sexual purposes: police estimated 85 to 90 percent in the surveilled Peel facilities. Women’s washrooms in the same locations were essentially unused. This near-exclusive occupancy by participants substantially reduces the risk of accidental discovery by straights.

Malls have also multiplied dramatically since Humphreys’ era, providing more sites, more washrooms, and more anonymity. They are open year-round in climate-controlled environments, unlike park washrooms in Canada that close through winter. Men visiting malls are less conspicuous than men visiting park washrooms: hundreds of vehicles in a mall parking lot present no identifying pattern, whereas two or three cars parked near a remote park facility for an extended period is a recognized indicator. Humphreys himself noted on page 7 that if two or more cars remain in front of a relatively isolated park washroom for more than ten minutes, homosexual activity inside may reasonably be inferred. In a mall that inference cannot be drawn.

Mall security also operates under different constraints than police. Security guards typically resolve tearoom problems with trespass notices rather than arrests, and — crucially — mall owners are reluctant to invite police onto private property for fear of negative publicity. In three of Desroches’ five communities, police required the active cooperation of property owners; one community’s mall owners refused, limiting the investigation. This relative tolerance makes malls safer for participants than parks, where public-land jurisdiction presents fewer obstacles to police action.

The convenience of mall access also matters motivationally. One man in Desroches’ sample accompanied his wife to the mall every Saturday, excused himself for twenty minutes, had a sexual encounter, and rejoined her shopping. No suspicion was raised. Another man in Oakville pulled off a major highway on the way between cities, attracted to a specific location partly because of the Hudson’s Bay “Meet me at The Bay” advertisement.

Desroches’ Study – Age and Occupation

a person on a cell phone, another blurry in background

The age range of participants in Desroches’ sample ran from 14 to 68, with a mean of 41 years — approximately seven years older than the mean of 34 found in Humphreys’ study. Both studies point toward middle age as the typical profile of the tearoom participant. The three teenagers in Desroches’ sample (ages 14 and 17) were observed with each other, not with adults; in both studies, no instances were found of adults engaging in sexual activity with minors, confirming that the rule against involvement of children held.

The occupational range in Desroches’ sample was strikingly diverse. Among the 190 men, occupations included elementary and secondary school teachers, a principal, community college administrators, a police officer, two ministers and a seminarian, a funeral director, a midget professional wrestler, Revenue Canada tax auditors, accountants, a medical doctor, a pharmacist, nurses, a commercial artist, bank managers, a soldier, hairdressers, a customs official, a letter carrier, a hotel manager, real estate salesmen, a firefighter, and numerous salesmen, labourers, and self-employed tradespeople. Humphreys concluded on page 129 that tearoom participants are “of no one type”; Desroches’ list emphatically bears this out. The only discernible pattern is that participants are overwhelmingly from working-class, lower-middle-class, or middle-class backgrounds — which is to say, representative of the general population.

Desroches’ Study – Marital Status

Table 3 of “Tearoom Trade: A Research Update” presents the marital status breakdown of Desroches’ 190-person sample: 58.4 percent married, 6.3 percent separated or divorced, 3.15 percent common-law — approximately 68 percent with current or recent heterosexual domestic experience. This closely mirrors Humphreys’ finding of 62 percent. In both studies, wives were unaware of their husbands’ activities; the arrest and publication of names came as a shock to spouses and families.

In interviews after arrest, the vast majority of married men in Desroches’ sample denied being gay or bisexual. Many offered the same rationalization: I never gave anyone a blowjob. By maintaining the insertor role only, these men were able to preserve, in their own minds, a heterosexual identity. Police who suggested otherwise were met with indignation. Most participants appeared to fall squarely into Humphreys’ Trade category: married with dependent occupations, masculine in presentation, and largely heterosexual in self-concept.

About ninety percent of men in the sample were arrested in their home community; most used washrooms they had likely frequented for years. A handful had been caught in previous investigations and had since driven to more distant washrooms — one man from Kitchener arrested in Orillia, one Toronto man also arrested in Orillia — in the mistaken belief that travelling beyond their home region reduced risk. Case synopses from police files illustrate the range of human situations: a 35-year-old insurance salesman nicknamed “Roger the Dodger” by surveillance officers who observed him on fourteen separate occasions and spent up to five hours daily in the washroom; a 68-year-old retired man on the old-timers hockey team; a 49-year-old bank manager who had received a caution in a previous arrest and continued; a nurse whose name in the paper led to his three children being physically attacked by classmates until his wife left with them. These are not stereotypes. They are ordinary community members, and in most cases their arrest was the first encounter any of them had ever had with the law.

Sexual Behaviour in the Washrooms – Desroches’ Findings

Police observations across Desroches’ five communities demonstrate that the physical architecture of a washroom determines the form sexual encounters take — a finding with no parallel in Humphreys’ study, which observed only open-doored park washrooms.

In Community 1 (Victoria Park, Kitchener), urinals were positioned behind a partition and could not be seen from the entrance. Activity began at the urinal — lingering, eye contact, one man fondling himself until erection, the other reaching over — and fellatio or mutual masturbation followed. A squeaky door served as an intrusion warning, prompting immediate disengagement.

In Communities 2 and 4 (Orillia and Oakville), the operative feature was a glory hole: a fist-sized opening punched through the metal stall partition at waist height, through which occupants could view each other and initiate contact. Sex play began with casual masturbation visible through the opening, followed by finger beckoning, notes passed on toilet paper (explicit, police-seized invitations), and ultimately the extension of a penis through the hole for manual stimulation or fellatio.

In Community 3 (Peel Region), stalls had partitions that did not extend fully to the floor. Foot-tapping and foot-sliding beneath the partition were the primary signals. Men brought hand mirrors to peer into adjacent stalls. Notes were exchanged by slipping paper under the partition. Sexual contact — usually mutual masturbation or fellatio — occurred beneath the partition without either man leaving his stall, and without the two men ever seeing each other’s faces. One community saw men standing in paper grocery bags during encounters to disguise two sets of feet beneath a stall from casual observers — an evasive tactic that presupposes considerable experience.

In Community 5 (St. Catharines), the end stall opened toward the urinals, making it possible for a man sitting there to open his door and beckon a man at the urinal directly into the stall — exactly the configuration Humphreys described as the most common in his park washrooms.

Across all five communities, the insertor departed first, the insertee departed later (sometimes remaining for multiple encounters), and men rarely saw each other’s faces or spoke. The police also observed voyeurs, group masturbation (including circle formations of four or five men), and serial fellatio — one insertee serving several insertors in sequence. Anal sex was observed only twice across the entire sample. Encounters typically lasted no more than twenty minutes. Some men were highly selective — entering and leaving many times in a day without connecting with anyone; others had sex with whoever was willing.

Humphreys’ Study and Desroches’ Study – An Overview

The overall verdict of the comparative analysis is one of consistency across time, geography, and methodology. The following patterns held in both studies: participants communicate through non-verbal gestures and rarely speak; they do not associate outside the tearoom; they do not exchange biographical information; no force or coercion is used; children and teenagers are not approached; roughly two-thirds are married or recently married; men depart separately; sex acts occur out of direct line of sight from the entrance; participants do not undress; anal sex is uncommon; contact is broken when someone enters; straight men are rarely approached; fellatio is not reciprocated and the fellator is typically the older partner; men in both samples are neat in appearance and maintain a breastplate of righteousness in their public lives; many engage in repeated and serial encounters; and encounters are brief, typically under twenty minutes.

The two significant divergences — location (malls have supplanted parks) and the absence of the watchqueen role in mall settings — are both explicable through the physical characteristics of the respective environments rather than any fundamental change in the behaviour itself.

Key Concepts: Police-generated data — Desroches’ methodology; 15 detective interviews and detailed case files across 7 washrooms Shopping mall locations — architectural and social reasons malls have replaced parks as primary tearoom sites Age and occupational status — mean age 41 (Desroches) vs. 34 (Humphreys); broad occupational spectrum with no clear patterns Marital status — ~68% in Desroches vs. ~62% in Humphreys had heterosexual domestic experience Sexual behaviour — shaped by washroom architecture; fellatio dominant and non-reciprocal; anal sex rare Comparative overview — remarkable consistency across time, country, and methodology

Module 15: The Motivation to Tearoom Sex

Objectives: By the end of this module you should be able to differentiate between motivational components, primary motivation, and secondary motivation in tearoom sex; explain why bisexuals and closet queens frequent tearooms; explain how heterosexual participants protect their self-concept; explain why relatively few gay men participate; explain why men do not choose affairs or prostitutes instead; and critically analyze why participants are not deterred given what they stand to lose.

Reading: Tearoom Trade, Ch. 8 (pp. 149–166); “Tearoom Trade: A Research Update,” Qualitative Sociology, pp. 56–59.

The Motivation to Tearoom Sex

a doctor drinking coffee and looking at their phone

Understanding why men engage in tearoom sex requires moving beyond a single primary motivation — sexual gratification — to a set of motivational components, each of which adds explanatory depth. This framework parallels the analysis of bank robbery motivation: the primary motivation for bank robbery is money, just as the primary motivation for tearoom sex is sex, but simply identifying the goal explains nothing about why people choose this particular path to it. Most people want money but do not rob banks; most people want sex but do not go to washrooms for it. The motivational components are what distinguish the person who does from the person who does not.

The motivational analysis must also differentiate by sexual orientation. For men who are gay or bisexual, the basic attraction to other men makes the gateway question relatively tractable: they find men sexually desirable, and tearooms offer an accessible route to anonymous sex with men. The harder question — for them — is why they choose tearooms rather than the gay community. For a gay man who is a closet queen, the answer is that he wants to keep his orientation secret: from his parents, from his community, from his colleagues. Tearooms permit him to satisfy his sexual needs without coming out. A twenty-four-year-old in Desroches’ sample drove two hundred miles round-trip from Toronto to Orillia for tearoom encounters. When arrested, he wept and told police he had known he was gay since childhood, had never been in a gay bar, had no boyfriend, and would never marry — and that his overwhelming motivation for secrecy was protecting his mother from devastation. Tearooms were his only sexual outlet that did not require disclosure.

