Blog

Module 2 – Rational Choice, Deterrence & Environmental Criminology Article Review. Article that needs to be reviewed is attached. Directions are below and course material as well as the book used is listed below. Article Reviews due (posted) by February 1, 11:59p (est)Article Review GuidelinesThe purpose of the article reviews is to develop your ability to summarize, critically evaluate and communicate conclusions from scholarly research on the causes of crime. You will use these reviews to help each other understand the evidence supporting or refuting particular theories of crime. You will post your review on the course web site so that other students can use it to prepare for class and to inform their responses to exam questions. These guidelines will help you prepare your review.In general, you should write the review with the goal of educating other students about the reading. Your review should: (1) summarize the main points of the article and (2) provide some critical analysis of the reading. Try to keep it short – shoot for no more than two pages (double- spaced), but under three pages is okay. Here are some suggested questions that will help guide you in constructing the two sections of your review:Summary: What question does the article try to answer? What does the article seek to understand or contribute to our understanding of crime? How did the article study this issue? Since this is not a methods class, keep this brief and “non-technical.” Simply provide some basic information about how they studied the question. What did the article find or conclude? Did the findings support the theory or their expectations?Evaluation: What are the strengths and weakness of the study? What does the article miss? What would you add to improve the article? How does the study contribute to our understanding of crime? The article’s literature review or your text might help you out with this point. What are the implications of this article for public policy or future research? What questions does it raise?The best article reviews will have the following qualities: Complete and accurate. Your summary should show that you understand the main findings of the article. That is, your reader should be able to understand the article’s point without having to read the actual article itself. Avoid unnecessary details about the methods and prior research – focus on the findings. Clear and Accessible. Explain or “break down” complex ideas in your own words. Work to make the article accessible for other students when you write your review. Remember your job is to “translate” the academic language for a more general audience. Avoiding using lots of direct quotes from the article – summarize, summarize, summarize!  Evaluation. Identify important contributions of the article (its strengths) or major gaps (its weaknesses) for the class. Provide your reasons for these points. This section can be hard, but try it to help other students.Some helpful tips for reading academic literature: Do not get bogged down in the technical information. You will find that the articles are dense and present complex information. You also find that because these articles are empirical “tests” of theories, they have lengthy research methods sections, which contain highly technical information about methods and statistics. You should just skim through this section and focus on what they found or didn’t find. Read the beginning of the article for the research questions or problem. In the beginning of the research paper, the authors are establishing the reasons for why they are studying this question. They discuss prior research and theory and they attempt to show where their new study fits into this literature. You will want to use this section to look for the research questions they are asking and why they are asking them. Read the conclusions or discussion for the general findings. This is the best and easiest section in which to find the main points of the study. Most students get tired of reading the article before they get to this. So read the background then skip ahead to the conclusions. This will help you get to what is important about the article. Avoid writing while you read. Attempt to read through the article and take some notes that you will want to include in your paper. Then “step back” and try to summarize the paper. This will help you write in your own words and voice. Go back to the article only to fill in key details. Textbook: Criminological Theory: Past to present by Francis Cullen, Robert Agnew, Pamela Wilcox. Cullen, Agnew & Wilcox Part X Introduction: Reviving Classical Theory: Deterrence and Rational Choice TheoriesReading 28. Stafford & Warr, Reconceptualizing Deterrence TheoryReading 29. Cornish & Clarke, Crime as Rational ChoicePart XI Introduction: Environmental CriminologyReading 31. Cohen & Felson, Routine Activities TheoryReading 49. Clarke, Situational Crime PreventionReading 48. Wilson & Kelling, Broken WindowsModule 2: Study Guide Rational Choice and Deterrence TheoriesBackgroundWe begin our discussion of crime theory with rational choice and deterrence theory for several reasons. First, rational choice is one of the most fundamental models of human behavior. While even economists and scholars from other fields that use the model as a starting point recognize the limitations of the basic model, it is also a widely-accepted vision of all types of human behavior. Second, rational choice provides the foundation for deterrence-based policies, which as you will see, are the rationale behind much of the criminal justice system’s approach to dealing with crime. Finally, these theories’ ideas are grounded in some of the earliest formalized thinking about crime and justice. The ideas and reforms proposed by what became known as the “classical school” or “classical theory” remain influential today. As discussed in the historical overview in Module 1, the ideas from classical school thinkers replaced old ideas about spiritual or demonic explanations of crime and began to establish a more rational basis for punishment and understanding crime. We have intense debates about justice approaches today – around the death penalty, long periods of incarceration – but there is no doubt that the reforms pushed for from classical school thinking led to a less brutal and rational approach to crime even if those reforms would seem out of mainstream today.Rational choice and deterrence theories are among the oldest and most widely-used theories of crime. In the introduction to the Part I, the textbook discusses the ideas of