Analysis Of Boxm A Professional Thief's Journey

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Occupations labeled as a profession tend to be specialized and require a depth of knowledge and understanding of the field. Criminals can also form a profession in a specific field such as murder, thievery, or bank robbery. As a professional thief, certain jobs can be specialized such as a professional pick pocket or conman. One such job is a professional boxman. A boxman is a thieve that specializes in cracking open safes through either torching, peeling, blowing, or punching (Chambliss & King, 2004, p. 14) the safe. A book by the name of Boxman: A Professional Thief’s Journey by William J. Chambliss & Harry King details the story of a professional Boxman named Harry King and his story of becoming a specialized thief in cracking safes. This …show more content…

Harry was about 11 or 12 years old at the time and had attended the third grade before dropping out of school. Due to Harry’s absence in school, he was placed on truancy. Harry was placed in a parental school in which he would escape and go back home. As he was truant, Harry’s mother would call the police to have him sent back. This upset Harry as he didn’t fully understand the consequences of his actions that wouldn’t allow him to be home with his brother and sisters. This can be explained by Robert Agnews General Strain Theory. General Strain Theory can be labeled as three different types of strain including “failure to achieve positively valued goals, removal of a positive valued stimuli, and the presentation of a negative stimuli” (Beirne & Messerschmidt, 2015, p. 94-95). With the loss of ability to see his family, Harry experienced the loss of a positive stimuli. With a lack of understanding and increase of emotional turmoil, it enforced Harry to establish a bond with current children at the school who taught him how to steal and peddle bike pieces. The correlation of anger and frustration allowed harry to become associated with other delinquent children that helped develop his coping strategy with criminal