For gay men who are out and part of the gay community, tearooms are somewhat marginal for the reasons discussed in Module 12: the gay community looks down on the behaviour, it is available mainly as a clandestine outlet for men who want to cheat on partners without the visibility risk of gay bars, and it is in competition with more socially normalized alternatives. Gay men who use tearooms are typically hiding this fact from their partners.

For heterosexual men, the motivational problem is more complex. They do not find other men sexually attractive, and allowing themselves to be used sexually by another man is a direct threat to their self-concept as heterosexuals. The psychological mechanism that enables this is the consistent refusal of the insertee role. As discussed in Module 11, these men draw a categorical line between being fellated (which they do not construe as homosexual behaviour on their part) and performing fellatio (which they do). The police in Desroches’ sample encountered this rationalization repeatedly: men accused of tearoom involvement who indignantly replied, “I’m not gay. I never gave anyone a blowjob.” The impersonality of the encounter reinforces this cognitive protection: no undressing, no voice, no face, no name, sometimes not even the sight of the other man — the encounter can be conducted through a glory hole or under a stall partition with no visual or personal contact whatsoever.

Motivation Continued

two people in bed, one wears robe and looks unimpressed

A second motivational component draws on Merton’s anomie theory: if the culturally approved goal (sex) cannot be obtained through legitimate means, illegitimate means will be pursued. For some participants, conventional sexual access is genuinely unavailable. One man in Desroches’ sample — a midget professional wrestler — told police plainly: “I go there for the sex, because I can’t get it anywhere else. Who would want to screw me?” He claimed to be heterosexual but felt unable to attract women. For many in the Trade, the anomie is less extreme but structurally similar: marriages that have become emotionally and sexually empty, wives who are devout and sexually conservative, no realistic prospect of a heterosexual alternative. Humphreys writes that “men engaged in tearoom sex have sad marriages woefully lacking in affect and physical pleasure,” and that for this group tearoom sex fulfils a need that the conjugal relationship does not meet.

Anomie theory does not fully account for all participants, however. The police in Desroches’ sample identified men who reported excellent marriages and satisfying sex lives yet still frequented tearooms — including a man who visited the Victoria Park washroom while his children played in the park nearby, and who, when asked why he did it, replied: “I don’t think of it afterwards. It’s as though it didn’t happen.”

The question of why tearoom sex is preferred over an affair or prostitution adds further motivational components. An affair is not simply a matter of will: it requires opportunity, attraction, and a willing partner — conditions not guaranteed, especially for men in their forties. It also involves entanglement, emotional demand, time, and the distinct possibility of threatening the marriage through discovery. A prostitute costs money; men visiting tearooms averaged 2.3 visits per week. At even a modest cost per sex-work encounter, that frequency would represent substantial expenditure. Tearoom sex is free.

Beyond cost and opportunity, tearoom sex has a cluster of secondary motivational attractions: it is fast (twenty minutes or less, compatible with leaving work early or a husband accompanying a wife to the mall); it is anonymous and non-entangling (no names, no follow-up obligations, no emotional demands); it is perceived as relatively safe (no complainant, no victim, the activity largely invisible to the public); it offers variety of partners (a different person each visit, with the aphrodisiac effect Humphreys identifies as part of the draw); and the game itself — the non-verbal signalling, the gradual escalation, the risk — is part of the erotic experience. Risk does not merely deter; for some men, it stimulates.

A Question of Deterrence

Given all this, a final analytical question remains: why are tearoom participants not deterred by the magnitude of what they risk? Arrest and name publication, as the case synopses in Module 14 illustrate, can annihilate everything a man has built — marriage, career, reputation, the respect of children, financial security. These are not trivial stakes. Yet men returned to tearooms twice or more per week, year after year, in some cases for decades.

Most participants in Desroches’ surveilled communities were not surveillance-conscious. They entered washrooms that had camera equipment installed without looking for it, behaved without any sign of wariness, and were arrested. The exception was St. Catharines, where a nearby washroom had been busted a few weeks earlier and received media coverage. Men in that community looked around for cameras — but still came. Even men who knew there had been recent arrests in their community were undeterred. They underestimated police capabilities: they understood that a police officer walking in on them would be a risk, but apparently did not appreciate that miniature cameras could be installed in walls or ceilings, or that video evidence would be legally admissible.

Desroches offers several explanatory hypotheses. The first is that long-term participants develop a false sense of security through years of unremarked activity. If nothing has happened in ten years of regular visits, the inference that nothing will happen becomes compelling, even if logically unwarranted. Three of the five communities in Desroches’ study had never had a tearoom investigation before; the men there had no reason to expect one.

A second hypothesis is that many of these men engage in the same psychological process documented among shoplifters: they simply do not think about the consequences of getting caught. Studies of ordinarily law-abiding people who shoplift show that they are genuinely mortified on arrest — not because they accepted the risk and lost, but because they had never seriously contemplated the scenario. The same dissociation from consequences appears to operate here.

A third, more limited hypothesis is that a small number of men are naively unaware that their behaviour is criminal. A few voyeurs and solo masturbators in Desroches’ sample were arrested and expressed genuine surprise; one said, “I didn’t know it was against the law to pull your own wire.” The criminal element, in their case, was the public nature of the act — an element some may not have understood.

Desroches closes his tearoom analysis with a summary observation: the data from five Ontario communities, taken from police-generated sources twenty years after and in a different country from Humphreys’ work, largely substantiate his classic portrait. The behaviour of tearoom participants “reveals remarkable consistency over time, from community to community, across national boundaries. Many men in our communities, the majority of them married and primarily heterosexual, continue to visit out-of-the-way public washrooms in search of fast, impersonal sex. They risk their family, friends, jobs and reputation.” Shopping malls have replaced parks; the watchqueen is absent from enclosed facilities. But the rules, the roles, the participants, and the consequences remain essentially constant.

Key Concepts: Motivational components in tearoom sex — primary motivation (sex) plus a cluster of secondary components: anonymity, cost (free), speed, variety, the game Heterosexual involvement and rationalizations — insertor-role restriction as protection of heterosexual self-concept; impersonality of encounter Tearooms as an alternative sexual outlet for unhappily married men — anomie theory; legitimate means unavailable; affairs and prostitutes are costly or inaccessible The threat of mall/park security as a deterrent — mild; trespass notices rather than arrest The threat of police arrest as a deterrent — severe in outcome but insufficient in perceived likelihood; false sense of security; failure to contemplate consequences; underestimation of police capability The consequences of arrest — loss of family, employment, reputation, and in some cases, life

Module 16: The Nature of Drug Trafficking and Research Methodology

Objectives: By the end of this module you should be able to explain what drug trafficking is and how it is structured, critically discuss the social effects of drug prohibition, distinguish between retail and higher-level trafficking, assess the “crime doesn’t pay” argument and the conditions under which it fails, and evaluate the methodological strengths and limitations of Desroches’ interview-based research.

Reading: The Crime that Pays, Ch. 1, pp. 1–11.

Introduction – Drug Laws and Prohibitions

Almost every modern state maintains criminal prohibitions against certain drugs, even as it permits others — tobacco and alcohol can be purchased legally in Canada, while marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine appear in the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act as prohibited substances. The penalties attached to these prohibitions are typically severe. In some countries — Malaysia, Vietnam, and China among them — trafficking can attract the death penalty, and a disproportionate share of the incarcerated population in both Canada and the United States is there for drug-related offences.

The concept of prohibition draws its most familiar North American reference point from the United States between 1919 and 1932, when a constitutional amendment banned the production and sale of alcohol. The lesson of that period is directly relevant to contemporary drug policy: people continued to drink, supply followed demand, and the criminal syndicates that emerged to fill the void — Al Capone’s organization being the most celebrated example — became wealthy, powerful, and deeply entrenched. The same dynamic operates wherever drugs are criminalized. Because demand for substances such as cocaine, heroin, and cannabis persists regardless of legal status, prohibition does not eliminate the market; it simply drives that market underground, ensuring it is served exclusively by those willing to break the law. Risk inflates price, and price inflates profit, which means that the same prohibition intended to suppress drug use creates the economic conditions for lucrative criminal enterprise.

Enforcing drug laws is inherently difficult because trafficking involves consensual criminal activity — both buyer and seller are willing parties, and there is no complainant, no victim who telephones the police. Unlike robbery, which is brought to the attention of law enforcement almost immediately, drug deals generate no complaint. The police must therefore be proactive rather than reactive, relying on surveillance, electronic wiretaps, video monitoring, and undercover operations — all of which are costly, time-consuming, and, for civil libertarians, deeply troubling. These intrusive investigative tools represent a real cost of prohibition that sits alongside the more obvious costs of mass incarceration and of creating a black market that enriches criminal entrepreneurs.

The Title of the Book – The Crime that Pays

The title of Desroches’ study, The Crime that Pays, is a deliberate rejoinder to a well-established criminological argument. Wilson and Abrahams, writing in 1992, made the case that most criminal activity is motivated by short-term gratification, yields very little money, and carries high risks of apprehension — in short, that crime does not pay. Studies of bank robbery support this view: the average take is modest, arrest is virtually certain over time, and offenders cycle in and out of custody earning little from their efforts. Desroches had reached similar conclusions in his own bank robbery research.

What distinguished higher-level drug trafficking, once Desroches began interviewing those incarcerated for it, was that the financial logic was almost entirely reversed. The men in his sample were, in most cases, millionaires. They had operated for years — the average was five to eight years — accumulating substantial wealth before they were eventually arrested. A telling illustration comes from an RCMP money-exchange sting operation in Montreal that was able to identify 25 criminal organizations dealing in illicit drugs. The RCMP had resources sufficient to investigate only two of them, leaving the other 23 to continue operating unimpeded. This is not an anomaly. Major drug investigations require years of work and millions of dollars, meaning that smaller syndicates, non-violent groups, and crews that maintain a low profile will often never be investigated at all.

