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Explain in that rational choice perspectives, situational crime preventation and enviornmental criminmology.
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Richard Wortley Nick Tilley UCL Corresponding author: Richard Wortley Jill Dando Institute of Security & Crime Science University College London r.wortley@ucl.ac.uk
Opportunity preceded choice and choice preceded rational choice in the development of situational crime prevention theory. Rational choice was, thus, a post hoc theoretical supplement to the initial realisation that immediate situations furnish key conditions affecting criminal behaviour and that these situations could be modified for preventive purposes. Rational choice seemed to suggest a general mechanism that could link the situation to the act. Change the situation and the rational choices about what to do will also change. The disposition to offend is not so strong that individuals’ criminal behaviours are inexorable. Choice in general and rational choice in particular filled for a while a theoretical vacuum to make sense of the influence situations evidently exert on behaviour and has been used to inform further research. It also provided a heuristic for practitioners to think about changes to the situation that might influence prospective offenders’ decisions. Yet there is growing evidence that rational choice assumptions are implausible and unnecessary. They may now be inhibiting rather than facilitating progress in research and practice. Their weaknesses may also be detracting from the credibility of situational crime prevention more generally, both in academic and practitioner circles. It is argued here that theory and practice would both be improved by abandoning rational choice as the sole theoretical foundation for situational crime prevention. In its place, we outline ten tenets, which we argue more fully describe the role situations play in crime, and provide a framework for accommodating a wide range of situational theories and perspectives.
Thomas Kuhn (1962) and Imre Lakatos (1978) show that major scientific ideas rarely perish at a stroke. Despite Popper’s (1959) emphasis on falsification, theories can be readily and rationally preserved by ad hoc adaptations, and qualifications that effectively inoculate them from attack. Moreover, as even Popper himself conceded, this often makes good sense for the advancement of science. Theories would perish before their potential was realised if they were jettisoned at the first sign of trouble. The full articulation of a theory takes time. Initial formulations can be crude. Moreover, even when a theory begins to fail – when ‘anomalies’ as Kuhn describes them appear – in the natural sciences that has not marked the point at which confidence in existing paradigms is lost and something new sought. Lakatos refers to ‘progressive problem shifts’ to describe adaptations to theories that are fruitful in that they produce new findings. He refers to ‘degenerating problem shifts’ that preserve a theory but are not progressive and do not generate new findings. For Kuhn, the accumulation of anomalies leads eventually to a crisis of confidence and the pursuit of a new paradigm. Lakatos’ formulation is less rooted in ‘mob psychology’ and refers instead to a change of direction that makes sense for the advancement of knowledge. We use a Kuhnian/Lakatosian framework as a way of interpreting the history of situational crime prevention (SCP), the importation of the rational choice perspective (RCP) into it, criticisms of situational crime prevention that focus on RCP, and responses to those criticisms. We argue that even if it was once helpful, RCP will no longer do as a fundamental underpinning of SCP and is now holding it back. We conclude with a new set of 10 tenets for SCP that no longer makes RCP central. Our aim is not to propose a new theory for SCP but
rather to describe the role that situations play in behaviour in a way that accommodates multiple theoretical perspectives. This, we suggest, offers a fruitful way ahead both for research on crime and for policy and practice to address crime problems. HOW RCP CAME TO BE ASSOCIATED WITH SCP While RCP and SCP have become closely linked, this has not always been the case. The ideas behind SCP began coalescing into coherent prevention models from the beginning of the 1970s. RCP on the other hand was first proposed as a foundation for SCP some 15 years later. In other words, RCP was settled on as an explanation for SCP practices that were already well established. It was intended to add theoretical coherence to SCP and to inform a research programme. It was seen, therefore, to comprise a progressive move. The first proto-‐situational models of crime prevention were presented in two books, with strikingly similar titles, published within a year of each other. The first was C. Ray Jeffrey’s (1971) Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design ; the second was Oscar Newman’s (1972) Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design. As their titles suggest both books proposed crime control strategies that involved manipulation of the immediate environment. Their approaches and underpinning assumptions, however, varied considerably. Jeffrey, a criminologist, built his situational analysis of crime around an operant conditioning model of behaviour. With this as his starting point, he proposed an eclectic assortment of interventions designed to alter the punishment and reward structures in criminogenic environments. His approach
