Ask yourself who perpetrates crimes.
Do they have a job? A steady income? Stability in their life? Confidence about their future? Did they go to college or even complete high school?
Or, are they broke, desperate, possibly with chemically altered cognition, and very likely to have a limited education/understanding about the world?
The fact is - when you don’t know much, you look at the world through a very limited perspective. This restricts a person’s thinking into a narrow set of tracks that are all the most obvious paths to the goal of quick cash (often, to buy drugs to stave off the DTs for a few more hours). The stereotypical behaviors are the only things that are seemingly possible with a limited education and a chemical addiction.
The reason stereotypes exist is because most humans aren’t that creative. Most people, most of the time, will do the same basic things everyone else does in the same basic ways everyone else does it.
The main difference here is that a crook rationalizes their actions and does not properly consider key facts, like the general success rate of robberies. Most of the time, desperation plays a strong enough role as a motivator that you can see these folks telling themselves how they “have to” do this. They’ll psyche themselves up in the moments before they decide to act because they need to convince themselves that what they’re doing “has to be done” even when they know their odds of success are abysmal.
Small-time crooks are cliche because the underlying reasons behind what made them crooks is always the same three or four things - poor, uneducated, desperate, and (often) addicted to something. The educated crooks are smart enough to get laws passed to make their crimes legal.
“Are we the baddies?” ponders Gen-X’s Rush Limbaugh copycat after decades of being a mouthpiece for Russian agitprop.