Rational Choice Perspective: Summary

Rational Choice Perspective: Summary

Core Principles

• Rational choice perspective: Understanding how offenders process environmental cues and situational factors to make decisions about committing crimes.
• Based on classicism criminology: Free will and hedonism.
  • Hedonism: The natural inclination to seek pleasure.
  • Rationality: Weighing advantages and disadvantages in decision-making.
• Subconscious decisions: Many decisions are made subconsciously based on experiences, especially crime-specific experiences.

De-emphasizing Dispositions

• Criminal motivations (dispositions) are hard to change.
• Limited success in finding universal solutions to criminal motivation.
• Criminal dispositions vary based on situations.

Situational Crime Prevention

• If we want to achieve immediate crime reduction.
• Adapting environments to deter crime.
• Rational choice perspective explains why situational crime prevention works.
• Situational crime prevention is effective in making crime harder to commit and reducing criminal initiation.

Key Takeaways

• Rational choice perspective is a model for understanding offender decision-making.
• It is useful for understanding specific types of crime.
• Offenders as rational beings: Weighing costs and benefits of actions.

Offender Decision-Making

• A Continuing Theme: Offender decision-making will be an ongoing theme, especially in later weeks and assessments.
• Originally Developed For: The rational choice perspective was originally developed to assist the development of situational crime prevention to work out why do these mechanisms work.

Rationality

• Rationality as Imperfect: Offenders, like everyone else, are rational beings who weigh the costs and benefits, although imperfectly, of their choices.