Routine Activity and Rational Choice

Volume 5

Richard D. Lambert, Ronald V. Clarke, Marcus Felson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780765808318
• eBook ISBN: 9781351492546
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Two new criminological approaches are defined and applied to categories of crime in Routine Activity and Rational Choice, now available in paperback. Routine activity analyzes the criminal event, and avoids motivations and psychology as topics for discussion, whereas rational choice approaches crime as purposive behavior designed to meet the offender's commonplace needs, such as money, status, sex, and excitement. These conceptual models are both employed to analyze such crimes as drunk driving, gun use, kidnapping, and political violence. This volume discusses the relationship of these theories to more traditional approaches to crime studies.The Advances in Criminological Theory series encourages theory construction and validation in the articles and themes selected for publication. It also furthers the free exchange of ideas, propositions, and postulates. Following publication of the first volume, Michael J. Lynch of Florida State University asserted that "Advances in Criminological Theory is to be applauded as an attempt to revive criminological theory by providing an accessible outlet." Contributions to this volume include: Pierre Tremblay, "Searching for Suitable Co-offenders"; Raymond Paternoster and Sally Simpson, "A Rational Choice Theory of Corporate Crime"; Richard B. Felson, "Predatory and Dispute-related Violence"; Gordon Trasler, "Conscience, Opportunity, Rational Choice, and Crime"; Ezzat A. Fattah, "The Rational Choice/Opportunity Perspectives as a Vehicle for Integrating Criminological and Victimological Theories"; Patricia L. Brantingham and Paul J. Brantingham, "Environment, Routine, and Situation"; Maurice Cusson, "A Strategic Analysis of Crime"; Richard W. Harding, "Gun Use in Crime, Rational Choice, and Social Learning Theory."

Introduction: Criminology, Routine Activity, and Rational Choice

Ronald V. Clarke and Marcus Felson

It might seem strange that proponents of two distinct theoretical approaches should join forces in a single volume less than fifteen years after the appearance of what might be considered competing paradigms. This theoretical cooperation may be all the more surprising when both proponents feel confident in the viability and vitality of their respective approaches. In fact, the routine activity and rational choice approaches, though differing in scope and purpose, are compatible and, indeed, mutually supportive. This volume provides the opportunity to acknowledge this compatibility and to give shape to the informal collaboration that has existed for some years among the contributors and editors. It has also provided an opportunity to consider the relationship between routine activity and rational choice and some other related theoretical and preventive approaches. Lastly, it has encouraged a fuller treatment of the relationship between these new approaches to crime and the traditional theories that currently dominate the textbooks. These topics are discussed below, but first we turn to brief descriptions of the routine activity and rational choice approaches.

The Routine Activity Approach

The routine activity approach (Cohen and Felson 1979) began by considering only direct-contact predatory violations. These required that at least one offender take or damage the property of at least one other person. This excluded any interest in such criminal violations as fights between equally "guilty" parties or illegal drug sales between consenting persons. Note also the use of the word violations rather than the word crime. The latter word is ambiguous about whether it refers to any single event or a general category, whereas the word violation directly refers to an event. To emphasize this point, the original paper continuously repeated the words incident and event, also using the modifier direct-contact to underline the concern for direct physical contact between offender and target of crime. Similarly, the word victim was avoided, since this person need not be immediately present, whereas the routine activity approach insisted upon discussing who and what was present during a criminal incident. Persons were treated virtually as objects and their motivations were scrupulously avoided as a topic of discussion, in stark contrast to the heavy motivational emphasis of virtually all contemporary criminology at that time. Even the word motivation was avoided, and the word inclination substituted so as to avoid reminding the reader that motivations might exist. Thus, at the outset the approach distinguished clearly between criminal inclinations and criminal events and made that distinction a centerpiece rather than a footnote. Moreover, it cast its lot unquestionably with events rather than inclinations. It did not deny the existence of criminal inclinations, but took these as given, virtually dismissing what was central to most contemporary criminology of the 1960s and 1970s.

The routine activity approach stated three minimal elements for direct-contact predatory crime: a likely offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian against crime. A likely offender was anybody who for any reason might commit a crime. How this likelihood might vary was avoided since that would bring up the forbidden issue of criminal motivation. A suitable target of crime was any person or object likely to be taken or attacked by the offender. The word target was selected to avoid the moral implications of the word victim and to treat persons and property exactly the same—as objects with a position in space and time. Each victim of personal attack was treated as a body in the physical world, thus ignoring all issues of socioeconomic or racial motivation for attacking someone, all issues of personal hatred, indeed, anything going on inside the head of offender or victim. Any such concern would have redirected the minds of the readers back to conventional criminology and distracted them from the point that criminal incidents are physical acts. In addition, the routine activity approach offered a thought experiment: to see how far one could go in explaining crime trends without ever discussing any of the various theories about criminal motivations. This same goal was best served by avoiding any psychology or social psychology, giving no entreé to distracting information. The routine activity approach was not to be relegated to a footnote. Criminal events were moved onto center stage and motivations pushed aside.

The third minimal element of direct-contact predatory crime, the capable guardian, was not seen to be a policeman or security guard in most cases. This was the result of a conscious effort to distance routine activity theory from the rest of criminology, which is far too wedded to the criminal justice system as central to crime explanation. This perverse tendency is an unfortunate artifact of (1) the location of many criminologists in criminal justice programs with the task of training people to work in the criminal justice system, (2) the linkage of research money to criminal justice policy, and (3) the widespread media linkage of the police and courts to crime, when in fact most crime involves neither agency. Indeed, the most likely persons to prevent a crime are not policemen (who seldom are around to discover crimes in the act) but rather neighbors, friends, relatives, bystanders, or the owner of the property targeted. Note that the absence of a suitable guardian is crucial. Defining a key element as an absence rather than a presence is surely the ultimate in depersonalizing and depsychologizing the study of crime. Certain kinds of people are no doubt more likely to be absent than others, but the fact that absence is emphasized is another reminder that the movement of physical entities in space and time is central to the approach. An offender must find a target in the absence of guardians. The moment that happens a crime may occur.

