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cj450d_chpt_5_crime_as_choice.pptxCrime as Choice
CHAPTER 5
CJ 450D
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Learning Goal
Students will learn how rationality, emotion, and criminal behavior are linked as they explore the Rational Choice and Routine Activities Theories.
Performance Objectives
Describe the basic tenets of rational choice theory.
Explain what is rationality.
Discuss routine activities theory and how it differs from rational choice theory.
List the three suggested elements that need to be present for crime to occur.
Critique both rational choice and routine activities theories.
Performance Objectives
Describe and evaluate cultural criminology.
Define “emotions” and list which ones are important in preventing crime.
Explain the rationality/emotion relationship.
List several ways crime may be prevented under rational choice and routine activities theories.
Introduction
The increasing crime rates of the late 1970’s / early 1980’s saw the start of a more conservative attitude in criminology.
Many theories at that time were tracing “root causes” of crime to society. What is problematic with this view?
It leads offenders to view themselves as victims rather than take personal responsibility.
Introduction
Two popular theories that emerged were rational choice and routine activities theories.
Both theories…
Emphasize roles of criminal situations and the benefits to risk ratio in deciding whether to engage in crime.
Are more concerned with crime than criminality.
Favor the foreground of crime – the immediate situation and thought process of the person at the time of the crime.
Rational Choice Theory
Basic tenets include –
People freely choose their behavior and are motivated by what advantage they main gain.
People are rational and will respond in ways that maximize pleasure and minimize pain.
Criminal behavior is all about attempts to gain some sort of personal satisfaction (pleasure) or to remove some source of irritation (pain).
Criminal behavior is a choice made in context of personal and situational constraints and opportunities.
Rational Choice Theory
Human agency is a concept that maintains humans have the capacity to make choices and the responsibility to make moral ones regardless of internal or external constraints on one’s ability to do so.
Just as non-offenders purposely weigh options before deciding on a course of action, so do offenders before deciding to commit a crime.
What is Rationality?
It is the quality of thinking and behaving in accordance with logic and reason so that one’s reality is an ordered and intelligible system for achieving goals and solving problems.
It is the state of having good sense and sound judgment.
We base our choices on the evidence before us at any given time and when we revise our reasoning (and our behavior) new evidence arises.
What is Rationality?
Max Weber talked about two types of rationality:
Purpose or instrumental rationality which is to say that rationality is innate and is self-serving.
Value rationality is related to such things as honor or duty to some revered entity (one’s country, group, or God), or idea (patriotism, ideology, religion).
Constraints on Rationality
Rationality is both subjective (personal and biased) and bounded (it has limits).
Because of these constraints, rational strategies can produce unwanted outcomes.
We do not all make the same calculations or arrive at the same plan when pursuing the same goals.
We may think we are behaving in ways that best serve our self-interest, but we may be ignorant of some factors and misinterpret others.
Constraints on Rationality
Rational choice theorists would say that criminal events are the result of choice structuring.
Crime requires motivated offenders meeting situations they perceive as an opportunity to acquire something they want.
Constraints on Rationality
Routine Activities Theory
Devised by Cohen and Felson in 1979.
Attempts to explain crime in different societies and neighborhoods without invoking individual differences in criminal propensity.
Routine activities are the day-to-day activity patterns that characterize a particular place that either invite or deter crime.
Proposed that societies affluence is as much a “cause” of crime as its poverty because affluence brings with it many opportunities for crime.
Routine Activities Theory
Model for when a criminal event is likely to occur:
Motivated offenders are people willing and able to commit crimes.
Suitable targets are persons that offenders view as vulnerable and who possess something they want.
Capable guardians are persons or things that deter criminal activity.
If these three elements do not converge in time and space, then crime is not likely to occur
Routine Activities Theory
A crime will only be committed when a motivated offender believes they have found something worth stealing or someone to victimize who is lacking a capable guardian.
Evaluation of RC & RA Theories
Most glaring criticism is their assumption of rationality.