classical theorists, focusing attention on Cesare Beccaria and his classic work, An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (p. 26), which is included in the readings. Building on the ideas of Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Hobbes, Beccaria, developed some of the foundational ideas behind rational choice and deterrence theory that continue to influence our understanding of criminal behavior and public policy. Bentham is best known for his ideas related to “free will” and what we often call the “pleasure-pain principle,” which suggests that people are motivated by a desire to do pleasurable things and avoid painful things. Modern theorists make this same argument about human behavior by making the assumption that people are “utility maximizers.” Beccaria applied the ideas to recommend a set of reforms around the existing systems of punishment of the time based on this underlying understanding of human behavior.Several of Beccaria’s “reforms” from the reading excerpt are worth noting here because they connect to our discussion of criminal behavior and the rationale for punishment. First, Beccaria saw punishment as necessary to society because people, motivated by self-interest, would harm collective society. Here you have the utilitarian justification for creating laws and systems of punishments where behaviors harm the greater good. Second, Beccaria argues that the punishment for crimes should be proportional to the harm produced by the behavior:…the means made use of by the legislature to prevent crimes, should be more powerful, in proportion as they are destructive of the public safety and happiness, and as the inducements to commit them are stronger.You see in the quote above that proportionality is connected to the offense’s harm to society – “destructive of the public safety” – but also the benefits that potential offenders may gain from the crime – “inducements to commit are stronger.” You’ll see more of how this works when we examine deterrence theory.Finally, among his other ideas, Beccaria recognized that the purpose of punishment “…is no other, than to prevent the criminal from doing further injury to society, and to prevent others from committing the like offense.” If we hadn’t known Beccaria was writing about 350 years ago we might think some modern criminologists and legal scholars were making these points: punishments should be proportional to the social costs of crime and connected to the benefits of the crime to the individual in order to meet the goal of deterrence and prevention. That, in a nutshell, is the same rationale behind much of the modern criminal justice system responses to crime. You should examine the reading from Beccaria in the text as an important historical work in the early development of crime theory; pay attention to the connections between his ideas and current thought and practice.Classical school ideas re-emerged in the 1970s with the rise of economists and policy analysis in the field of criminal justice, along with a more conservative approach to crime control. Gary Becker’s work, “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach,” from his book Economics of Crime and Punishment and James Wilson’s “Thinking A

bout Crime” article from the Atlantic Monthly were highly influential in establishing modern rational choice theory as an central argument about crime causation. The research of modern rational choice theorists, changes in the political environment, prominence of conservative thinkers (like Wilson) in public policy development, as well as real and perceived beliefs about the rise of crime, a generally understood to varying degrees to have led to much of “crime control era” -policy approaches – mandatory sentencing, mass incarceration, heightened police surveillance and arrest practices. These approaches may be moving out of favor in recent years but represent some of the key debates about justice policy in our society. Modern Rational Choice TheoryJames Q. Wilson’s begins his Atlantic Monthly piece with an example about a young person considering the crime of purse snatching. (We link to the piece, which is derived from his classic text, on the week’s overview page for your reference.) In Wilson’s scenario, the potential offender is interested in having a good time, sees an opportunity for an easy crime, and considers his options. We’d like to put the question to you in a slightly different manner:Suppose someone left an iPod on a table next you at a fast food restaurant. You initially think they’ll come back, but when you look up again you see them driving out of the lot. No one is around and you are about to leave yourself.Would you take it? What costs or benefits of this crime would you consider?As the scenario above suggests, the main proposition of rational choice theory is that people weigh the costs and benefits of criminal behavior in the same way they do just about every other behavior and choose the alternative with the greatest benefit. If it benefits someone to sell drugs more than it does to make money through legitimate means, then that individual will choose to sell drugs (but see the “research in focus” in this lecture on this issue). Some of the costs associated with selling drugs are the potential of being punished, the potential for physical violence, and the economic costs of losing a legitimate job, while the benefits include the money you might make from selling drugs as well as less tangible benefits. So just as you might consider the costs and benefits of different graduate programs or of buying different cars, potential offenders (meaning, all people) weigh the costs and benefits of criminal behavior. The “rational actor” chooses those actions or behaviors that benefit them the greatest—or at least that they perceive to benefit them the greatest.Although this argument makes a good deal of sense, it hinges on several assumptions about human behavior you should understand before we further discuss these theories. All theories of crime rest on underlying assumptions about human behavior that we cannot necessarily or easily test. Some of the main assumptions about human behavior that rational choice theorists make are the following:people seek to maximize their utility;they recognize a range of possible alternatives;they have information available to them about the likely consequences of each choice; andthey can therefore rank the choices according to benefits. Rational choice theorists, applying these assumptions to decisions about human behavior, contend, to some extent, that all people