The routine activity approach is fundamentally different from almost all other criminology in its intellectual roots, namely, the human ecology theory of Amos Hawley (1950). While Shaw and McKay were human ecologists in the Chicago school and well-known in criminological literature, they worked mainly in the spatial dimension, plotting neighborhood structure and linking it to crime distributions. They also included a strong motivational component in their analysis, which the routine activity approach did not. Amos Hawley, on the other hand, recognized that the spatial aspect of human behavior was but one aspect. The temporal aspect was another, making the timing of different activities by hour of day and day of week important for the understanding of human society. These points were central also to the routine activity approach. No matter at what level data were measured or analyzed, that approach kept returning at least intellectually to specific points in time and space, jointly considered, and to changes from moment to moment and hour to hour in where people are, what they are doing, and what happens to them as a result.

Hawley's work has two other important intellectual characteristics that carry over to the routine activity approach. First, it includes macro analysis of human populations, often ignoring individuals. Second, it offers systemic thinking, not merely describing the ebb and flow of human activities and their interrelationships, but also offering intellectual tools and empirical examples of how these activities change over time. The organizing feature of the system is a population's drive to gain sustenance from the environment, including other populations. The essential point is that each group, as well as the whole population, must carve out its niche in a larger system of activities.

The Rational Choice Perspective

The rational choice perspective, as discussed in this volume, had its beginnings in work on "situational" crime prevention, which seeks to block opportunities for crime by environmental change (Clarke 1980). Although supported by evidence of the role of opportunity in crime (Mayhew et al. 1976), situational prevention flew in the face of most contemporary theorizing of the time. Whether sociological, psychological, or biological in its premises, this theorizing regarded situational variables as playing a relatively minor part in crime compared with the powerful, driving force of criminal dispositions (see Gordon Trasler's chapter in this volume). Situational variables might determine the timing and location of offending, but reducing opportunities at a particular time and place would result simply in displacement of offending to other times, places, or crimes, with no net reduction in crime. In other words, situational prevention would be wasted effort for society as a whole.

The experience of situational prevention was quite contrary to this theoretical prediction. In many cases, perhaps most, crime was prevented with little displacement (Barr and Pease 1990; Gabor 1990; Clarke 1992). Offenders seemed much more responsive to changes in the risks and effort of crime than predicted by contemporary crime theories. This finding led to an interest in offender decision making, not just in relation to specific crime opportunities, but also in relation to crime as a way of life. Work on criminal decision making was being undertaken in four separate disciplines: (1) Within the sociology of deviance, ethnographic studies were revealing the purposive, rational, and mundane nature of much crime; (2) within environmental criminology, crime pattern analyses were being illuminated by interviews with offenders about their target selection strategies; and (3) within economics and (4) cognitive psychology, models of information processing and decision making were being applied to the analysis of criminal choices. A synthesis of these different strands of work resulted in the rational choice perspective discussed here, which was intended to assist thinking about displacement (Clarke and Cornish, 1985).

Before describing the perspective, we should explain why the formulations of rational choice theory by economists such as Becker (1968), which gave a central role in explanation to offender perceptions of risk, effort, and reward, could not be adopted wholesale. These theories represented an attempt to express utilitarian philosophy in mathematical terms, with individuals maximizing satisfaction by choosing one of a finite set of alternatives, each with its particular costs and benefits. Crime was discussed using such classic economic terms as supply and demand, a translation that involved treating "being a criminal" as an "occupational option," fundamentally similar to legal occupations in society. Each individual makes a "rational choice" of one among these options in order to maximize satisfaction. "Being a criminal" is more likely to be selected when legal options are less rewarding for the individual or when crime is less punishing.

While consistent with the opportunity-reducing objectives of situational prevention, the economic model was seriously limited in a number of respects. First, the rewards of crime were treated mainly in material terms (e.g., how much money can an offender make), while mostly ignoring rewards that could not easily be translated into cash equivalents. This reflects a second limitation, that economists have not been sensitive to the great variety of behaviors falling under the general label of crime, with their variety of costs and benefits, and instead have tended to lump them together as a single variable in their equations. Third, economists rarely seemed to appreciate how difficult it is for a modern society to deliver punishment, that is, how easy it is for offenders to avoid detection. Fourth, economists have overlooked the fact that a good deal of crime is committed at work. Indeed, most retailers find that losses from employee theft exceed losses from shoplifting. How can crime be a unique occupational choice when some occupations help people commit more crime? Fifth, economists ignored the fact that many offenders (indeed most for some occupations) are too young to be in the labor force anyway, so the "occupational choice" model is largely beside the point for juvenile delinquency. Sixth, the market model did not fit most ordinary crime; although there is a supply of victims, there is no demand by victims to be victimized. While economists have made important contributions in analyzing illegal markets for drugs or prostitution (Reuter and Haaga 1989), their terminology is confusing when applied to most other crime. Seventh, the formal mathematical modeling of criminal choices by economists often demanded data that was unavailable or could not be pressed into service without making unrealistic assumptions about what they represented. Finally, the economist's image of the self-maximizing decision maker, carefully calculating his or her advantage, did not fit the opportunistic, ill-considered, and even reckless nature of much crime.

Thus, the normative economic theories of crime ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Criminology, Routine Activity, and Rational Choice Ronald V. Clarke and Marcus Felson
• Contributors
• Author Index
• Subject Index