The argument that higher-level trafficking pays is further reinforced by sentencing outcomes. Most of the men Desroches interviewed were classified as non-violent first-time federal offenders, which made them eligible for accelerated parole — release after serving just one-sixth of their sentence. Average sentences ran to seven years, with the minimum being two years. These are not outcomes that generate effective deterrence for men who have been earning hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, tax-free, for most of a decade.

The Nature of Drug Trafficking

Drug trafficking operates as a hierarchical distribution system. Drugs enter the chain through importers, manufacturers (in the case of synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine), or cultivators (marijuana), and then pass downward through successive layers of wholesalers and middlemen until they reach retail dealers, who sell directly to users. Each link in this chain purchases from a supplier or source above them and sells to distributors below them. Along the way, the product may be broken into smaller quantities and, at the lower levels, sometimes diluted or cut to extend volume.

For the purposes of Desroches’ study, a higher-level drug trafficker is anyone who operates above the retail level — an importer, grower, manufacturer, or wholesaler who markets large quantities of drugs to other dealers rather than to end users. Retailers, sometimes called street-level dealers, pushers, or lower-level dealers, are those who sell directly to consumers. The distinction is not entirely clean in practice — some individuals who are primarily wholesalers maintain a handful of retail clients — but it provides a workable analytic boundary.

Dealers at all levels work within social networks. A trafficker typically has a supplier above them, a small number of distributors below them, and a handful of people who assist with operations. These groups are variously called crews, syndicates, or families, and they are generally quite small. Members tend to know one another well — through prior friendships, shared ethnic backgrounds, or kinship — a point that becomes important when explaining both how trust is established and why certain ethnic communities are over-represented in particular drug markets.

Retail Drug Trafficking

aerial shot of two people exchanging drugs and money

The majority of criminological research on drug dealing has examined the retail level, and the picture that emerges differs substantially from the popular stereotype of the ruthless, predatory drug pusher. Research consistently shows that retail dealers are not part of any large organization and are not employed or controlled by higher-level operators. They are, instead, small independent entrepreneurs who buy drugs from whoever will sell to them and resell to a limited personal clientele — typically friends and acquaintances.

The pusher myth portrays the street-level dealer as someone who actively recruits new users, particularly children, through a predatory strategy of supply. Research does not support this. Drugs are not pushed; they are sold to willing consumers who often actively seek them out. Most retail dealers are drug users themselves, and they drift into selling as a way of subsidizing their own consumption. Their profits are modest, and their primary motivation is not wealth but rather offsetting the cost of personal use. The research also finds that most of these dealers maintain some legitimate employment, deal only occasionally, and remain broadly committed to conventional values. They are not career criminals in any meaningful sense of the term.

What does tend to distinguish the small minority who move beyond retail into wholesale is ambition, greed, and a degree of business acumen. In Desroches’ sample, 25 of the 70 higher-level traffickers — approximately 36 percent — had started at the retail level before moving up. These individuals are genuinely atypical; they differ markedly from the average street-level dealer in their motivation and their willingness to commit fully to a life centred on criminal enterprise.

Desroches’ Research Methodology

The research that produced The Crime that Pays was conducted between 1990 and 2002. Desroches interviewed 70 convicted higher-level drug traffickers incarcerated in federal penitentiaries across Canada — in Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, and British Columbia — together with 20 RCMP drug investigators and a number of investigators from other police departments. The 70 offenders belonged to 62 different drug syndicates, with 16 interviews involving two members of the same crew. All of the offenders were men.

Access to RCMP investigators was obtained through a letter to the Commissioner of the RCMP explaining the research, which in turn yielded a letter of authorization that proved invaluable when approaching drug squad branches across the country. This access was historically unusual: in earlier decades the RCMP had been highly secretive, but the expansion of full disclosure requirements in criminal proceedings had rendered secrecy less viable, and investigators proved cooperative, opening their files and remaining available for follow-up questions. One notable exception was an officer at the RCMP College in Ottawa, who refused to participate at all.

Interviews with the incarcerated offenders were conducted within the institutions rather than on tape recorder. Desroches typed notes in real time and filled in gaps immediately afterward — a method he found considerably more efficient than transcription. The use of a laptop and the avoidance of audio recording also helped put subjects at ease. Participation was voluntary, and ten men refused to be interviewed; five of those were motorcycle gang members for whom participation would have required permission from gang leadership, and who in any case are institutionally socialized toward non-cooperation with outsiders.

The men who did participate had several reasons for consenting. The interview was a break from routine — as more than one put it, the alternative was mopping floors. Many recognized the legitimacy of academic research. Others had a stake in telling their story or harboured modest hopes that cooperation might be read favorably at parole. Most important, perhaps, was confidentiality: Desroches’ questions were deliberately general, focusing on process, motivation, and typology rather than on names, dates, specific transactions, or the locations of assets. There was no apparent incentive to lie, and some participants likely underreported their profits — no one volunteered information about offshore accounts.

The police files provided an independent check on accuracy. Because RCMP investigators had extensive documentation on these cases, Desroches was able to triangulate the offenders’ accounts against the police record. The police also supplied information the offenders did not have — particularly about how they had been identified and arrested, since many traffickers had no idea how surveillance or informants had been used against them.

The Sample

The 70 men in the sample were all serving federal sentences — a minimum of two years — and most were housed in minimum security institutions, in contrast to bank robbers, who are classified as violent offenders and typically held in medium or maximum security. The average age was 40. The average sentence was 7 years, with a range of 2 to 17 years. Most charges were for conspiracy (57 percent of the sample), followed by importing (21 percent), trafficking or possession for the purpose of trafficking (14 percent), and manufacturing or cultivation (7 percent). When charged, the average syndicate had 11 co-accused.

Most of the men specialized in a single drug: 41 sold cocaine; 11 heroin; 9 marijuana; 4 methamphetamine; and only 5 dealt in two or more drugs. This specialization reflects the supply chains through which dealers obtain their product — ethnicity and geography tend to shape which substances are accessible and in what form.

Regarding drug use, the sample contradicts the assumption that dealers are motivated by addiction. 52 of the 70 described themselves as non-users; 8 reported recreational use, typically marijuana; and only 10 reported heavy use or addiction. Drug use is generally understood at the higher level to be unprofessional and incompatible with the reliability demanded in a serious drug operation. Those in the sample who were heavy users kept it secret from partners and associates.

Among those who had worked their way up from the street, the retail phase typically lasted two to three years. Once at the wholesale level, the men in the sample had operated for five to eight years on average before their first arrest, and several had been active for ten to fifteen years. One cocaine importer’s career had spanned over three decades.

The most theoretically significant finding from the sample was that the 70 men fell into two clearly distinguishable types. Businessmen dealers (50 of 70, or approximately 71.5 percent) were characterized by law-abiding backgrounds, legitimate employment histories, family ties, and a self-conception centred on business and entrepreneurship. Criminal dealers (20 of 70, or about 28.5 percent) fit the profile of career criminals — early criminal onset, deviant peer networks, lengthy records for violence and property crime, and an essentially criminal self-concept. This typology recurs throughout the remainder of the course and is central to understanding motivation, lifestyle, and behaviour in the drug trade.

Key Concepts: Drug laws and prohibitions: criminal law prohibiting illicit drugs and their enforcement context. The “crime doesn’t pay” argument: most crime yields small returns and high risk; higher-level drug trafficking is a documented exception. The structure and organization of drug dealing networks: hierarchical distribution systems from importer/manufacturer through wholesale and retail to user. Retail drug trafficking: independent entrepreneurs subsidizing personal drug use; the pusher myth refuted. Higher-level drug trafficking: importers and wholesalers who sell exclusively to other dealers; five-to-eight year average careers. Desroches’ research methodology and sample: 70 incarcerated male dealers from 62 syndicates; RCMP triangulation; two dealer typologies (businessmen and criminal).

Module 17: Organized Crime and Higher Level Drug Trafficking

Objectives: By the end of this module you should be able to critically evaluate the Mafia model of organized crime, identify the characteristics used to define organized crime in contemporary scholarship, explain how economic models illuminate drug trafficking, distinguish legitimate from illegitimate business enterprise, compare businessmen and criminal drug trafficker types, analyze the role of race, ethnicity, and kinship in drug networks, and discuss size and composition of higher-level syndicates.

Reading: The Crime that Pays, Ch. 3, pp. 35–51.

The Mafia Model of Organized Crime

The Mafia model is the traditional and, among criminologists, thoroughly discredited conception of organized crime. It portrays organized crime as a centralized, hierarchical, ethnically Italian organization with monopolistic control over criminal enterprises and geographic territories. In this view, the Mafia arose during American Prohibition, uses violence and corruption to protect its interests, and constitutes a systemic threat to public safety and democratic institutions. This picture was popularized by journalists, politicians, and U.S. congressional commissions — the Kefauver Commission in 1951, the McClellan Commission shortly after — and by decades of Hollywood representation.

Academic criminologists regard this depiction as a myth. No credible evidence for a unified, nationally coordinated Italian-American or Italian-Canadian criminal syndicate has ever emerged. What research consistently finds instead is a landscape of organized criminal activity composed of diverse ethnic groups — Sri Lankan, Russian, Puerto Rican, Mexican, French-Canadian, Jamaican, Vietnamese, Italian, and many others — operating in small independent crews rather than as branches of some central authority. The Mafia myth persists partly because arresting Italian-organized criminals generates good press for law enforcement and politicians, but it fundamentally misrepresents what organized crime actually looks like.

Defining Organized Crime

There is no single definition of organized crime that commands universal scholarly agreement, but research has converged on a set of common characteristics. Organized crime involves a criminal conspiracy — people working together to commit crimes. It is profit-driven rather than ideologically or politically motivated, meaning that organized criminals are not terrorists or revolutionaries; they are entrepreneurs in illicit markets. Those markets exist in large part because of prohibition: wherever a legally prohibited or strictly controlled activity generates persistent demand — drugs, unlicensed gambling, commercial sex, smuggled goods — organized criminals will step in to supply it. Because the activity is ongoing and consensual, the customer returns repeatedly, enabling organized criminals to build a trade that resembles a legitimate business in structure and continuity.

