Louis area "seldom are members of the same criminal networks," Wright and Decker say, "making contact with active black armed robbers proved to be of almost no help to us in locating white offenders.") Because black and white offenders in the St. Louis police, in 1993, the year before Wright and Decker did their research, 82 percent of robbery arrestees were black and 18 were white the corresponding rounded figures for their study were 97 and 4. (This approach in seeking hard-to-find research subjects, called snowballing, also led to a skewed racial sample for the study. They were paid $50 each and offered an additional $10 for each referral to another robber who agreed to participate in the study. Wright and Decker's subjects are mostly black males, all of whom committed at least one robbery in the month before they were interviewed. That's why it is so riveting to read the detailed answers those cagey robbers gave to Wright and Decker and their associates when questioned about why they rob, how they choose their targets and how they feel during the heat of the offense. But what may be most striking is just how elusive criminals can be. But there were fewer than 46,000 adult felony convictions for robbery, of which almost all-more than 40,000-resulted in some incarceration in a jail or prison." Currie's point here is that our society is not as soft on crime as is claimed by those who support the buildup of the criminal-justice system.
"(I)n 1994 about 1.3 million robberies took place, of which about 619,000 were reported to the police.
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