The underworld
There are many crimes committed everyday all over the world. A professional crime is one in which crime is committed in a specialized way with the prime motive of making economic gain.
Professional criminals who commit crimes as a regular business use techniques which have been developed over a long personal association. With their codes of behaviour and consensus, they tend to look down upon amateur criminals as 'kids'.
Professionalisation extends beyond the execution of a crime. It involves prior location of spots and prior preparation for escaping punishment in case of the detection of crime. Arrangement is made in advance for bail, legal service, and fixing the case. It is in these advance arrangements, quite as much as in the technique of executing the crime, that professionalism is found.
Some professional criminals begin their career as juvenile delinquents, some as adolescent criminals, some as youth criminals and some take the first step only after achieving adulthood and move from legitimate means of earning their livelihood to a life of criminality. His friends, security, affection, recognition, sympathy, etc. all come from the underworld. This does not mean that he totally cuts himself apart and becomes isolated from the conventional world. He continues to have friends and acquaintances in the law-abiding world also.
The nature of crime in which the professional criminal specializes determines the type of criminal he comes to be identified with. On this basis, he is called a burglar (who breaks into shops, residences, offices, and buildings and steals money, goods and merchandise. he has his own techniques of picking locks and opening doors), a sneak (who steals from shops, offices, and packed automobiles), a purse-snatcher (who snatches hand-bags from woman ), a pick-pocket (who picks pockets with his nimble fingers), a confidence man ( who gains the confidence of the victim and then cheats him), and so forth..
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