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Based on in-depth interviews with 29 active drug robbers (25 male, 4 female) from St. Louis, MO (USA), we explore restraint among people and in circumstances where there should be none. Focusing on greed restraint at the crime's payoff point (i.e., not taking everything one could when rewards are seized), we identify the decision-making constructs and conceptual pathways by which this happens and discuss their implications for improved specification of the relationship between criminal propensity, self-regulation, and risk sensitivity. We contend that self-centeredness is the one dimension of criminal propensity that is sufficiently receptive to risk sensitivity to make self-regulation possible, and that individuals with low trait self-control can show state self-control when ambiguity aversion and reference point expectations align to sate anomic greed. This refinement offers novel pathways for future study of dual-influence models of crime, and suggests that offender decision-making is best conceptualized as a process that unfolds during crimes rather than a discrete event that precedes them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: We identify the distinction between patience and self-control to improve specification of time preferences in offender decision-making. Methods: Data were drawn from in-depth qualitative interviews with 35 active auto thieves with high criminal propensity and focus on target selection. Results: Patience oscillates upward and downward, showing state instability among those with low trait self-control. Conclusions: Discussion focuses on the conceptual processes that mediate patience's variation in offender decision-making, but especially among high-propensity offenders. The larger criminological significance of patience is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding how deterrence operates under extreme conditions is both elusive and important. Studying suspect noncompliance in the form of flight during police-involved vehicle chases provides the opportunity to do this. These are crimes where the certainty of detection could not be higher, yet noncompliance is the end result and arguably comes because of the enhanced sanction risk rather than the obverse (deterrence) or in spite of it (defiance). Drawing from a qualitative sample of 25 auto thieves who have fled from the police, we explore their pre-chase perceptions, their motives for flight, and their decision-making processes during flight to probe the theoretical boundaries of perceptual deterrence. To this end, we pay particular attention to the mediating role of ambiguity aversion and belief updating in reconciling two seemingly inconsistent theoretical perspectives: risk framing and rational choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although sanction threats promote fear, among committed offenders, that fear can become a resource with which to sculpt emerging crime preferences. In such cases, criminality is not deterred but channeled. We explore the channeling process here as it relates to auto theft and carjacking. Our qualitative findings reveal that auto thieves are reluctant to embrace the violence of carjacking due to concerns over sanction threat severity they attributed to carjacking—both formal (higher sentences) and informal (victim resistance and retaliation). Meanwhile, the carjackers are reticent to enact auto theft because of the more uncertain and putatively greater risk of being surprised by victims, a fear that appears to overcome the enhanced long-term formal penalty of taking a vehicle by force. We examine the implications of offenders’ decision-making for the analytic intersection of rational choice and deterrence, offering the notion of projective risk sensitivity to encapsulate the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives. This paper explores how offenders manage the prospect of victim confrontation during auto theft.Methods. Data were drawn from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 35 active offenders recruited from the streets of a large Midwestern US city using snowball sampling methods.Results. Two contextual domains figured prominently in the offenders’ decision-making calculus: The area around the target and the target itself. The first galvanized the offenders’ attention to, and management of, informal social control. The second enjoined offenders to balance speed and stealth in breaching the target.Conclusions. Victim confrontation is an informal sanction that is distinct from both retaliation and traditional extralegal sanctions. The rarity with which it occurs in auto theft is likely due to confrontation avoidance measures offenders adopt at the front end of the offense and during the enactment process itself. The conceptual implications of victim confrontation in crime are explored in relation to the following five areas: (1) sanction celerity and present orientation; (2) sanction certainty and ambiguity aversion; (3) sanction interdependence; (4) violence avoidance; and (5) directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although researchers have examined the attributes that make offenders more or less responsive to sanction threats, far less attention has centered on the manner in which responsiveness can lead to less detectible crime, or perhaps even more overall crime. Restrictive deterrence is the concept that explains this paradox. We explore it here using qualitative interviews with 35 active auto thieves. Findings suggest that auto thieves' restrictively deterrent decision-making strategies fell into three broad categories: discretionary target selection, normalcy illusions, and defiance. Discussion focuses on the data's conceptual implications for restrictive deterrence and offender decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing theoretical and empirical interest has turned to the process and dynamics of offender decision making and to how offenders commit discrete acts of crime. One outcome is attention to how offenders manage risks they view as significant. Here, the authors examine how carjackers script and manage victim resistance—the foremost obstacle in the accomplishment of robbery. Using semi-structured interviews with 30 carjackers, the authors explore their perspectives on the ramifications of victim resistance and their strategies to forestall and control it. The authors find that offenders are cognizant that resistance interferes with their goals and that mistakes in managing their victims not only lead to unsuccessful carjackings but also threaten their safety. Much of the scripting of criminal opportunity and the enactment of carjacking are explained, therefore, by strategies offenders use to minimize the chances that victims can resist. Discussion focuses on the implications of findings for theories of offender decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]