Early writings by Ronald Clarke, the chief architect of SCP, predate those of Jeffrey and Newman. In 1967 he published a research paper on absconding from a residential school for juvenile delinquents. Clarke noted that the best predictors of absconding were aspects of the environment – hours of daylight, features of the school’s regime, the distance home – and not any individual factors associated with the absconders. At this point Clarke provided little in the way of theoretical analysis of why the environment was so important or how it interacted with characteristics of the individual. Further situationally-‐focused papers followed (Clarke and Martin, 1971; Sinclair and Clarke, 1973) but it was not until the publication of Crime as Opportunity, the foundational Home Office report that in 1976 marked the first manifesto for situational crime prevention (Mayhew, Clarke, Sturman and Hough, 197 6 ), that the question of underpinning general theories arose. Crime as Opportunity emphasised that criminal behaviour is responsive to situational cues. Gibbons (1971) is quoted approvingly in it, when he refers to ‘deviance (as) a temporal response to provocations , attractions and opportunities of the immediate situation’ (Mayhew et al 1976: 1, italics added). A subheading refers to ‘situational inducements to criminality’ (ibid: 2). These classes of cue countenance various ways in which situations may encourage criminality. At this point, there was no mention of ‘choice’. Choice – but not rational choice – was central to Clarke’s 1980 paper in the British Journal of Criminology (BJC), which laid the first systematic academic foundations for situational crime prevention theory. Indeed, one of the headings there is ‘Crime as the Outcome of Choice’ (Clarke 1980: 161). The BJC paper is pitched against common sense and criminological dispositional theories, which prevailed then and continue to thrive in folk thinking about crime, which
construe criminality and the consequential criminal acts as the product of some more or less aberrant or pathological impulse springing from social or personal factors bearing on the offender. Against this, Clarke emphasised that almost always offenders know what they are doing and in this sense there is at least an element of choice in their actions. He noted that even if there are predisposing conditions these are hard to change, especially in the short term. Focusing on the immediate and manipulable conditions in which crime commission choices are made (even if those choices are influenced by social or personal factors), however, suggests a practical agenda for preventing crime. Clarke listed a range of conditions that might influence choices to offend, of many of which, he conceded, the offender may be unaware. These include the offender’s motives, mood, moral judgements, criminal knowledge and perceptions of opportunities, assessments of risk and likely consequences of offending, and the likelihood that s/he has been drinking. Clarke said of them that, ‘These separate components of subjective state and thought processes which play a part in the decision to commit a crime will be influenced by the immediate situational variables…’ (Clarke 1980: 161). Hence, in 1980 Clarke’s articulation of SCP theory embraced the ‘choice’ element of RCP but not the ‘rational’ one. The first fully-‐fledged exposition of the Rational Choice Perspective as we now know it came in a paper published by Clarke with Derek Cornish five years later (Clarke and Cornish, 1985). Clarke and Cornish presented a detailed and wide-‐ranging review of then recent developments in the sociology, criminology, economics and psychology of crime. They referred to the sociology of deviance, ecological studies of criminal activity, criminal careers research, and applications of cognitive psychology and economics to offender decision-‐making, all of which
There are two crucial points to be made about RCP as proposed by Clarke and Cornish – points far too often overlooked by subsequent critics and devotees alike. The first is that rational choice was presented in highly qualified terms. From the start Clarke and Cornish understood that rationality is constrained, and their approach owes a particular debt to Simon’s (1957) concept of ‘bounded’ rationality. Simon argued that human decision-‐making was neither perfectly rational nor wholly irrational, but rather ‘satisficing’ – satisfactory and sufficient. The rational decision making process may be affected by cognitive biases, lack of information, time pressures, emotional arousal, individual values, and a range of other factors. The utility of an anticipated outcome, therefore, is subjective – judged from the decision-‐maker’s point of view – and an individual may not always pursue a course of action that ultimately produces the greatest benefits. In accordance with this, Clarke and Cornish conceded that the rationality of rational choice in criminal behaviour is highly circumscribed. It would be implausible, they acknowledge, to suggest that at every turn offenders make calculations on expected outcomes or that information is sought and obtained on which to make informed calculations about whether to offend, how to offend, and where and when to offend. Second, Clarke and Cornish presented RCP as a model for practice: it was never intended as a detailed and accurate description of how offenders actually make decisions (see Wortley, 2013). Their aim was to provide a simplified account of the role of situations in crime that would guide research and policy. While RCP is often referred to as rational choice theory in the literature, they have never done so; the term ‘perspective’ was chosen advisedly. They regarded RCP as a heuristic for synthesising existing research, for giving direction to
future research, for analysing existing policy and for finding out fruitful future crime control initiatives. In other words it served to stimulate the research program for situational crime prevention as well as to enhance practice in relation to its immediate progenitors: it was thus conceived as a progressive problem-‐shift. Repeatedly throughout their 1985 paper (and consistently in later writings) they refer to RCP as merely ‘good enough’ to explain the processes of criminal involvement and the occurrence of criminal events. The stripped-‐down, one-‐dimensional depiction of the offender – ‘bereft of moral scruples’ and ‘without any deficits such as lack of self control’ – was also deliberate in order to avoid cluttering the model with unnecessary detail ‘that might get in the way of rational action’ (Cornish and Clarke, 2008, p. 39). Moreover, they explicitly invited further developments of their decision-‐making models in the light of future research. Their rational choice models were ‘tentative’ (p. 163), ‘still at a relatively early stage’ (p. 163), ‘a useful starting point’ (p. 178), ‘temporary, incomplete, and subject to continual revision’ (p. 178), and to be ‘modified or discarded’ (p. 149) when no longer fit for purpose (Clarke and Cornish, 1985). RCP was seen by Clarke and Cornish in the mid 1980s as good enough to underpin both research and practice in SCP. SCP had always been conceived as a scientific research programme and a policy/practice programme. Rational choice was deemed helpful to both. It could inform a programme of research better to understand criminal behaviour, avoiding traditional and dubious assumptions about crime as a product of special pathological people with aberrant personalities, genes or social backgrounds, and focusing instead on the normality of crime as an intelligible response to immediate cues by ordinary people
