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Armed Robbers offers a frank account of the experiences of 42 convicted armed robbers in Australia suffused with moral ambiguities. Their accounts are interwoven with historical events and national folk tales - each contribute threads that when sewn together produce a uniquely Australian criminal identity.
List of contents
- Part One: Encounters
- 1: Introduction
- 2: The Edge of Reason: Affective Transgression
- 3: Prison Research
- Part Two: Identity and Performance
- 4: The Lucky Country: National Mythscapes and the Australian Dream
- 5: Becoming an Armed Robber: Performativity and Affect
- 6: Doing Rob (and Getting Away with It): Planning and Process
- Part Three: Rewards
- 7: The Usual Suspects: Cash and Drugs
- 8: The Magic Carpet Ride: Flow, Affect, and Automaticity
- Part Four: Such is Life
- 9: Getting Caught and Doing Time
- 10: Conclusion: Such Is Life: Affect, Fatalism, and Crime
About the author
Dr. Emmeline Taylor is Associate Professor in Criminology at City, University of London. Her research explores several dimensions of crime and criminal behaviour with particular emphasis on the experiences and motivations of offenders, new technologies, the police, and retail crime. Dr Taylor has published extensively across these topics, including the books: Surveillance Schools (2013, Palgrave), Surveillance Futures (Routledge, 2017), and Crime, Deviance and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
Summary
Notoriously difficult to access, armed robbers have mostly eluded the attempts of authors to access their lives. Aside from biographies of the most infamous, the stories of armed robbers, as varied, bizarre, and captivating as they are, have rarely been told. This has resulted in robbers being considered as largely homogenous; their unique pathways to crime ignored or lumped into ill-defined stereotypes. Yet their routes into one of the most serious violent crimes could not be more varied. Written by a leading female criminologist, Armed Robbers relays the powerful, sometimes amusing, often harrowing stories of 42 convicted criminals in Australia. Their accounts are interwoven with historical events and national folk tales - colonial settlement, convict ancestry, gold rushes, and a sometimes-ferocious hyper-masculinity born of frustration and constructed in forgotten towns - each contribute threads that when sewn together produce a uniquely Australian criminal identity.
Additional text
The conclusions Taylor reaches are those readers may intuitively suspect: offenders have been exposed to violence for much of their lives, and drugs and abuse play a part in shaping behaviour. Yet the observational approach adds real-world nuance, and not all outcomes are entirely to be expected.