Violence is a potential characteristic of organized crime rather than a necessary one; it is always available as an instrument of last resort, particularly where debts cannot be legally enforced. Corruption is similarly potential but unevenly distributed — far more prevalent in developing nations with poorly paid and underinstitutionalized police forces than in Canada or Western Europe. Secrecy is virtually universal: organized criminal groups operate covertly and protect their leadership by insulating senior figures from the most operationally dangerous activities.

Contemporary terminology reflects the analytical shift away from the Mafia model. Scholars now speak of enterprise crime, syndicated crime, or most commonly criminal networks — terms that foreground the connective, market-based character of organized criminal activity. The network concept captures how drugs flow through a chain of linked but partially unknown actors: someone in Canada may be connected to someone in the United States, who is connected to someone in Mexico, who is connected to growers in South America, yet none of these individuals may know anyone more than one or two steps removed from them in the chain. This need-to-know structure limits the damage any single arrest can do to the broader network and makes the enterprise very difficult to dismantle.

The practical implication for law enforcement is significant. Rather than facing a single large target, police confront hundreds of small, tight-knit, often ethnically cohesive drug syndicates across the country, many of them barely visible, few of them violent. When one is disrupted, another emerges to fill the market vacuum.

The Business Model of Organized Crime

a person in a suit running with dictionary definition of business

Economists have applied both market models and enterprise models to organized criminal activity, and the resulting analysis is illuminating. Both approaches treat organized criminals as rational actors who seek profit, respond to market conditions, manage risk, and develop strategies to maximize returns — behaviours strikingly similar to those of legitimate business operators. Higher-level drug traffickers discuss procurement, pricing, competition, and client management in terms that would be unremarkable in a business school case study. Many of them refer to their drug syndicates simply as their “business.”

The analogy has limits, however, and scholars like Naylor and Pioli have mapped the systematic differences between legitimate and illegitimate enterprise. Legitimate firms operate within a supportive legal and political environment — courts, contracts, intellectual property protections, and regulatory frameworks all serve their interests. Illegal firms face exactly the opposite: the state actively tries to put them out of business. Legal firms maximize profit; illegal firms prioritize risk minimization, sometimes accepting lower returns in exchange for greater safety. Legal firms streamline to eliminate redundancy; illegal firms deliberately maintain it — spreading drugs across multiple drivers or storage sites so that any single seizure captures only a fraction of the product. Legal firms advertise; illegal firms must operate in secrecy, limiting their client base to those they can reach through closed networks of trust. Legal firms persist beyond the tenure of their founders; illegal enterprises are typically so dependent on the personal relationships of their leader that his arrest or departure causes the operation to collapse. And legal firms can use courts to enforce debts; illegal firms must either absorb losses, renegotiate, or resort to violence — all of which carry their own costs.

Expansion is another point of contrast. While legitimate businesses pursue growth aggressively, illegal firms are cautious about scaling up, because expansion means dealing with strangers, and strangers may be undercover police officers. The rational response is often to stay small, operate below the radar, and consolidate a reliable and trusted network rather than reaching for greater market share.

Businessmen and Criminal Drug Traffickers

All 70 men in Desroches’ study viewed drug dealing as a business. They spoke of needing a quality product, maintaining competitive prices, managing people, collecting money, and building a reputation for reliability — the ordinary vocabulary of commercial enterprise. What Desroches did not anticipate was how cleanly his sample divided into two fundamentally different types of drug trafficker.

Businessmen drug traffickers constituted 50 of the 70 men, or approximately 71.5 percent of the sample. They were overwhelmingly law-abiding in all respects except for their drug trafficking. They were employed before their arrest. They did not use drugs. They did not carry guns. They did not have lengthy criminal records — 22 of the 50 had no prior criminal record whatsoever, and the 9 who had minor convictions were charged with things like possession of marijuana or mail fraud, not violence. Most strikingly, 37 of the 50 businessmen dealers — almost 75 percent — had previously owned or operated a small business. Auto body shops, money exchanges, car dealerships, trucking companies, lobster boats, gymnasiums, import/export companies, beauty salons: a wide variety of modest commercial enterprises. These prior businesses had not made them rich, but they had given them entrepreneurial values, business skills, and a way of seeing the world in terms of opportunity and calculated risk. When the opportunity to enter the drug trade presented itself, they evaluated it with the same calculus they had applied to legitimate ventures — and the risk-reward ratio looked compelling.

Criminal drug traffickers made up 20 of the 70 men, or roughly 28.5 percent. They more closely resemble the bank robbers described in Desroches’ earlier research: early criminal onset, typically in their teens; persistent involvement in crime throughout their lives; a social world populated by other criminals; and a lengthy record for serious offences including robbery, assault, murder, and weapons charges. They rarely had legitimate employment histories. Their income was drawn overwhelmingly from crime. And they were more likely than their businessmen counterparts to use or threaten violence, more likely to use drugs, and more likely to project a conspicuous criminal lifestyle.

The prevalence of small business ownership across the full sample — 44 of 70, or 62.8 percent — is one of the most striking findings in the study. No comparable research had previously documented this pattern. Entrepreneurial attitudes, the habits of independent operators, and the experience of managing people, money, and suppliers appear to be meaningful predictors of entry into higher-level drug trafficking and of success once inside.

Friendship, Kinship, Race, and Ethnicity

three people wearing suits and eating lunch

Trust is the fundamental organizing principle of illegal enterprise, and trust must be built from something. In the absence of legal enforcement mechanisms, the only reliable basis for trusting a business partner in the drug trade is personal knowledge — knowing the person, knowing their history, knowing how they behave when things go wrong. This requirement shapes the composition of drug syndicates in predictable ways. Associates and employees are chosen from among people one already knows: childhood friends, family members, long-standing neighbourhood acquaintances, fellow members of an ethnic community.

Because our social networks are structured along lines of ethnicity and kinship, it follows that drug syndicates will often be ethnically homogeneous. Desroches found that over half of the 62 drug syndicates in his study consisted entirely or primarily of members from the same ethnic background. A Sri Lankan importer had eight co-accused — all Sri Lankan. A Guyanese trafficker working in Toronto drew his entire crew, including his brother and best friend, from the Guyanese community and sold almost exclusively within it. A marijuana smuggling crew was composed of Mexican Mennonites who imported from Mexico and sold within Ontario’s Mennonite communities. Other crews were drawn from Anglophone, Francophone, Jamaican, Italian, Irish, East Indian, Chinese, and Vietnamese communities.

The key variable, Desroches notes, is ethnicity rather than race per se — meaning country of origin and cultural background, which structures the friendship networks from which trust relationships are drawn. Race can be a correlated variable, but it is the social networks built on shared culture and shared migration experience that actually determine who deals with whom. Outsiders are treated with deep suspicion regardless of their background. Anyone wanting to join a drug operation must be vouched for by someone already inside the network; reputation is everything, and a reputation can only be established through people who already know you.

Size and Composition of Drug Syndicates

Across studies of higher-level drug trafficking, one of the most consistent findings is that drug syndicates are small, decentralized, and independent. The 62 syndicates in Desroches’ sample ranged from 3 to 9 members in their core crews. The average drug conspiracy in the sample charged 11 co-accused, but many of those charged did not know one another — they were connected through the drug chain without ever having met.

The “hot potato” analogy, proposed by researcher Marcella, captures the operational logic: when a supplier takes possession of a large quantity of drugs, they want to move it as quickly as possible. Holding drugs creates risk — the possibility of seizure, the cost of storage, the obligation to pay one’s own suppliers. So the drugs are passed down the chain quickly, broken into smaller quantities, and passed on again, flowing toward retail level at speed. No one in this chain wants to be holding the product any longer than necessary.

The relationships between drug traffickers in this system are not employer–employee relationships in the conventional sense. A supplier does not own or control the distributors who buy from them. Distributors are independent entrepreneurs who choose their suppliers based on quality, price, and reliability, and who are free to take their business elsewhere if a better option arises. One dealer quoted in Desroches’ study put it plainly: “You’re basically an individual entrepreneur. Even though I supplied them with the product, they’re not working for me. They’re working on their own and I’m just their supplier, but there is a lot of loyalty.” Long-term relationships develop not from obligation but from mutual benefit — both parties are making money from each other and neither wants to disrupt a working arrangement.

This entrepreneurial, decentralized structure has implications for both policing and theory. There is no single organization to dismantle, no cartel controlling the Canadian drug market from top to bottom. There are instead hundreds of small, independent, often ethnically based syndicates, each competitive with the others, each difficult to penetrate precisely because they deal only with people they know and trust. Opportunity theory is essential here: to enter the drug trade at a higher level, one needs not only the willingness to take risk but the connections — ethnic, professional, or criminal — that provide access to the supply chain.

Key Concepts: Mafia and network models of organized crime: the Mafia model is a myth; network/enterprise models better describe actual OC. Organized crime as a profit-oriented conspiracy engaged in market activities: profit motive, ongoing illicit exchange, potential for violence and corruption. Legal versus illegitimate business activity: similar entrepreneurial logic, fundamentally different operating conditions. Drug trafficking as independent entrepreneurship: decentralized, autonomous crews; no monopolistic cartel structure in Canada. Businessmen and criminal drug traffickers: the two-type typology; businessmen (71.5%) vs. criminal dealers (28.5%). Friendship, kinship, race, and ethnicity: trust relationships as the basis for crew composition. Size and composition of higher-level drug syndicates: 3–9 person crews; hot potato analogy; free market between independent entrepreneurs.

Module 18: Motivation, Lifestyle, and Theories of Crime

Objectives: By the end of this module you should be able to apply learning, rational choice, anomie, opportunity, and social control theories to higher-level drug trafficking; explain the motivational components that draw individuals into the drug trade; trace the stages through which retail dealers move up to the wholesale level; analyze the morality and self-concept of higher-level dealers; describe the lifestyle and spending patterns associated with the drug trade; discuss the stresses of a criminal double life; and explain why dealers so often fail to retire when it would be rational to do so.

Reading: The Crime that Pays, Ch. 4, pp. 53–111.