as a theoretical model of offending behaviour, but increasingly, too, the extent to which it provides a sufficient underpinning for SCP. These critics, with whom we identify here, take rational choice to hamper the broader research and practice programme of SCP – to mark a degenerating problem-‐shift inhibiting further progress. There are three main theoretical criticisms levelled at RCP – that human decision making is as much characterised by cognitive errors and biases as it is by rationality; that the emphasis on cognition overlooks the role that personal factors such as emotions and dispositions play in human behaviour; and that a great deal of behaviour is the result of automatic cognitions that occur below the level of conscious awareness (see Wortley, 2013). In fact, each of these criticisms was addressed by Clarke and Cornish in their original 1985 paper where they were at pains to emphasise the constraints on human rationality. It is easy to show that offenders are not perfectly rational (e.g., Hayward, 2007; Katz 1988; Trasler, 1986), but then Clarke and Cornish have never said that they are. Likewise, Clarke and Cornish readily conceded that decisions made in the heat of the moment are sub-‐optimal, and that over time many crimes are committed routinely on the basis of ‘standing decisions’. Thus most criticisms of RCP can be effectively countered by labelling them as ‘misconceptions’ or ‘misperceptions’ and simply referring back to the original, highly qualified description of the model (Clarke, 2005; Cornish and Clarke, 2008). However, relying on the ‘good enough’ ambitions of RCP as a defence presents a double-‐edged sword for those interested in advancing SCP. On the one hand, the concept of bounded rationality provides flexibility and a capacity to accommodate anomalies, effectively inoculating RCP against falsification. On the
other hand, the qualification that rationality is bounded comes at a price and exposes the theoretical limits of RCP. Each concession of impaired rationality reduces the explanatory power of the model. For example, the concession that an offender under high levels of emotional arousal makes less rational decisions than an offender not so aroused can be easily accommodated within RCP, but doing so reduces rationality to a partial explanation. Working with a qualified model of rationality might not be such a problem if there were also an active research programme examining the situational conditions under which rationality is impaired and the impact of the impaired rationality on offenders’ decisions, but there is not. Despite Clarke and Cornish’s explicit invitation to researchers to modify their decision-‐making models in the light of new evidence, RCP today remains essentially as it was presented in 1985, largely unaffected by the theoretical advances that have taken place elsewhere in the cognitive sciences (Wortley, 201 3 ). The expected progressive problem-‐shift has not materialised. The concept of ‘bounded’ rationality has inadvertently inhibited further research on offender decision-‐making by providing a convenient escape clause. The factors that limit rationality can be treated as unfortunate ‘noise’, interfering with, but not completely eliminating, the rational choice process. In the case of emotional arousal, for example, the response to the criticism that RCP does not account for so-‐called expressive crimes typically stresses the vestiges of rationality that remain even in highly aroused offenders (e.g., R. Felson, 2005), with little consideration given to the ways in which arousal affects decision making or why the offender may be so aroused in this situation (see Katz, 1988). In Lakatos’s terms, adherence to RCP in such cases as an essential element of SCP is degenerative as a research programme. The non-‐
depriving it of its distinctive analytic bite. Moreover, the notion of provocations undermines the RCP notion that preferences are consistent. In economics too, ‘hyperbolic discounting’ (the systematic tendency of humans to switch preference orders as the moment of decision-‐making becomes imminent) undermines any expectation of consistent intentions and preferences in ways highly relevant to decisions over the commission of crimes (see Elster 2007: 111 -‐123). Homo economicus , the cool, though fallible, calculator of personal utilities, can no longer be assumed adequately to represent the potential offender, who instead becomes subject to moral restraint and emotional drives. Even those prevention strategies that do involve opportunity reduction do not necessarily involve the exercise of rational choice. In many cases reducing opportunity does not affect the choices that potential offenders make but reduces the choices that are available to them (Sidebottom and Tilley, forthcoming). Taking your laptop with you when you park your car rather than leaving it on the back seat (‘removing targets’) does not reduce the perceived rewards of offending in any meaningful cost-‐benefit sense; it simply eliminates theft of your laptop as an option. The invocation of any rational choice deliberation does not arise. In a similar way, offenders cannot commit crime, no matter how motivated they might be to do so, if they lack the necessary physical or personal resources (Ekblom and Tilley, 2000). Burglary through a second storey window may not be possible if there is no ladder handy (‘controlling tools and weapons’) or if the offender is afraid of heights. There are countless similar examples where what matters is the supply of options, rather than the reasons for exercising choice.
