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Twenty-five years on
Benoit Leclerc and Richard Wortley
The birth of The Reasoning Criminal
In 1986 Derek Cornish and Ron Clarke published The Reasoning Criminal, an edited collection of (mainly) empirical studies that examined the decision making of offenders across a range of offences. The introductory chapter, written by Cornish and Clarke â their sole chapter in the book â sets out in just 16 pages a radical model (by the standards of conventional criminology) for viewing the causes of crime. Rather than focus on the usual historical factors â the offenderâs genes, his/her family life, schooling, the influence of peers, and the like â assumed to create the offenderâs criminality they were concerned with proximal factors â the offenderâs perceptions of the potential crime scene â that led individuals to commit crime. Rather than view the offender as a passive respondent to social or dispositional forces outside of his/her control, they proposed a model in which the offender was an active, decision-making agent, purposively pursuing criminal goals. And rather than portray the pursuit of these goals as irrational, inexplicable and senseless, they argued that offenders rationally sought to benefit themselves from their criminal acts and were motivated to fulfil much the same needs that drive us all.
The ideas that Cornish and Clarke were to fashion into the rational choice perspective had their genesis almost 20 years earlier. In 1967 Ron Clarke published a research paper on absconding from an approved school (essentially a residential school for juvenile delinquents). Clarke noted that the best predictors of absconding were âcertain environmental influencesâ â hours of daylight, features of the schoolâs regime, and the distance home â and not any âdeep psychological aspectsâ associated with the absconders. Despite appearing in the highly ranked British Journal of Criminology, Clarkeâs paper created little interest at the time and even today according to Google Scholar has just six citations (one of which is by Clarke himself). But it is worth noting in passing that this paper predated Walter Mischelâs (1968) Personality and Assessment (which sets out the classic arguments against dispositional models of behaviour), C. Ray Jeffreyâs (1971) Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, and Oscar Newmanâs (1972) Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design, making Clarke a true pioneer of situational explanations of criminal behaviour.
At this point Clarke provided little in the way of theoretical analysis of why the environment was so important in crime or how it interacted with characteristics of the individual offender. The absconding data were findings looking for a theory. Further situationally focused papers followed (Clarke and Martin, 1971; Sinclair and Clarke, 1973) and by 1975 the various environmental factors conducive to crime had become distilled into a single concept â opportunity (Mayhew, Clarke, Sturman and Hough, 1976). By now Clarke and colleagues had dipped into the psychological literature and they cited a limited range of psychological sources (including Mischel) supporting the role of opportunity in crime. The first publication by Clarke that explicitly uses the term situational crime prevention appears to be his 1980 paper âSituationalâ Crime Prevention: Theory and Practice. In this paper there is a brief section entitled âPreventative implications of a âchoiceâ modelâ, but there is really just one sentence that hints at the developments in the rational choice perspective that were to come:
Since offendersâ perceptions of the risks and rewards attaching to different forms of crime cannot be safely inferred from studies of the distribution of offences, there might be additional preventative benefits if research of this kind were more frequently completed by interviews with offenders.
(Clarke 1980: 139)
The classic features of the choice model were not fully fleshed out until the mid 1980s when they were first described in detail in an article co-authored with Derek Cornish (Clarke and Cornish, 1985), who had developed a similar approach in relation to gambling behaviour (Cornish, 1978). Setting the scene in the 1985 paper is a wide-ranging review of research from sociology, criminology, economics and cognitive psychology supporting their contention that the offenderâs behaviour is best understood as the product of external situational forces, not of individual pathology. From the array of perspectives reviewed, Clarke and Cornish settled on a choice model as a way of capturing the goal-directed nature of criminal conduct and of providing an account of the mechanisms by which environmental forces translate into deviant behaviour. They also made the decision to label their choice model ârationalâ.
In the same year Clarke organised a symposium comprising an international group of researchers interested in understanding crime from the offenderâs perspective with the aim of taking forward the decision-making approach as an explanation of crime. From this symposium, the idea of an edited collection was proposed and The Reasoning Criminal was published in the following year with an abridged version of the 1985 article as the introductory chapter.
The basic tenets of the rational choice perspective will be well known to most readers of this book and require no more than a brief recapitulation here (see Cornish and Clarke, 2008, for the most recent and comprehensive outline of the approach). Instead of focusing on the criminal and his/her propensity to commit crimes, the rational choice perspective emphasises crime events and the situational factors that facilitate the perpetration of crime. According to the rational choice perspective, the offender is not at the mercy of uncontrollable drives but interacts with the immediate environment, which shapes his or her behaviours. Within this framework, the offender is portrayed as a thinking individual who is capable of making decisions and who seeks to gain benefits from committing crimes. These decisions are crime-specific. The considerations involved in the commission of a burglary, for example, are very different from those involved in the commission of rape. Crime occurs when the perceived benefits of offending outweigh the perceived costs and in this sense the decisions to commit crime are rational. It is understood, however, that the offenderâs capacity to make rational choices is not perfect, but is bounded, limited by cognitive biases, lack of information, time pressures, emotional arousal, drugs or alcohol, individual values, and a range of other factors. The utility of an anticipated outcome, therefore, is subjective â judged from the decision makerâs point of view â and an individual may not always pursue a course of action that ultimately produces the greatest objective benefits.