Initial Involvement into Higher-Level Drug Trafficking

Learning theories — particularly cultural transmission theory and differential association — hold that crime is learned behaviour, acquired through intimate association with others who are already engaged in it. Every man in Desroches’ study entered higher-level drug trafficking through connection with other people. Fifty-one of the 70 reported that their initial contacts were in their immediate social world — friends, relatives, or work associates who were already dealing. Nine gained entry through connections with foreign nationals, typically through ethnic ties to drug-producing countries. The remaining ten made their connections in prison. Learning theory is clearly applicable: the values, rationalizations, technical knowledge of the drug game, and crucially the opportunity to enter it, all come through other people.

Three distinct pathways into higher-level trafficking emerged from the interview data. The first is the gradual move from retail to wholesale, traced in detail below. The second, more common path is direct recruitment: an established dealer approaches someone they know and presents the proposition as a business opportunity, explaining likely earnings, emphasizing the low profile required, and making the appeal to a trusted friend or associate. Recruitment is typically a soft sell — the person being approached can observe the recruiter’s apparent prosperity, hear a credible account of manageable risk, and may receive an offer of drugs on credit to get started. There is rarely hard pressure; most subjects report that the pitch was simply attractive enough to consider seriously. The third pathway is active seeking, where someone with connections to higher-level dealers takes the initiative and asks to be brought in. All three pathways underscore the role of opportunity: one cannot become a higher-level drug trafficker simply by wanting to be one. Access depends on connections.

Rational Choice Theory and Drug Trafficking

Rational choice theory holds that criminal behaviour, like other economic behaviour, reflects deliberate weighing of costs and benefits. Applied to drug trafficking, the theory is highly informative — particularly at the higher levels. Unlike the impulsive, addiction-driven retail dealer, higher-level traffickers describe their entry into the drug trade in markedly rational terms: careful assessment of risk and reward, weighing the likely profits against the probability of detection, developing a modus operandi designed to minimize exposure, and maintaining that discipline over years of operation. These men knew they were taking risks; they simply believed, often correctly, that those risks were manageable.

Rational choice theory applies less cleanly to retail dealing, where addiction, financial desperation, and impulsive decision-making often compromise the quality of risk assessment. At the upper level, however, rationality is evident not only in the initial decision to deal but in the ongoing operational choices — selecting associates, structuring transactions, compartmentalizing knowledge, avoiding violence and other attention-drawing behaviours. The modus operandi of higher-level traffickers, discussed in Module 19, is a sustained exercise in applied risk management.

One caveat must be noted: rational choice theory cannot explain why some people are disposed to cross the moral line into crime while others, facing identical opportunities and calculations, do not. Nor can it account for the expressive or emotional dimensions of behaviour — the occasional impulsive use of violence, the status-seeking that brings unwanted attention. The theory illuminates the structure of decision-making without fully explaining its origins or its excesses.

Anomie Theory and Drug Trafficking

Merton’s anomie theory argues that crime results from a cultural emphasis on financial success combined with blocked legitimate access to the means of achieving it. Applied to Desroches’ sample, the theory works better for some men than for others. Only 8 of the 70 reported financial setbacks — business failures, job losses, divorce-related expenses — that created the kind of desperate need anomie theory predicts. The majority of the men, especially the businessmen dealers, were employed and economically functional before entering the drug trade. They had legitimate opportunities; they were not destitute.

Where anomie theory does apply is in the dimension of aspiration. These men did not subscribe to modest, middle-class definitions of success. They wanted enormous wealth, a high-status lifestyle, conspicuous consumption, the respect of peers and family, and personal freedom. Legitimate employment could provide a comfortable living; it could not provide what they were seeking. Robert Agnew’s strain theory sharpens this point: the key is not the absolute distance between where one is and where one could reasonably be, but the comparison between oneself and the wealthiest people in one’s frame of reference. Many of the men Desroches interviewed described this dynamic explicitly — they had seen others living in extraordinary wealth, found themselves envious and dissatisfied, and decided that the gap between their current position and their aspirations was not one they were willing to accept.

Secondary motivations accompanied the primary drive for money. Status, personal freedom, the thrill of risk, a sense of power and importance, the approval of family and friends who believed them to be successful businessmen — all of these fed into the decision and sustained the commitment over years. The money was always primary, but the lifestyle the money purchased was itself part of what was being sought.

Opportunity Theory – Ethnicity and Business

two people in suits shake hands with a third

As established in Module 17, opportunity is the gating variable for entry into higher-level drug trafficking. Wanting to be a drug trafficker and being in a position to do so are entirely different things. The connections that provide access to supply are typically structured by ethnicity, because drug supply chains run along lines of shared cultural background and pre-existing trust. This explains the empirical pattern Desroches observed: the 12 men in his sample with ties to Asia were responsible for 9 of the 11 heroin cases, reflecting the supply connections between Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim and the ethnic communities through which that product moves.

Legitimate business and employment also serve as ports of entry. Twenty-four of the 70 subjects — approximately a third of the sample — found their way into drug trafficking through business or employment connections. Six bar owners and four of their employees developed drug-dealing clienteles through their establishments. Eight subjects owned import/export companies whose infrastructure was then adapted for moving drugs. In each case, the legitimate business provided not only opportunity but plausible cover. The border-crossing trucking company that is also moving cocaine is, from one perspective, simply a legitimate enterprise with an additional revenue stream.

From Retail to Wholesale – Moving up the Ladder

person dangles handcuffs, dictionary definition of business in background

Of the 25 subjects who moved from retail dealing to wholesale, the transition was neither automatic nor sudden. Desroches identified a sequence of ten stages through which this move typically occurred — a finding with no real precedent in the prior literature on drug trafficking.

The process begins with a period of time at the retail level, which on average lasted two to three years. This time is not incidental: it is during this period that the dealer develops the contacts, reputation, and resources that make the eventual move possible. Working connections upward in the supply chain enables the dealer to identify and cultivate a higher-level source — someone willing to supply wholesale quantities. In parallel, time at retail allows the dealer to build a reputation as reliable, trustworthy, and businesslike — the precondition for being offered wholesale terms.

Alongside these structural developments, a cognitive shift occurs. The dealer begins to see themselves differently — no longer as a small-time street seller but as someone capable of playing at a higher level. This self-reassessment accompanies a change in motivation: ambition grows, greed intensifies, the retailer becomes unwilling to remain a small player. Moving up also requires accepting a deeper identity as a drug dealer — it means acknowledging, at least internally, that this is no longer a sideline but a career.

Practically, the move requires capital. Buying wholesale quantities demands substantial upfront investment, which means the dealer must have managed their retail earnings carefully rather than consuming them. It also requires a network of retail clients who can be handed off or recruited as distributors — the contacts built during years of street dealing become assets when the aspiring wholesaler needs people to move the product.

The single most powerful motivating factor, however, was typically security consciousness. Street-level dealing exposes the dealer to a wide range of risks: rip-offs, robbery, unstable customers, the constant possibility of selling to an undercover officer, the chaos of managing dozens of clients. Many of the men who moved up did so partly because of a close call — an arrest, a robbery, a friend’s conviction — that brought home the vulnerabilities of retail-level exposure. Moving up to wholesale dramatically reduces the number of people one deals with. Instead of selling to forty or fifty users, the wholesaler sells to two or three distributors. The risk profile changes entirely.

The final motivating factor was simply the desire to escape the hassles of street-level life: the constant availability demands, the debt collection problems, the association with users and addicts. Wholesaling meant less contact, less volatility, far more money, and considerably more dignity.

a person in a suit grasps another by the lapels

Social control theory shifts the question from “why do people commit crime?” to “why do most people not commit crime?” The answer lies in the social bonds — attachments, commitments, involvements, and beliefs — that connect individuals to conventional society and give them something to lose. People with strong family ties, stable employment, and community reputation generally do not commit serious crimes because the potential cost of detection is too high.

By these criteria, most of the businessmen dealers in Desroches’ study should not have become drug traffickers at all. Two-thirds of the sample — 47 of 70 — were in marital or common-law relationships at the time of their arrest, most with children. Only three reported dysfunctional upbringings. Their wives almost universally did not know about the trafficking, and their arrest was typically a profound shock to their families. The men themselves expressed genuine shame at having brought embarrassment to people they loved.

Yet they dealt anyway — and Travis Hirschi’s social bonding theory cannot explain why, just as it cannot explain the behaviour of Humphreys’ tearoom participants, who also had families, reputations, and conventional lives they were prepared to risk. Some of the drug traffickers actually inverted the logic of social bonding theory, arguing that family commitment was a reason to deal rather than a reason not to. They wanted private schools for their children, holidays for their wives, beautiful homes. The desire to provide at an exceptional level overrode the protective function the family bond was theoretically supposed to serve.

Social control theory performs better with the criminal dealer type and with retail-level dealers — populations with thinner social bonds and less to lose. For the businessmen dealers who make up the majority of Desroches’ sample, it largely fails as an explanatory tool.

Morality and Techniques of Neutralization

Sykes and Matza’s techniques of neutralization theory offers a more productive framework for understanding how these men managed the moral dimensions of their behaviour. The theory holds that people do not need to reject conventional values in order to commit crime; they need only find ways to neutralize those values temporarily, protecting their self-concept while justifying their conduct.

Drug trafficking is particularly well-suited to moral neutralization. Social attitudes toward drug use are ambivalent — many people support legalization of marijuana, others use cocaine recreationally without apparent harm — and this ambivalence gives dealers room to rationalize. The specific techniques Desroches’ subjects employed included denial of responsibility (the consumer chooses to use; I am not responsible for other people’s choices); denial of injury (marijuana doesn’t hurt anyone; my customers are professionals who use cocaine recreationally and aren’t addicted); denial of the victim (if someone abuses drugs and harms themselves, they bear responsibility for that choice); condemnation of condemners (politicians, police, doctors, and lawyers all buy drugs — society is hypocritical to condemn me for supplying a market that includes its most respected members); and appeal to higher loyalties (I am doing this for my family).