There are two ways of responding to the limitations of RCP. The first is to retain the cognitive choice framework but look to elaborating it to account for current deficiencies. In other words, treat individual, utility-‐maximising rational choice as the default, but create a more nuanced version of the offender which is attentive to the ways in which crime-‐commission decisions that might otherwise be rational may be compromised or limited by the internal cognitive limitations and external influences already alluded to by Cornish and Clarke. This would preserve RCP as a core element of SCP and try to sweep in non-‐rational elements on the grounds that the non-‐rational elements comprise challenging ‘puzzles’ (to borrow a term used by Kuhn to describe ‘normal science’ occurring under the auspices of given ‘paradigm’), but do not furnish grounds for any fundamental change. A recent example of this approach is the edited volume Affect and Cognition in Criminal Decision Making by van Gelder, Elffers, Reynald and Nagin (2014a), in which Clarke has a chapter. Contributors were invited to draw on advances in the cognitive sciences to provide a more contemporary, complete, and scientifically rigorous account of the role of emotion in offender decision-‐making than that provided by RCP. In their introductory chapter, the editors clearly indicate that they have no intention of abandoning a choice model of offending. They frame their task in terms of giving due attention to the ‘bounded’ nature of rationality, which has been neglected over the years. “Rather than referring to the ‘introduction’ of affect into rational choice theory and models of criminal decision making” they write, “it would perhaps be more accurate to refer to ‘reinstating’ the role of affect in criminal decision theory” (van Gelder et al, 2014 b, p. 12 ).
the person-‐situation debate has been framed in the literature. For some in the social sciences, the issue is seen as a contest between situational and dispositional accounts of behaviour: either one or the other plays the dominant role. For others, the interest lies in how the person and the situation interact with one another. The person-‐situation interaction, in turn, has two interpretations (see Wortley, 2012). One is that there is a reciprocal relationship in which individuals both affect, and are affected by, their immediate environment. The other is that behaviour is the combined outcome of situational and dispositional factors. We argue that in all three cases RCP fails to provide a full account of the role of situations. Social scientists who are interested primarily in the effects of the immediate social and physical environment on behaviour hold that the effects of particular situations are more or less consistent across a given group or population. Almost everyone attending a funeral will be quiet and reverential; those same people attending a wedding may be rowdy and joyous. Variations in behaviour are caused by variations in the environment rather than by factors within the individual. RCP emerged as one account of how this could be the case. The probability of crime varies by situation, providing those within it prospects of utilities that, ceteris paribus, they maximise. With its bare-‐boned depiction of the offender, no attention is paid to variations among individuals. Humans are defined by a single, universal attribute – the capacity to make (boundedly) rational choices – that provides the sole mediating process through which environmental contingencies are assessed and translated in to action. However, as we have highlighted, rational decision-‐making has severe limitations as a mechanism for capturing how we relate to the world around us. Errors in
reasoning are ordinarily the rule not the exception, while under conditions of emotional arousal decision-‐making processes are overwhelmed by feelings. Decision-‐making is not just prone to error but in many cases rationality may not even play a meaningful role in behaviour. Cognitive theorists acknowledge that we are aware of just a tiny fraction of the neuronal activity that occurs within our skulls. A great deal of our behaviour occurs, not as a result of conscious deliberation, but routinely and reflexively as the result of cognitive processes that occur automatically below the level of conscious awareness. Moreover, there is more to human behaviour than decision making. RCP is fundamentally limited by the restricted pallet of human processes it provides to account for the impact of situational forces. It pays little consideration to the broader spectrum of the attributes that define humans – their desires, beliefs, emotions and moral understandings. At best, then, RCP can provide no more than a partial account of the impact of the immediate environment on the offender. Only the offender’s instrumental cognitions come into play. There is little recognition of the power of situations to affect individuals in ways of which they may not be fully aware or over which they may have limited control. Nor is there any sense in RCP that offenders are changed in any fundamental way by their encounters with the immediate environment. We can contrast this narrow rendering of situational effects with the far richer accounts given elsewhere in the social sciences. Solomon Asch (1951), for example, showed how simple expressed judgements of line length are affected by those expressed by others even when clearly contrary to fact. Participants not only offered incorrect answers in order to avoid social censure, many convinced themselves that their incorrect response was correct. In the