are essentially the same rational actors, which differs from the other theories of crime (notably, the biological theories taken up next week). (See also our discussion of the historical evolution of criminological theory and the text’s Section 1 Introduction on “In Search of the Criminal ‘Man’”.)These are relative reasonable assumptions for most people, most of the time. Herbert Simon explains in Administrative Behavior, a classic work in organizational theory and social science generally, that people are more likely to act according to “bounded rationality,” rather than in the purely rational manner that rational choice and deterrence theorists suggest. Without entirely rejecting the assumptions of “rational man,” he explains that this means we often have somewhat limited information about choices and consequences of our actions. The consequence of this is that we act to “satisfice,” rather than to maximize our utility. We essentially “make do” with what we have and select the best choice at that time given a variety of constraints.Wilson’s essay, which defends the rational choice theory and deterrence-based policies, identifies correctly that much of the debate around rational choice between different social science fields hinges on the assumptions. He points out that “delay, uncertainty and ignorance” makes applications of the rational choice model to crime more complex. Costs and benefits of crime are delayed and, in some cases, so far off it would be hard for us to “see” them correctly. Every cost and benefit come with some likely unknown or at least hard-to-guess-at probability of it taking place. In our updated scenario, the probability of getting the iPod successfully is fairly high and we would be fairly certain about it. But what is the probability of you successfully robbing a liquor store or setting out to deal drugs?You should consider the ways these assumptions affect the validity of the theories discussed in these sections. Do you agree with these assumptions of human behavior? Do they apply to all types of crime and all people? What kinds of conditions need to be met?An important point connected to the concept of rationality is that a rational choice is not something we would all think is the best course of action, objectively speaking in economic terms. What is rational to one person may not be rational to another based on their perceptions of the costs and benefits. People act in ways that are consistent with rational choice theory when they simply believe they are acting in their best interests. To use an extreme example, according to rational choice theorist, then, drug addicts act rationally to use heroin because in the short term they believe this benefits them the most, even though in the long term, it does not. The issues of physical addiction or underlying psychological issues are deemphasized. Describing rational choice this way almost makes it sound like it can never be wrong, but research we describe throughout this lecture qualifies and points to limitations in the model. There is a good deal of evidence testing the extent to which potential offenders act in a manner consist with rational choice theory. Much of this is related to tests of deterrence theory, which is a more practical application of the theory, so we will hold off examining that research in depth here for now. The next section, Research in Focus, examines drug-dealing gangs from an economics of crime perspective as one example of research looking into how that rational calculus plays out—or not—among young men around drug dealing.Research in FocusSection Introduction: Throughout the course, we will be using “Research in Focus” sections to highlight some empirical research related to the theory we are examining. Your textbook provides the classic readings, which are often the initial statements of theories or important works in a theory’s development. This section fits with one of the main goals of the course: to help you understand the empirical evidence around each theory of crime. These sections may also illustrate innovative or model methods for studying the questions from each theory of crime. Pay attention to them and use them, if applicable, as empirical evidence to inform your writing assignments.Research in Focus: Economics of Drug-Dealing GangsundefinedThe Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115, undefinedSteven Levitt, who co-authored the popular book Freakonmics, and Sudhir Venkatesh, author of Gang Leader for a Day, studied the economics of a street gang in Chicago in a novel way. Levitt and Venkatesh were able to analyze the financial records of a drug dealing gang to understand the extent to which financial gain motivates gang membership and activity. Like any other organizations involved in profit-driven business endeavors, the gang kept detailed records of how much money they brought in and how much money they had to pay out (for salaries and other expenditures). Levitt and Venkatesh test several questions using the gang’s financial records that inform our discussion of rational choice theory.One relevant question they address is: Do members of drug dealing gangs make more money than legitimate employment opportunities available to them? Based on one of their most conservative estimates of wages, here is what they found out about gang member wages for the first year of the study:All Members:$5.90 per hourSoldiers:$2.50 per hourLeaders:$32.30 per hourWhat does this say about the rationality of individuals participating in a drug dealing gang? Does their calculus add up? Levitt and Venkatesh show that soldiers make less than what they could potentially make in most legitimate job opportunities available to them in service-sector employment. These data then do not necessarily support the idea that financial gain as a motivation for participation here. The authors do point out one way in which economic gain could motivate participation here. They explain that only the potential—however unlikely—of becoming a gang leader makes gang membership financially beneficial. Gang leaders do make more, but the chances of achieving the “leader” salary are slim and there are numerous other potential costs that should prevent people from engaging in this activity. One cost the author’s highlight are those related to personal safety; this alone should make this a poor economic decision.Still drug-dealing gangs continue to exist and young people continue to participate despite the lack of economic payoff described in Levitt and Venkatesh’s analysis. Why do you think this is the case?