Most powerful of all, however, was what Desroches calls conventionalization: the practice of framing drug dealing as ordinary business, and oneself as an honest businessman providing a product. By treating the drug enterprise as equivalent to any other commercial activity — emphasizing quality, reliability, fair dealing, and the provision of employment — these men could see themselves not as criminals but as entrepreneurs operating in a legally disfavoured but not morally objectionable trade. None of Desroches’ subjects reported feeling guilty about their conduct. They had not simply suspended their values; they had genuinely concluded that what they were doing was not wrong.

Ego and Self-Concept – Criminal Drug Dealers

a crooked cigarette in an ashtray, glass of alcohol behind

One of the most striking characteristics of all higher-level drug traffickers, in Desroches’ observation, was their inflated egos. Years of success, large amounts of money, and the power that comes with being a significant player in an illegal market had produced, across the board, a high degree of self-confidence that imprisonment had done surprisingly little to erode. The rationalizations were strong enough to insulate self-concept from the humiliation of arrest.

Criminal drug traffickers expressed their ego in a particularly visible way. They gravitated toward what subjects themselves called “going Hollywood” — a celebrity lifestyle of conspicuous spending, club attendance, expensive cars, and an entourage of status-seekers. Bouncers know them at the door. Waitresses bring drinks without being asked. Women and friends cluster around. The criminal dealer is a wheel, a mover, and he wants to be seen as one. The lifestyle is genuinely pleasurable in the short term, but it is also, as their own suppliers typically remind them, catastrophically dangerous. A 25-year-old driving a Maserati in the neighbourhood where he deals is, from a policing perspective, essentially self-identifying. Most are eventually talked out of the most conspicuous behaviour — or they take the party somewhere away from their business territory. But criminal dealers are much more likely than businessmen dealers to go through this celebrity phase and to suffer its consequences.

A case example Desroches discusses — drawn from a National Post employment advertisement placed by a self-described “Former Marijuana Smuggler” — illustrates the phenomenon with particular clarity. The man Desroches calls “Mr. Davies” had no university education, no legitimate employment history, and no business accomplishments, yet applied for an executive position by listing his drug trafficking enterprise as equivalent to operating a major corporation. His advertisement and accompanying website showed the inflated ego characteristic of criminal drug dealers: boasting of the scale of the operation, claiming expertise that cannot be independently verified, and treating drug-trade success as transferable to the licit economy. He had been convicted twice and incarcerated, yet remained utterly unhumbled.

Ego and Self-Concept – Businessmen Drug Dealers

Businessmen drug dealers displayed an equally strong ego, but expressed it differently. They did not seek the attention of strangers in nightclubs; they sought the respect of people who believed them to be successful entrepreneurs. Their wealth was displayed through a beautiful home, an expensive but tasteful car, fine dining, travel, and their children’s education. People in their community admired them as successful businessmen, not knowing that the source of the success was illegal. Their self-concept was built on exactly the conventional roles they performed — husband, father, employer, businessman — and the drug trafficking was carefully compartmentalized away from that identity.

When Desroches interviewed these men, they were self-confident rather than arrogant, articulate in describing their operations, and genuinely convinced that their conduct had been ethical within the logic of the trade. They spoke of having integrity, of treating their distributors fairly, of providing a product that people wanted. Prison had not broken them. The rationalizations that had allowed them to enter the drug trade in the first place continued to sustain their self-regard.

Profit, Losses, and Spending

a person with a briefcase walks near a helicopter

The profit potential of higher-level drug trafficking is, as Desroches observed, extraordinary. A kilogram of cocaine purchased in Colombia for approximately USD $1,000 sells in Canada for $35,000–40,000. The margin narrows as the product moves through transit countries and multiple hands, each taking a cut, but even a Canadian wholesaler buying at $25,000–30,000 per kilogram and selling at $35,000+ still generates thousands of dollars of profit per unit. An operation moving 30 kilograms per month at a $10,000 margin per kilo generates $300,000 monthly in pre-tax profit. One American subject in Desroches’ sample laundered USD $9 million Canadian into U.S. currency in a single six-month period, with 70 kilograms of cocaine seized from his safe house. RCMP sting operations regularly encountered traffickers arriving to launder $50,000 to $100,000 per month, some of them weighing hockey bags of $20 bills rather than counting them.

There are genuine costs: vehicle and cell phone rentals, safe houses, legal fees, the expenses of transporting drugs across borders, the infrastructure costs of hydroponic marijuana operations or methamphetamine laboratories. Drug seizures, bad debts from fronts, and occasional theft all represent losses. But the margin is so wide that even with substantial costs and the occasional loss, a mid-level operator can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

Spending patterns divide along familiar lines. Businessmen dealers invested in homes, cars, education for their children, travel, and legitimate businesses that also functioned as covers for their trafficking income. They were acutely aware of proceeds-of-crime legislation and took steps to ensure that visible wealth was accountable. Criminal dealers were far more likely to spend hedonistically — clubs, women, clothing, status toys — and far less likely to accumulate durable assets. Many subjects, when asked whether they were worried about supporting themselves after release, responded with a knowing smile. Their money, they implied, was somewhere the RCMP had not found it.

Stresses Associated with a Life of Crime

a person wearing a hat and suit stands next to an old car

The rewards of higher-level trafficking are real, but so are the stresses. Living as a serious criminal requires constant vigilance: one must be secretive about one’s activities, suspicious of new acquaintances, alert to surveillance, careful about what is said on the phone, and always aware of the possibility that the next knock at the door could be the police. Several of Desroches’ subjects described what amounted to chronic low-level paranoia — lying awake wondering about the money owed to them, or owed by them; worrying whether a car parked outside was surveillance; experiencing persistent anxiety that they could not fully share with anyone.

This finding was, Desroches acknowledges, an unexpected one. He had not designed his study to investigate stress, and the data are suggestive rather than conclusive. But the fact that multiple subjects raised the topic spontaneously, and that four of the five men interviewed outside of prison — living in the community, no longer dealing — volunteered without being asked that they felt dramatically more relaxed since leaving the life, is telling. One may not recognize how stressed one has been until the source of stress is removed.

The double life imposed additional costs. Most of these men maintained a strict separation between their drug world and their conventional one — their wives, children, neighbours, and legitimate associates knew nothing. This separation required constant deception, limited genuine intimacy with people outside the trade, and produced in some men a sense of alienation or disconnection. Others found the secret identity exhilarating. But the need to screen every new acquaintance as a potential police officer, the inability to talk honestly about what occupied most of one’s waking hours — these were real constraints on social life.

The Failure to Get Out of Drug Trafficking

If crime pays as well as higher-level drug trafficking demonstrably does, why do so many of its practitioners fail to retire before they are caught? This question is not rhetorical — some of the men in Desroches’ sample were worth many millions of dollars at the time of their arrest and had no financial need to continue. One American subject had accumulated over $500 million in assets, yet kept trafficking.

The most fundamental explanation is greed. Many of these men entered the trade with a financial target in mind — “I’ll make a million and then I’ll stop” — only to find, once that target was reached, that the ease of the money made it impossible to stop. The target shifted upward. Then shifted again. One subject captured the dynamic with characteristic bluntness: “You think you could walk away from $40,000 a month?” The lifestyle built around that money — the homes, the spending patterns, the tastes — also required money to sustain, creating structural pressure to keep dealing.

Ego and overconfidence played their own role. Success over many years created a conviction that one had mastered the game, that the police were less capable than they appeared, that the careful operator would not be caught. This confidence was often accompanied by complacency — a gradual erosion of the fear that had initially made these men careful. The security procedures that felt essential in year one began to feel like excessive caution in year six. Along with the diminution of fear came a diminution of deterrence: sentences in Canada were, as Desroches noted, relatively modest, and for someone earning hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, a seven-year sentence was a manageable risk rather than a catastrophic one.

Identity and lifestyle attachment were also powerful anchors. Especially for criminal dealers, being a major player in the drug world was who they were. It gave them status, power, money, and a place in the hierarchy of the criminal world they had always inhabited. Giving that up meant going back to being nobody. Many of them postponed retirement chronically — “just three more months,” “just this one more deal” — until the arrest that eventually came.

Finally, Desroches notes that the men in his sample represent a biased population: they are the ones who were caught. There are, he argues, almost certainly many more higher-level traffickers who are never caught, who operate for years and then retire quietly into legitimacy, taking their proceeds with them. The study captures the failures; the successes are invisible.

Key Concepts: Learning theories of crime: differential association and cultural transmission applied to drug trafficking entry. Rational choice theory and crime: high rationality at the wholesale level; limited rationality at retail. Anomie theory and motivation to drug trafficking: blocked aspirations (not blocked opportunities) for the businessmen type; high financial goals driving entry. Agnew’s strain theory and drug trafficking: reference group comparisons with the wealthy as a motivational driver. Opportunity theory and entry into higher-level dealing: ethnicity and business connections as ports of entry. From retail to wholesale – moving up the ladder: ten stages from street dealing to wholesaling. Social control, social bonding, and techniques of neutralization: social bonds fail to deter businessmen dealers; neutralization techniques protect self-concept. The ego and self-concept of “criminal” and “businessmen” dealers: criminal = celebrity lifestyle; businessman = respectable entrepreneur persona. The dealing lifestyle and celebrity status: conspicuous consumption among criminal dealers; discreet display among businessmen. Stresses associated with a life of crime: anxiety, paranoia, double life, alienation. The failure to get out of drug dealing: greed, ego, overconfidence, lifestyle attachment, complacency.

Module 19: Modus Operandi – Marketing and Security

Objectives: By the end of this module you should be able to describe the unique challenges of marketing illicit drugs, explain the bases on which loyalty between suppliers and distributors is built, and analyze the multiple and layered security strategies that higher-level drug traffickers employ.

Reading: The Crime that Pays, Ch. 5, pp. 113–137.

Modus Operandi and Marketing Illicit Drugs

Marketing illicit drugs operates under constraints that have no parallel in legitimate commerce. A legal business can advertise broadly, court new customers openly, and build a public reputation. A drug trafficking operation must acquire clients through closed networks, keep its activities hidden, and compete for business without ever being able to announce that it is doing so. As a result, higher-level traffickers invest most of their operational energy not in expanding their customer base but in servicing and retaining the clients they already have, and in the security and logistical operations that keep the enterprise running. Finding a good client — reliable, discreet, able to move product quickly and pay reliably — is genuinely difficult, and losing such a client to a competitor is a real loss.