If everyone is rational (wanting to maximize pleasure and minimize pain), then rationality is a constant and cannot explain something as variable as human behavior.
The typical criminal’s rationality is severely bounded.
More than 66% of released inmates return to prison which is hardly maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain.
Criminals are not walking computers who routinely take the time to run a pros/cons analysis of their every move.
Evaluation of RC & RA Theories
They tend to ignore social conditions that may contribute to the motivations of offenders, because they concentrate on crime as a process of unfolding events.
They have a narrow focus…
Chronic criminals do not just bump into criminal opportunities, they actively create them, even if the benefits do not outweigh the possible costs.
Theories do not explain what differentiates a career criminal from short term criminals from non-offenders.
Cultural Criminology
A relatively new theory that is in direct opposition to rational choice theory, but provides a discussion on emotion as a prime motivator of behavior.
Views much of modern crime as the result of the breakdown of culture in context of a destabilizing economic globalization.
Also known as the “McDonaldization” of society becoming more obsessed with consumerism, hedonism, sex, and violence.
Cultural Criminology
Introduced the concept of anelpis (“without hope”) which is a state of mind involving the presence of virtually total cynicism and nihilism: no opinions, no expectations, no hope, no fear of authority.
Cultural criminologists trace cultural breakdown to economic globalization and relentless financial poverty, which in turn produces this anelpis mindset.
Cultural Criminology
View emotions as primarily causing criminal behaviors.
Emotion motivating crime is a rather permanent fixture of many criminals’ mental states.
The primary appeal of crime is its intrinsic rewards (the thrill and rush of taking risks and getting away with it).
Most criminals are motivated by short-run hedonism, which is expressive, malicious, and destructive.
Evaluating Cultural Criminology
Has done a service by emphasizing the role of emotions in criminality.
Looking at the offenders’ subjective point of view allows us insight into their thought processes, motives, values, and emotions.
Has an anarchic quality that constantly references resistance to state repression and oppression.
Promotes a negative view of social control agents, romanticized view of criminals, and a disdain for empirical science.
Emotions
Are subjective feelings of varying strength prompted by nervous system arousal in response to some perceived event.
Are situated in the limbic system where our reasoning power is housed.
Modern neuroscience has demonstrated that emotion and cognition are fully physically integrated in the lateral prefrontal cortex that weights rational and emotional information coming in their respective brain regions to guide human actions.
Crime Preventing Emotions
Positive emotions that function to prevent criminal behaviors have been ignored in criminology.
Empathy channels helping behaviors and moves us to rapidly assess and respond to situations.
Guilt involves anxiety, remorse, and concern about how one’s actions have negatively impacts others.
It is psychologically punitive so it motivates us to not repeat bad behavior, moves us toward reparative behavior, and motivates approach behavior
Shame is more self-centered as it involves and appraisal of self-worth in light of the behavior in question.
It is a private emotion with only the person experiencing it being aware of what is causing it.
Conscience is what keeps us on a law abiding path and the lack thereof is what allows criminals permission to prey on others.
While even the worst criminals are aware intellectually of what is right and wrong; the problem is that their weak social emotions allow them to discount that knowledge.
Crime Preventing Emotions
Policy & Prevention
The key to crime prevention for these theories is to reduce criminal opportunities by minimizing the occasions where potential offenders and suitable targets will cross paths.
To do so, you must make the environment more difficult and risky to offend.
Target hardening is one way to accomplish this. What are some examples?
Policy & Prevention
Have police concentrate on “hot spots” by crime mapping, instead of random patrol.
Create defensible space through environmental design.
Bringing people together into a tribe-like sense of community by designing the physical environment so as to awaken the territorial nature of humans.
Arranging streets to generate a sense of belonging to “my special little neighborhood.”
Who are these two?
Charles Manson
Bill Gates
NEXT WEEK…
Chapter 7 – Social Process Theory
Chapter 6 – Social Structural Theory
