Capitalizing on Criminal Accomplices: Considering the Relationship between Co-offending and Illegal Earnings

This study investigates whether co-offending offers an avenue towards criminal success. Specifically, it considers if current and prior co-offending experience is related to the probability of reporting illegal earnings as well as the amount of these earnings. Using data from the Pathways to Desistance Study, we estimated fixed-and random-effects models to test whether co-offending experience is related to self-reported illegal earnings. The models also estimated whether “historical” co-offending experience predicted current illegal earnings. Across both modeling strategies, current and historical co-offending predicted the probability of reporting non-zero illegal earnings, net of offending frequency and controls. There is minimal evidence of a relationship between co-offending experience and the amount of illegal earnings, however. These findings lead us to conclude that access to a relatively common criminal connection—the co-offender—offers tangible benefits to adolescent offenders, primarily by affecting their ability to translate criminal opportunities into monetary gain.     

Church,State, Resistance1

This article problematizes a separation of Church and State that is nevertheless identified as constitutive of politics. Democracy has come to manifest a tension between the ‘autonomy’ of the political and a ‘heteronomy’ that, exceeding rationalist or social contractarian accounts of our co‐existence, is here presented as an irreducible affect of our being together. Autonomy, it is argued, resists heteronomy through all representations of democracy; yet, by contrast, heteronomy resists autonomy, and does so with the force of this affect. So if civil religion is impossible – and if we know only too well where its realizations lead: by default, to republican celebration, or by excess, to fascism – then we must take up again, and from scratch, the question of the affect according to which we co‐exist.