The Rational Actor

The emergence of the rational actor

Historic conditions

  • Pre-modern perceptions of crime were predominantly attuned to notions of sin

    • Natural law

    • Crime was not a secular term

    • Power rested with the Crown and Church

  • Spiritual explanations for crime and spiritual solutions

    • Aetiology based on principle that God is the cause of all things

    • Crime conceived as a personal rather than national problem

  • Crime caused by the devil, his familiars and his agents

  • Punishment enacted for spiritual not temporal reasons

  • Ultimately criminals had offended against God not individual victims

  • Punishments were violent and vicious

  • Torture was common place

  • Executions were often public and prolonged ordeals

  • Law lacked conditions

    • Crime was based on offences against God

    • Many punishments resulted in death

    • The point of punishment was to rehabilitate the soul

      • Individuals confessed their sins so they don’t go to hell — fire was used a lot to mimic fire of hell

    • Little law that was consistently written down — not codified across the UK. Lack of systems so no CJS back then. Law applied unequally and in religious context. People didn’t think crime could be controlled as it was spiritual forces

Intellectual foundations

  • 1700s — time of rapid change. Moved away from barbaric systems and towards rational and disciplining systems

  • Ideas of crime and sin rooted in religious teaching were gradually replaced by a set of secular concerns

  • The management and categorisation of the individual became the primary concern of the bureaucratic state

    • Got lawyers before police force

  • Social contract —

    • Free moral agents (own choice and decisions),

    • free exercise of will

      • Humans possessed several innate characteristics. The have autonomy (freedom)

  • Utilitarianism

    • The greatest happiness of the greatest number. Rules make people unhappy. Need to give away autonomy to be protected from each other by the state so rule breakers unhappy.

    • Emphasis on hedonism as the basic human trait

      • Humans do what is best for themselves

  • Pleasure-pain principle

    • All offenders are rational beings (capable of making decisions)

    • Calculations of costs and rewards (Minimise pain)

    • Hedonistic impulse

    • Utility maximisation

Classical theory

  • Human traits: Hedonism

  • Utilitarian: greatest happiness of greatest number

  • Human autonomy: free will

  • Desire for fair system

Intellectual foundations

  • Declaration of the rights of man

  • French penal code

  • Legal doctrine of mens rea or guilty mins

  • Sentencing principles

  • Structure of punishment

  • Rise of imprisonment

Understanding Deterrence

  • Final theoretic assumption of classical crim

  • Most common policy reaction to crime in the West is to call for more penalties, increased sentencing powers, more police and more imprisonment

  • Underlying assumptions that punishment deters

    • Specific and general deterrence

    • Celerity of punishment

    • Certainty of punishment

    • Severity of punishment

  • Classical approaches predict an inverse or negative relationship. If certainty and severity are high crime should be low

  • If the basic deterrence hypothesis was correct then we would expect:

    1. Lower recidivism rates following custodial sentences, compared to community sentences

    2. The longer the sentence, the lower the rates of recidivism

    3. Lower crime rates in jurisdictions that apply the maximum penalty

  • Empirical testing focussed on deterrence rates in relation to the sanctioned use of the death penalty failed to demonstrate significance

  • There is no sound evidence for any of these propositions, and conversely, there is evidence of increased recidivism

  • Understanding the ‘paradox of deterrence’ can only be achieved if we understand how individuals make decisions

Rational Choice Theory

  • RC came to prominence in the 1800s as a result of the crisis of aetiology and rehabilitation

    • Primarily associated with Ron Clarke

    • Originally an economic model of offending

  • One of the most ‘practical’ and popular explanations for offending

  • Based on expected utility/opportunity theory

    • Offenders make decisions based on cost and benefit

    • Increased cost and benefit

    • Increasing cost or reducing benefit will reduce crime

    • Understanding the decisions making precess is key

  • Central point is that all choices and decisions are impacted by both internal and external variables

  • Choice Structuring Properties:

    • Availability

    • Awareness of method

    • Likely yield

    • Competence of method

    • Planning necessary

    • Immediacy of need

Rational Utility

  • All offending serves a purpose (cost and benefit)

  • Rationality is bounded:

    1. Offenders rarely possess all the facts

    2. Criminal choices are often made quickly

    3. Offenders do not plan specifics but tend to improvise and generalise

    4. Risk assessment is short not long term

  • The theory demonstrates that minimum rational is a feature of offending

  • Process dependent upon crime type and situational variables:

    1. Involvement decisions

      • Impacted by personality traits, emotions, beliefs and attitudes

    2. Event decisions

      • Impacted by previous experience, target availability and immediate situational variables

Crime scripts

  • Clarke and Cornish — generic crime scripts of offending decisions

  • Most human action follows identifiable patterns

  • Possible to map human action and therefore answer questions of what, when, who and how

  • Numerous crime scripts now exist

  • Such an approach does not explain why certain individuals or groups offend

    • It explains why crime happens