Within these constraints, dealers compete on a recognizable set of marketing variables: the quality of the product (most higher-level dealers claimed never to cut their drugs, and RCMP seizures confirm that purity tends to be very high at this level), the quantity they can reliably supply (buying in volume earns discounts that enable competitive pricing downstream), price (buying large quantities allows a wholesaler to undercut competitors), service (reliability, predictability, and some version of a standing behind the product, including money-back guarantees in some cases), reputation (being known in the trade as trustworthy, professional, and businesslike), and credit (the use of fronts, discussed in Module 20).

Repeat business is the lifeblood of a higher-level operation. A reliable distributor who can move drugs quickly, pay consistently, and keep their mouth shut is extremely valuable and correspondingly difficult to find. Dealers treat their best clients accordingly — with attention, flexibility, and sometimes informal cooperation. Desroches found that about 20 percent of his sample had formal business partners rather than working alone, and these partnerships were often built on long friendships and offered both instrumental benefits (shared workload, combined connections, coverage during absences) and expressive ones (having someone to talk to, to think through decisions with, to feel less isolated in a secret life). Competitive and cooperative impulses coexisted: some dealers who knew their counterparts at the same level would occasionally lend each other drugs when one was running low, maintaining market continuity and building goodwill.

Modus Operandi and Security – Security Through Violence and Intimidation

The most persistent popular misconception about higher-level drug trafficking is that violence and intimidation are central to its operation. Desroches’ research, and the broader literature on higher-level trafficking in developed countries, consistently contradicts this view. The vast majority of higher-level dealers are non-violent. When arrested, they typically face no charges of assault, threats, or weapons possession. They do not use violence to collect debts, protect territory, or intimidate competitors.

Some criminal dealers acknowledged occasional use of force — primarily debt collection — but even they insisted that violence was a last resort and bad for business. A subset of businessmen dealers admitted to posturing: implying the existence of a violent organization behind them (“the boss is getting upset,” “my people want to know when they’re getting paid”) as a bluff to encourage payment without actually resorting to force. But posturing is not violence, and many dealers avoided even that, noting that threatening people can transform a debtor into an informant or provoke retaliation.

The structural logic here is clear from a rational choice perspective. Violence attracts police attention; it is, in fact, one of the RCMP’s primary criteria for targeting a drug syndicate. Non-violent, low-profile groups are precisely the ones the police lack resources to investigate, and are therefore the ones most likely to operate for years without interference. Violence also invites retaliation: killing or injuring someone who owes money may trigger vengeance from their associates. And violence consumes time, energy, and resources that could more profitably be invested in the business itself. The near-unanimous conclusion among higher-level dealers was that market forces — price, quality, service, reputation — rather than coercion, govern business relationships in the drug world.

Security Through Trust – Friendship, Kinship, and Ethnicity

Trust is far more important than violence as a security mechanism, and it is built through pre-existing relationships: friendships that preceded the drug trade, kinship ties, and shared ethnic community membership. Selecting partners and employees from people one already knows and has worked with over years provides a degree of security that no amount of intimidation can replicate. You cannot be informed on by someone you have not told anything; and people who trust each other, who have history together, who are embedded in the same community, are far less likely to become informants than strangers recruited for operational convenience.

Before entering any new business relationship, experienced traffickers would investigate prospective partners through their own network — finding mutual acquaintances, checking reputations, getting vouched for through trusted intermediaries. Among criminal dealers specifically, the relevant vetting question was whether a person had been arrested before and, if so, whether they had maintained silence. A “standup” record of not informing under pressure was among the highest forms of professional credential in the criminal world.

Trust-based security has one important constraint: it limits expansion. A dealer who deals only with people they know personally is restricted to the size of their social circle. Many of Desroches’ subjects described turning down profitable opportunities because they would have required dealing with strangers. Staying small, staying trusted, staying secure was preferable to growing at the cost of exposure.

Security Through Redundancy

Where legitimate businesses streamline operations to maximize efficiency, drug trafficking operations often deliberately replicate functions to limit the damage of any single loss. This is redundancy as a security strategy: rather than moving 100 kilograms of cocaine across the border in a single vehicle — risking total seizure — a trafficker might divide the load among four vehicles, accepting higher transportation costs in exchange for reduced exposure per trip. Similarly, maintaining multiple safe houses, multiple bank accounts, multiple cell phones, and multiple employees performing similar roles ensures that a single arrest or seizure does not shut down the operation. If two of five couriers are arrested, the remaining three continue moving product. The crew reconstitutes quickly and business resumes.

This principle of deliberate redundancy — at the cost of efficiency — is one of the clearest operational distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate enterprise.

Security Through Size, Structure, and Secrecy

The 62 crews in Desroches’ study ranged from 3 to 9 members — deliberately small. Small size confers security in ways that are difficult to replicate in large organizations. Members know one another personally; behaviour can be monitored and trusted; the closed nature of the group makes police infiltration extremely difficult. As an operation grows and must extend its reach to include strangers, each new member represents a potential leak, a potential informant, a potential undercover officer.

The standard structural model consisted of the drug trafficker themselves, occasionally a partner, one or two trusted associates who handled operations, and a small number of paid workers — couriers, drivers, money exchangers — who carried out the risky tasks. These peripheral operatives were hired for specific jobs and paid on a fee-for-service or commission basis. Critically, many of them did not know who their ultimate employer was. A courier crossing the border with cocaine might know only the trusted associate who gave them the package; they would have no direct connection to the drug trafficker, making them useless as a witness even if they were arrested and wished to cooperate with police. This structural principle — layering — is among the most effective protections available to a higher-level dealer.

This security architecture was complemented by a need-to-know information structure: the dealer controlled information tightly, ensuring that each person knew only what they needed to perform their task. Employees who asked too many questions became suspicious by that very act. The drug trafficker knew everything; everyone else knew only their part. This limited the evidentiary value of any single arrest, since no peripheral operative could provide testimony connecting the core of the organization to the drugs.

Security Through Information Networks and Corruption

Higher-level traffickers — particularly criminal dealers with deep roots in the criminal underworld — maintained informal information networks that provided real-time intelligence on the drug scene. This meant cultivating contacts throughout the chain: street-level dealers, drug users, bartenders, doormen, strippers, petty criminals, and prison inmates all fed information upward about police activity, new supply routes, prices, competition, and the reliability of specific individuals. Some dealers were systematic about this, actively seeking information on a daily basis. Others relied on what came to them through existing relationships.

The practical value was significant. Information networks allowed traffickers to monitor prices and anticipate market changes, identify potentially compromised associates, learn about police operations and investigative techniques, vet new business contacts, and stay abreast of the general state of the drug market. Biker gangs, the RCMP noted, sometimes stationed representatives in courtrooms to observe proceedings and learn from what was disclosed in evidence.

Corruption of public officials was, by contrast, rare in Canada and other developed countries, and Desroches found no evidence of it in his study. Corruption is common in developing nations where state salaries are low, moral authority is weak, and drug syndicates have sufficient resources to make corrupting officials economically attractive. In Canada, police are well-paid and culturally oriented toward integrity; the organizational structure of higher-level trafficking — small, decentralized crews — also makes approaching the police for protection an extremely dangerous undertaking in itself. Drug traffickers in Canada preferred to remain invisible to the police rather than attempt to pay them off.

Security Through Diplomacy and Technology

Diplomacy — the maintenance of good personal relationships throughout the drug network — was recognized by many of Desroches’ subjects as a primary security mechanism. Treating people well, paying fairly, keeping one’s word, being generous and understanding when problems arose, and even ending business relationships gracefully: all of these practices reduced the probability that a former associate or disgruntled distributor would become an informant. People who feel well-treated, who have been paid fairly and respected throughout the relationship, have no grievance to motivate cooperation with police. The diplomatic imperative was also practical: drug traffickers knew that their wealth made them objects of envy, and they worked to ensure that envy did not become resentment.

Technology played a surprisingly limited role during the period of Desroches’ study (1990–2002). Very few subjects used encrypted communications, scanning devices, or other electronic countermeasures. The primary security tools were interpersonal: trust, secrecy, caution in what was said on any telephone, and careful choice of associates. This may have changed as communications technology became both more sophisticated and more widely available, but at the time of the research, the dominant security strategy remained fundamentally social rather than technical.

Key Concepts: Marketing illicit drugs: quality, quantity, price, service, reputation, and credit as competitive variables. A dealer’s reputation: trustworthiness and reliability as the highest business credential in the drug world. Partnerships: shared workload, combined connections, expressive as well as instrumental benefits. Security through violence and intimidation: violence is rare, seen as bad for business, attracts police. Security through trust — friendship, kinship, ethnicity: personal knowledge and vetting as the primary security tool. Security through redundancy: deliberate replication of functions to limit damage from seizures. Security through size, structure, and secrecy: small crews, layered structure, need-to-know information control. Security through information networks and corruption: intelligence gathering; corruption rare in developed nations. Security through diplomacy and technology: good people management; technology not heavily relied upon.

Module 20: Fronts, Debts, and Violence

Objectives: By the end of this module you should be able to define fronts and explain their role in the drug economy, describe the principles and precautions that govern their use, explain the norms and informal rules that regulate debt obligations, discuss the conditions under which violence does and does not occur in the higher-level drug trade, analyze territoriality in relation to both retail and wholesale trafficking, and summarize the findings of comparative international research on upper-level drug trafficking.

Reading: The Crime that Pays, Ch. 6, pp. 139–161; “Research on Upper Level Drug Trafficking,” Journal of Drug Issues, 2007, pp. 827–844.

