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An often implicit assumption of perceptual deterrence tests is that the elicited values pertaining to arrest risk reflect stable underlying beliefs. But researchers in other disciplines have found that reported expectations are highly susceptible to exogenous factors (e.g., anchors and question ordering), indicating that such values are somewhat arbitrary responses to probabilistic questions. At the same time, reported expectations are coherent within persons, such that respondents rank order them rationally. For deterrence, then, absolute values reported on arrest risks are likely not stable but individuals still rank order specific crimes in meaningful ways. We examine the interpretability of reported arrest risk for three possibilities: 1) Reported risks are stable probabilistic values; 2) reported risks are arbitrary and uninformative for deterrence research; or 3) reported risks display “coherent arbitrariness” with unstable values between individuals but stable rank ordering of crimes within individuals. Through the use of three random experiments of college students, our results indicate that elicited risk perceptions are arbitrary in that they are influenced by the presentation of anchors and question ordering. Nevertheless, the rank ordering of crimes within and across conditions is unaffected by the presentation of anchors, suggesting that reported risks are locally coherent within persons.

The study of the monetary returns to criminal activity is a central component in many emerging areas of criminology, including rational choice and offender decision-making, desistance, and criminal achievement. Scholars have been increasingly captivated with specification of the earnings function and with examining how variations in illegal earnings predict important outcomes such as persistence in offending. The potential utility of findings in related empirical studies hinges on the quality of the key measure, self-reported illegal earnings. Yet to date scant attention has been paid by researchers to the measurement properties of this metric. We analyze self-reported illegal earnings generated from a variety of instrumental crimes by using data from the Pathways to Desistance Study (n = 585) and the National Supported Work Project (n = 1,509), which are two longitudinal data sets of active offenders separated by more than 30 years. Findings based on analyses both within and between data sets reveal support for the internal consistency reliability and criterion validity of self-reported illegal earnings. Moreover, the results reveal premiums in terms of higher earnings associated with different crime types, which are persistent both over time and across data sets. Implications and future directions for advancing the theoretical study of criminal achievement are also discussed.

In the last few decades, rational choice theory has emerged as a bedrock theory in the fields of economics, sociology, psychology, and political science. Although rational choice theory has been available to criminologists for many years now, the field has not embraced it as other disciplines have. Moreover, rational choice scholars have fueled this skepticism of the theory's generality by modeling offender decision making that is one-sided—large on the costs of crime (sanction threats), short on the benefits of crime. In this article, we directly assess the generality of rational choice theory by examining a fully specified model in a population that is often presumed to be less rational—adolescents from lower socioeconomic families who commit both instrumental (property) and expressive crimes (violence/drugs). By using a panel of N = 1,354 individuals, we find that offending behavior is consistent with rational responses to changes in the perceived costs and benefits of crime even after eliminating fixed unobserved heterogeneity and other time-varying confounders, and these results are robust across different subgroups. The findings support our argument that rational choice theory is a general theory of crime.

Deterrence theorists and researchers have argued that the critical dimension of sanction certainty is its level-increasing the certainty of punishment from a lower to a higher level will inhibit criminal conduct. However, the true certainty of punishment is rarely known with much precision. Both Sherman (1990) and Nagin (1998) have suggested that ambiguity about the level of punishment certainty is itself consequential in the decision to commit or refrain from crime. Here, we investigate this proposition. We find some evidence that individuals are "ambiguity averse" for decisions involving losses such as criminal punishments. This finding means that a more ambiguous perceived certainty of punishment is a greater deterrent of some crimes than a nominally equivalent but less ambiguous one. However, this effect depends on how large an individual's risk certainty perception is initially. That is, we find evidence for "boundary effects" (Casey and Scholz, 1991a, 1991b) in which this effect holds for lower probabilities but reverses for higher ones. For higher detection probabilities, individuals become "ambiguity seeking" such that a less ambiguous detection probability has more deterrent value than a nominally equivalent but more ambiguous detection probability. Results are presented from two distinct, but complementary, analysis samples and empirical approaches. These samples include a survey to college students with several hypothetical choice problems and data from the Pathways to Desistance study, a longitudinal investigation of serious adolescent offenders transitioning from adolescence to young adulthood.

The effect of criminal experience on risk perceptions is of central importance to deterrence theory but has been vastly understudied. This article develops a realistic Bayesian learning model of how individuals will update their risk perceptions over time in response to the signals they receive during their offending experiences. This model implies a simple function that we estimate to determine the deterrent effect of an arrest. We find that an individual who commits one crime and is arrested will increase his or her perceived probability of being caught by 6.3 percent compared with if he or she had not been arrested. We also find evidence that the more informative the signal received by an individual is, the more he or she will respond to it, which is consistent with more experienced offenders responding less to an arrest than less experienced offenders do. Parsing our results out by type of crime indicates that an individual who is arrested for an aggressive crime will increase both his or her aggressive crime risk perception as well as his or her income-generating crime risk perception, although the magnitude of the former may be slightly larger. This implies that risk perception updating, and thus potentially deterrence, may be partially, although not completely, crime specific.