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Criminal Contemplation, National Context, and Deterrence

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Abstract

Using random samples of adults from three European countries rarely surveyed about crime-related issues, this study seeks to identify, with more extensive indicators than is typical, individuals who are likely to contemplate the commission of criminal acts. Then, it assesses the contextual universality of deterrence claims by estimating the deterrent effectiveness of perceived formal and informal sanctions for theft and violence among crime contemplators in Greece, Russia, and Ukraine. With criminal contemplation taken into account, our findings confirm the patterns established in past research. Whereas the threat of formal punishment shows little deterrent effect, perceptions of informal sanctions appear to influence projected crime. However, supportive findings hold only in Russia and Ukraine. Overall, it appears that the deterrent effectiveness of sanctions may be to some extent contingent on cultural or contextual characteristics.

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Notes

  1. Two-stage sampling design with an initial random selection of street routes followed by the random selection of residences was employed. In each participating household, the resident 18 or more years old with a birthday closest to the date of the interview was targeted. Random replacement from an initial oversampling was employed in instances where locked apartment buildings, inability to book an interview within the designated callback time, lack of success in arranging a mutually agreeable interview time, or refusal failed to produce an interview. Approximately 70% of the respondents were random replacements, a rate that is only slightly higher than is typical in comparable city surveys in the U.S. (for example, see Latimore et al. 2006 for a description of the Oklahoma City Survey procedures) and is generally comparable to surveys in other countries (Couper and Leeuw 2003; Vågerö et al. 2008; Kordos 2005), although one might expect less cooperation in locales like these where surveys on sensitive subjects are relatively rare. In addition, to minimize bias from possible feelings of shame, embarrassment, or fears about anonymity, all questions requiring reports of past or projected crime or moral attitudes were self-administered away from the interviewers, with the respondents returning them to the interviewers in sealed envelopes containing only identifying numbers used to match with the rest of the data.

  2. Early studies trying to assess deterrence hypotheses often used self-reports of past criminal behavior, with different studies employing different lengths of recall ranging from all of the prior lifetime to the past year (see Anderson et al. 1977; Burkett and Jensen 1975; Jensen et al. 1978; Kraut 1976; see discussions by Paternoster et al. 1983; Saltzman et al. 1982). If, as the theory implies, people anticipate sanctions and then decide to act or not, deterrence cannot be assessed by looking at criminal behavior that occurred prior to the measurement of the sanction perceptions. Furthermore, some argue that prior experience with sanctions may influence future perceptions of the chances and severity of punishment. Therefore, using current perceptions to predict prior criminal behavior may not indicate anything at all about deterrence, but instead point to an “experiential” effect of prior behavior on perceptions about sanctions (Lochner 2007; Matsueda et al. 2006; Pogarsky and Piquero 2003; Saltzman et al. 1982).

  3. Projections of crime have become more popular among criminologists in recent decades (for examples see Tittle and Botchkovar 2005b; Grasmick and Bursik 1990; Grasmick and Green 1980; Hay 2001; Piquero and Pogarsky 2002; Pogarsky 2004) and they offer two main advantages for studying deterrence. First, they provide data that are correctly ordered for causal interpretation because the perceptions of sanction characteristics concern the present while the projections of criminal behavior to be predicted from sanction perceptions concern future conduct. Second, they are less threatening to respondents because they do not involve actually committed behavior, the admission of which might subject a respondent to criminal prosecution if known to the authorities. Finally, research suggests that crime projections match the actual chances of criminal involvement reasonably well (examples: Albarracin et al. 2001; Green 1989; Murray and Erickson 1987; Pogarsky 2004).

  4. Some might also contend that the strength of likely contemplation should be treated as a contingency for the effectiveness of deterrence rather than as a pre-condition for any deterrence. Logically, however, potential effects of the level of contemplation on deterrence are contradictory. On one hand, one might argue that greater degrees of contemplation should signal less deterrability because of elevated motivation for crime. Conversely, frequent contemplators may be more deterrable because even low chances of getting caught and punished are more likely to come into play to prevent heavily contemplated crime. Similarly, scant contemplation might signal high potential deterrence because those typically uninvolved in crime may be unusually fearful of sanctions. By contrast, those who rarely contemplate committing crimes may see criminal behavior as a rare opportunity that is worth the potential risk. In other words, there is a clear, definitional requirement for some degree of contemplation to be present to set the stage for deterrence, but there is no clear theoretical guidance about how the degree of contemplation might work as a contingency for deterrence. Given that uncertainty, any investigation of degree of crime contemplation as a potential contingency for deterrence would be no more than an exploratory exercise and would likely produce inconsistent findings (as we found to be the case in empirical explorations not shown).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Charles R. Tittle

  2. College of Criminal Justice, Northeastern University, 425 Churchill Hall, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Ekaterina V. Botchkovar

  3. Department of Sociology, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA

    Olena Antonaccio

Authors
  1. Charles R. Tittle
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  2. Ekaterina V. Botchkovar
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  3. Olena Antonaccio
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ekaterina V. Botchkovar.

Appendices

 

Appendix 1 Comparison of countries’ and samples’ characteristics
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Appendix 2 Deviance, sanctions, and religiosity items
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Tittle, C.R., Botchkovar, E.V. & Antonaccio, O. Criminal Contemplation, National Context, and Deterrence. J Quant Criminol 27, 225–249 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-010-9104-8

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