Fronts and the Use of Credit

A front is a consignment of drugs provided on credit — the dealer takes possession now and pays later. Fronts function as a revolving short-term line of credit in the drug economy and serve several distinct purposes for the supplier who provides them. The most obvious is recruitment: a potential distributor who lacks the capital to purchase several kilos of cocaine outright can be brought into the business through a front, expanding the supplier’s market without requiring the distributor to have pre-existing funds. Fronts are also used to retain existing distributors during difficult periods, to move drugs quickly in a saturated market, and to establish a presence in new geographic areas. For every kilo taken on a front rather than purchased in cash, the supplier typically charges a premium of $2,000–$3,000, creating an additional profit stream while accepting the additional risk.

The “hot potato” dynamic discussed in Module 17 reinforces the appeal of fronts from the supplier’s perspective: the faster drugs can be moved out of one’s possession, the lower the risk of seizure. Fronting allows drugs to change hands quickly even when distributors have not yet assembled the necessary cash.

Some men in Desroches’ study had been released from prison and re-entered drug trafficking immediately, enabled by suppliers who trusted them enough to front product without any upfront payment. The trust relationship, built before the prison term, provided the capital they needed to start again.

Principles and Precautions in Fronting

Experienced dealers did not front drugs casually. The standard practice was partial fronting: rather than extending the full quantity on credit, the supplier required the distributor to pay cash for a portion of the purchase while receiving the remainder on account. If selling five kilos, the dealer might require immediate payment for two and extend credit for three. This structure limits the supplier’s exposure while giving the distributor access to product beyond their immediate means.

Fronts were extended only to people the supplier knew, trusted, and believed to be reliable. Heavy drug users were excluded, since their consumption of the product or erratic behaviour made them poor credit risks. The supplier also thought carefully about how much they could afford to lose: they would front only what, in the worst case, would not put them out of business. Some dealers also required collateral — property that could be taken if the debt was not repaid, functioning much as a bank secures a loan against assets. These practices are recognizably analogous to legitimate commercial lending, and the men themselves described them in those terms.

Norms Regulating Fronts

a calendar with PAYMENT DUE written on it, money tacked next to it

The normative structure governing fronts in the drug world is largely implicit rather than explicitly stated. The foundational norm is that once a distributor takes possession of drugs, they assume full financial responsibility for them — regardless of what subsequently happens. If the drugs are seized by police, if a courier is arrested, if the product is stolen: the money is still owed. This norm is widely understood in the higher-level drug trade, but because the parties rarely spell it out explicitly at the time of the transaction, disputes arise when distributors claim that circumstances beyond their control should excuse the debt, while suppliers insist on payment regardless.

In practice, however, Desroches found that these norms were applied with considerable flexibility and tolerance. Suppliers who had worked with a distributor for years, who had made substantial amounts of money together, and who believed a hardship to be genuine and not self-inflicted, would typically negotiate — extending the payment deadline, reducing the amount owing, or even writing off the debt entirely. In the case of a distributor arrested and imprisoned, the calculus was particularly clear: a supplier who pressures someone in prison for drug money first assumes they will be unable to collect, and second implicitly acknowledges that the imprisoned person had reason to cooperate with police and chose not to. Most suppliers wrote off such debts and looked forward to resuming the relationship when their distributor was released.

The strategic logic is straightforward: maintaining a productive, trusted distributor relationship is worth more than recovering a single debt, especially since the amounts involved, though seemingly large, can be recouped in weeks when the partnership is functioning. Diplomacy — patience, understanding, and a willingness to help people through difficult situations — was the preferred instrument of debt management. Violence was considered the last resort, employed only by those who lacked the financial sophistication to recognize its costs.

Fronts – Financial and Security Risks

While fronts offer significant commercial advantages, they also create real risks. The distributor might abscond with the product, consume the drugs, fail to collect from their own clients, be arrested, or simply refuse to pay. Some drug traffickers in Desroches’ study avoided fronting entirely, preferring to operate on a cash-only basis and accepting a somewhat smaller volume of business as the price of complete control over their assets.

For those who did front, the risks were compounded by the need to keep debt records without creating evidence. Keeping a written or electronic record of drugs fronted and money owed would, if discovered in a police search, constitute extremely compelling evidence of drug trafficking. Most higher-level dealers dealing in limited numbers of clients managed this mentally rather than in writing; street-level dealers, who might be owed small sums by dozens of users, were more often caught with debt records.

From the distributor’s perspective, taking drugs on a front created its own pressures. Unlike a cash purchase, a front put the distributor under time pressure to sell — they had to move the product and collect payment within an agreed-upon period. If the market was slow or police activity was elevated, they could not simply wait; the debt clock kept running. Under this pressure, some distributors took risks they would not otherwise have taken. Furthermore, taking a front compromised the independence that higher-level dealers prized: it gave the supplier a degree of authority over their timeline, undermining the autonomy that was one of the psychological rewards of being an independent entrepreneur. Established dealers with sufficient capital generally preferred to pay cash, buying their independence along with their product.

Violence Among Higher-Level Traffickers

two people wearing stocking masks point pistols

Violence in the drug trade is concentrated at the retail level, where dealers interact directly with users, addicts, and desperate individuals. The higher-level drug trade — insulated by layers of trusted intermediaries, dealing in large transactions between professional operators — is characterized by the near-absence of violence among independent entrepreneurial syndicates.

What violence does occur at the higher level is typically aimed at other participants in the drug trade — other dealers, distributors, or suppliers — rather than at civilians, and it is most commonly connected to debt collection. Even here, the businessmen dealers in Desroches’ study were emphatic: they would write off a bad debt rather than use violence to collect it. The reasons were partly ethical (they were not career criminals and did not inhabit a culture of violence) and partly rational (the rational-choice calculus here is straightforward: spending time and money trying to collect a debt you may never recover is inferior to spending the same resources making new money). Criminal dealers were more likely to acknowledge occasional use of force or threats, but even they regarded it as a last resort and were well aware of its costs.

Reputation for potential violence offered an alternative to actual violence for some criminal dealers: the credible suggestion of being dangerous could deter non-payment without requiring follow-through. But many dealers avoided even this, recognizing that posturing as dangerous might convince a frightened debtor to preemptively seek police protection — or, as the RCMP noted, to kill the dealer before being hurt themselves.

Outlaw motorcycle gangs represent the significant exception to this pattern. As hierarchical criminal organizations with careers built on violence, bikers operate by different norms. They have been involved in territorial drug wars — most notoriously in Quebec in the 1990s, where rival Hells Angels factions killed over 150 people in a multi-year conflict. The RCMP responded with massive enforcement operations that took much of the gang leadership out of circulation. Independent entrepreneurial traffickers were, for the most part, aware of this violence and made a deliberate point of avoiding the motorcycle gang world. Those few in Desroches’ study who did transact with bikers did so cautiously, maintaining secrecy about their own supply chains and valuing the bikers primarily as buyers who always paid cash.

Territoriality

The Mafia model of organized crime envisions drug trafficking territories controlled and defended by powerful syndicates who use violence to exclude competitors. In Desroches’ research, this picture receives essentially no support for independent higher-level traffickers in Canada. These dealers operated in a free and competitive market, free to buy from and sell to whoever they wished, governed by price, quality, service, and reputation rather than by geographic monopoly. When asked directly about territorial control, most subjects found the concept alien to their experience.

Territoriality is more characteristic of retail-level dealing, where selling on specific streets or in specific neighbourhoods creates the conditions for territorial conflict. Even here it varies considerably by time and place — some street-level dealers in Desroches’ sample described territorial disputes, others reported dealing wherever they wished without interference. There is no universal retail-level territoriality, but it is at the retail level, not the wholesale level, that the concept has any empirical purchase.

Outlaw motorcycle gangs, again, are the exception. They do control certain bars and strip clubs as drug sales venues and do defend those locations against other dealers — though typically against rival motorcycle clubs rather than against independent operators. The Quebec biker wars of the 1990s were, at root, territorial conflicts between organized criminal hierarchies. But they were exceptional, attracted massive police attention and response, and did not characterize the broader landscape of higher-level drug trafficking in Canada.

Research on Upper-Level Drug Traffickers

Desroches’ 2007 article in the Journal of Drug Issues synthesizes approximately a dozen studies of higher-level drug trafficking conducted in developed countries — the United States, Britain, and several European nations. The research base is limited by international standards: most studies are qualitative, involve small samples, and carry significant methodological limitations. Nonetheless, the patterns that emerge across this literature are strikingly consistent and closely aligned with Desroches’ own findings.

Every study in the review described drug trafficking as a business and found that higher-level traffickers conceptualized themselves as businesspeople rather than as organized criminals. No study found evidence of monopolistic territorial control, violence used to exclude competitors, or the Mafia-style hierarchical structure that popular accounts assume. Across national contexts, higher-level syndicates were small, loosely structured, profit-oriented, and independent. They relied on trust networks built on friendship, kinship, and ethnicity. They avoided corruption of public officials. They generally avoided violence, and where violence occurred it attracted police responses that disrupted the violent group while leaving non-violent competitors to prosper.

The comparative pattern breaks down when the analysis is extended to developing countries. In nations where political institutions are weak, public officials are poorly paid, and the rule of law is contested, drug trafficking organizations can grow to a scale and achieve a degree of political influence that is simply not possible in Canada or Western Europe. In Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Venezuela, corruption is normalized, violence is more common, and the economic and political power of major trafficking organizations has in some cases placed the state itself under threat. The drug trafficking that Desroches’ research illuminates — non-violent, decentralized, entrepreneurial, flying below the radar — is characteristic of traffickers operating in stable, high-trust, institutionally robust societies. It does not describe the cartel environment of the developing world.

Key Concepts: Fronts and partial fronts: drugs extended on credit; partial fronts reduce supplier risk. Norms regulating fronts: implicit obligation to pay once possession is taken; flexibility applied in practice. The reason for the use of fronts: recruit new distributors, move product quickly, expand markets, earn premiums. Problems with the use of fronts: bad debt, loss of independence, pressure to sell under unfavourable conditions. Outlaw motorcycle gangs: hierarchical, violent, territorial; the major exception to the non-violent independent entrepreneur model. Research on higher-level drug trafficking around the world: consistent findings across developed-country studies; sharp divergence from developing-world trafficking environments.