NCJ Number
91601
Journal
Rutgers Law Review Volume: 35 Issue: 1 Dated: (1982) Pages: 100-131
Date Published
1982
Length
31 pages
Annotation
This article analyzes the tradeoff problem from the perspective of the would-be criminal and compares this individual perspective with the societal approach.
Abstract
The individual approach seeks to relate certainty, severity, and crime benefits to the decisionmaking of individual would-be criminals as to whether it would be profitable to commit a certain crime under various circumstances. The societal approach seeks to generalize about the relations between certainty, severity, and crime benefits to crime occurrence across cities, States, nations, or other governing units. The paper illustrates that the individual approach can be more easily modeled mathematically than the societal perspective by using only deductive analysis. The societal view involves empirical data, which are difficult to obtain, and statistical controls that are difficult to implement. The benefit of crime to the would-be criminal is an important additional consideration in explaining both the degree of crime occurrence and the reason why a would-be criminal chooses to commit a criminal act rather than to refrain from doing so. For this reason, the analysis of tradeoffs included three dimensions -- certainty, severity, and crime benefits. Charts, graphs, and 24 footnotes are provided. (Author abstract modified)