Abstract
Objectives
A survey of empirical research concerning the determinants of an individual’s perceptions of the risk of formal sanctions as a consequence of criminal behavior. The specific questions considered are: (1) How accurate is people’s knowledge about criminal sanctions? (2) How do people acquire and modify their subjective probabilities of punishment risk? (3) How do individuals act on their risk perceptions in specific criminal contexts?
Methods
Three broad classes of extant studies are reviewed. The first is the relationship between objective sanctions, sanction enforcement, and risk perceptions—research that includes calibration studies and correlational studies. The second is the relationship between punishment experiences (personal and vicarious) and change in risk perceptions, in particular, research that relies on formal models of Bayesian learning. The third is the responsiveness of would-be offenders to immediate environmental cues—a varied empirical tradition that encompasses vignette research, offender interviews, process tracing, and laboratory studies.
Results
First, research concerning the accuracy of risk perceptions suggests that the average citizen does a reasonable job of knowing what criminal penalties are statutorily allowed, but does a quite poor job of estimating the probability and magnitude of the penalties. On the other hand, studies which inquire about more common offenses (alcohol and marijuana use) from more crime-prone populations (young people, offenders) reveal that perceptions are consistently better calibrated to actual punishments. Second, research on perceptual updating indicates that personal experiences and, to a lesser degree, vicarious experiences with crime and punishment are salient determinants of changes in risk perceptions. Specifically, individuals who commit crime and successfully avoid arrest tend to lower their subjective probability of apprehension. Third, research on the situational context of crime decision making reveals that risk perceptions are highly malleable to proximal influences which include, but are not limited to, objective sanction risk. Situational risk perceptions appear to be particularly strongly influenced by substance use, peer presence, and arousal level.
Conclusions
The perceptual deterrence tradition is theoretically rich, and has been renewed in the last decade by creative empirical tests from a variety of social scientific disciplines. Many knowledge gaps and limitations remain, and ensuing research should assign high priority to such considerations as sampling strategies and the measurement of risk perceptions.
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Notes
Paternoster (2010) provides an interesting survey of the intellectual roots of modern deterrence theory. Excellent theoretical and empirical reviews of early deterrence research are available in Zimring and Hawkins (1973), Andenaes (1974), Gibbs (1975), Nagin (1978), and Cook (1980). Updated reviews are provided in Nagin (1998), Apel and Nagin (2011), and Piquero et al. (2011).
The committee’s conclusion concerning recent legislative changes was blunt: “While the Legislature had supposedly responded to public appeal and increased the penalties for crime of violence to victims, this was not known by the public” (Assembly Committee on Criminal Procedure 1968: 14).
These researchers have suggested that sanction perceptions are grounded less in punishment reality and knowledge of criminal codes, than in social condemnation of criminal acts and respondent beliefs about what ought to be done about crime (Erickson and Gobbs 1978; Williams and Gibbs 1981; Williams et al. 1980).
Sherman (1990) suggested that crackdowns result in initial deterrence because of a short-term increase in the objective risk of apprehension, which decays when police back off. However, certain crackdowns have the capacity to produce residual deterrence following initial deterrence decay, because of greater uncertainty in apprehension risk that persists past the crackdown. He advocated policy approaches which capitalize on would-be offenders’ “ambiguity aversion” (see Tversky and Kahneman 1974).
An interesting anomaly is the finding by Apospori et al. (1992) that, in their sample of arrestees, sanctioned offending was correlated with lower risk perceptions. They surmised that more prolific offenders learn that the risk of apprehension is actually quite low, and that the experience of being punished is not as aversive as they might have believed. Other scholars have reported that some offenders, especially those with prior prison experience, actually exhibit a preference for prison sentences over probation (Crouch 1993; McClelland and Alpert 1985).
Hjalmarsson (2009) also estimated models of change in criminal behavior at the age of criminal majority in the NLSY97, but her data only allowed her to estimate reduced-form models, because her measure of risk perceptions was limited to auto theft. She found some evidence that criminal behavior declined at the age of criminal majority, although her results differed by offense type and were highly sensitive to how she adjusted for age. For other mixed evidence on changes in behavior at the age of criminal majority, see Levitt (1998) and Lee and McCrary (2005).
In criminology, research on criminal event decision making is closely tied to the tradition of research on situational crime prevention (Clarke 1983).
Additionally, in the presence of a group of same-aged peers, participants were significantly more likely to engage in risk-taking behavior in a computerized game, and to choose a riskier course of action in hypothetical decision-making dilemmas (e.g., allowing friends to bring drugs into one’s house, stealing a car, cheating on an exam). These peer effects were particularly strong among adolescents and young adults.
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Acknowledgments
Portions of this article were presented at the Deterrence and the Death Penalty workshop, in April 2011 at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. The author is thankful for constructive comments provided by meeting participants, and would like to specifically thank Daniel Nagin and Philip Cook.
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Apel, R. Sanctions, Perceptions, and Crime: Implications for Criminal Deterrence. J Quant Criminol 29, 67–101 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-012-9170-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-012-9170-1