Nagin, Daniel S., and Raymond Paternoster: Individual Differences and Deterrence

Deterrence and Rational Choice

The powerful idea that the threat of sanctions can deter individuals from committing crimes traces its roots back to the foundational 18th-century-work of Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham. This work has become known as the Classical School and its primary argument is that the decision to offend will be sensitive to the certainty, swiftness, and severity of legal sanctions. Rational choice theorists argue that this perspective is too limited since it ignores informal sanction threats and the rewards of criminal behavior. Informal sanction threats and rewards can be easy to measure and quantify, or they can be the result of relatively complex, individual-specific, mental calculation. As Nagin and Paternoster point out, many rational choice theories also allow for a moral dimension in the explanation of offending. Thus, conscience can form a barrier to offending even if the other benefits of offending outweigh the costs. Though the rational choice perspective surely provides a more complete picture of decision-making calculus than deterrence theory, it has been limited by vague and incomplete descriptions of the process by which people approach the actual weighing of costs and benefits.

Key Theoretical Linkages

To more completely specify the process of deterrence and rational choice processes involved in decision making, Nagin and Paternoster draw on several principal theoretical ideas. These ideas flow primarily from the self-control theory of Travis Hirschi and Michael Gottfredson and the biocentric rational-choice perspective of James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein. According to these perspectives, individuals vary in their tendency to think about the long-term implications of their behavior (present-orientation) and the effects of their behavior on other people (self-centeredness). Additionally, these perspectives both maintain that individual differences in present-orientation and self-centeredness are established relatively early in life. Also, once established, these differences are relatively time-stable; individuals who rank high in the population on present-orientation and self-centeredness early in life will tend to rank high in the population on these characteristics later in life.

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