Cornish and Clarke were not the first to propose a choice model of offending. The idea that offenders choose to commit crimes was among the first recognisable theories of criminology, proposed in the utilitarian deterrence models of Bentham and Beccaria in the late eighteenth century. Nor did Cornish and Clarke invent the term rational choice, which has a long history in economics, political science and psychology. Their contribution was to adapt the concept of rational choice to provide a way of analysing crime events. Unlike the classic deterrence model, which largely locates the costs of offending in the criminal justice system, Cornish and Clarke recognised that the costâbenefit analysis can take place at the crime scene using information from the immediate environment. And by emphasising the bounded nature of rationality and the importance of offence-specific decision making, Cornish and Clarkeâs version of rational choice diverges significantly from the strict expected-utility models originally employed in the social sciences. Cornish and Clarkeâs was first and foremost a pragmatic model. From the start they were concerned with the practical implications of rational choice, rather than with the precise details of offender decision making. Indeed, while the term rational choice theory is common in the literature as a description of their approach, they regarded rational choice as a heuristic rather than a theory and have consistently preferred the terms rational choice model or perspective. Their primary aim was to develop a âgood enough theoryâ to provide a framework for developing crime control strategies (Cornish and Clarke, 2008: 38).
The impact of The Reasoning Criminal
Rational choice perspective has in equal measure been one of the most influential and criticised criminological models to emerge in the latter quarter of the twentieth century. Let us deal first with the criticisms.
Criticisms of the rational choice perspective have been mounted both on theoretical and ideological grounds. Theoretically, the central target for critics is the presumption of offender rationality (Hayward, 2007; Trasler, 1986). The criticism takes a number of forms. Some crimes may be portrayed as senseless â ârandomâ acts of violence or vandalism, for example â and seemingly devoid of any rational benefits. It may also be pointed out that the decisions made by offenders are in fact often self-defeating, ultimately causing him/her more pain than pleasure (for example, by leading to imprisonment). Or the power of psychological forces to override rationality might be emphasised. Crimes such as child sexual abuse are viewed as the product of deep-seated psychological disorder, while temporary emotional states â rage, sexual arousal, depression â may result in impulsive, âexpressiveâ crimes.
Cornish and Clarke (2008) and others (Farrell, 2010; Tedeschi and Felson, 1994) have responded to this criticism in detail and we wonât rehearse the rebuttals here. Suffice to say it seems clear that in many cases critics are responding to what they assume the rational choice perspective is about rather than to what Cornish and Clarke have actually said. The term ârationalâ is interpreted literally, with Cornish and Clarkeâs qualifications concerning the bounded nature of rationality (which were outlined in detail in the original 1985 article) largely ignored. Hayward (2007: 233), for example, complains that ânot all actors are economically self-interestedâ, a conclusion with which most rational choice adherents would readily agree. Violence can be used as an instrumental means to avenge an insult (Luckenbill, 1977) or to gain compliance of the victim (Tedeschi and Felson, 1994), and child sexual abuse can be perpetrated for sexual gratification, intimacy and revenge (Mann and Hollin, 2007).
Ideologically, rational choice perspective has been painted as a politically conservative paradigm, labelled âright realismâ (Matthews, 1987) and âadministrative criminologyâ (Young, 1994), although few adherents to rational choice would apply either of these terms to their work. It is seen to be guilty both of sins of omission and sins of commission. Its sins of omission are to ignore the socio-cultural (ârootâ) causes of crime and in doing so to fail to support a social reform agenda that is the staple of sociological criminology. Its sins of commission are to instead propose a model of crime control that (so it is argued) can be used by the state to suppress the behaviour of citizens and that will ultimately contribute to a divided and unfair society.
Again there have been robust defences offered in the face of such criticisms that we need not elaborate upon (see Cornish and Clarke, 2008; Wortley, 2010). Again, too, one suspects that the criticisms relate more to an image of rational choice than to its substance or intent. It is interesting to note that in the theoretical review used to justify the adoption of a rational choice perspective, Clarke and Cornish (1985) drew heavily on the sociological and criminological literature, and in particular, the sociology of deviance. They saw the rational choice perspective as being consistent with a view of crime that âexplicitly emphasized the cultural relativity of definitions of delinquency, the relationship between social control and the distribution of political and economic power in society, and the need to appreciate the meaning of deviance from the actorâs perspectiveâ (p. 150). Moreover, in the sociological tradition Clarke and Cornish saw offenders as products of their environment and âexplicitly rejected deterministic and pathological explanations of crimeâ (p. 150). It seems not a little perverse that among the criticisms now levelled against the rational choice perspective is that it normalises crime and does not pathologise offenders (Garland, 1999; Hayward, 2007).
We turn to the influence of the rational choice perspective. Despite the criticisms from within criminology, rational choice perspective has become (almost) mainstream. Indeed, the level of criticism it has attracted is a mark of its influence. (Irrelevant challenges to orthodoxy can be safely ignored.) Most criminology textbooks will now devote a chapter (or at a minimum a section within a chapter) to it. The Reasoning Criminal has over 1,000 citations listed in Google scholar, a figure that does not include citations to individual chapters within the edited collection. And if you want to buy a second-hand copy of The Reasoning Criminal, you will need to pay more than $200 on Amazon.
There is an accumulating catalogue of research revealing that elements of offender decision making can be found in most forms of crime. Burglary has probably been the most studied crime in terms of decision making to ...
