Book Review: Affect and Cognition in Criminal Decision Making

OPEN IN VIEWER How can we understand why people offend? How can we understand why people choose to behave in a way that to most of us appears dangerous and costly? Applying a rational choice perspective (RCP) is, it appears, one way to understand offending behaviour. This perspective takes as its starting point the view that offending is reasoned − that the decision to offend is made much in the way most people make any behavioural choice: that there is a weighing of the pros and cons. The obvious example is that crime can be economically rewarding but we can also see how it is rewarding in other ways too – through prestige or status or excitement. This book aims to expand the rational choice perspective by introducing the role of emotions and is organized into 12 chapters by a range of psychological and criminological researchers.

So, we learn that predatory street criminals live against a background of desperation (which provides a context for offending) and that fear and anger play a role in moving them towards actual offending. We learn that fear is the most common emotion felt prior to robbery (with happiness most common afterwards) and that the anticipation of regret can act as a moderating influence and that the level of sexual arousal is important in sexually coercive decision-making and sexual offending against children. Not only does sexual arousal increase the perceived benefits of offending (and lead the offender to ignore moderating influences); it is a more important determinant of a first sexual offence against a child than a stable sexual preference for children.

Putting aside the issue about whether sexual arousal (a physical event?) and desperation (an attempt to address basic survival needs and a reaction to fear?) can actually be categorized as emotions, it is hard not to overstate the importance of a view that people do bad things for reasons that we might be able to understand (because we feel the same things for different reasons and in different contexts). However, the determination of the book to tie this perspective to recommendations for deterrence starts to make the theory look unwieldy. The authors acknowledge that the RCP was used by deterrence researchers to expand the doctrine beyond legal punishment and presumably one of the highly attractive aspects of the RCP is its capacity to legitimize deterrence and to introduce a raft of effective behavioural influences into crime prevention. I particularly enjoyed learning about ‘nudgeability’ thinking which steers behavioural choices in a particular direction and which underpins a range of situational crime prevention strategies. Nudgeability isn’t just useful for reducing the spillage of urine, it seems (by placing a fly ‘target’ on urinals), but also for reducing disputes (fixed cab fares), facilitating compliance (easy library checkouts) and alerting conscience (roadside speed boards) (Clarke, p. 34).

Emotions, however, by their very nature, defy reason. As Bouffard notes in his chapter on sexually coercive decision making ‘if even harsh and certain penalties will be ignored under moderately intense visceral states, is it possible then to overcome (them) through efforts such as situational crime prevention?’ (p. 93). He concludes that more research is needed but the conflict is evident. RCP sits within a classical framework of crime prevention which prefers to think of an offending population as homogenous and not too far away from you and me in terms of reason and rationality. The role of emotion immediately brings with it a need to understand the most damaged and distressed individuals, who are probably the least consistent in terms of their decision-making and the most resistant to classification in terms of their behaviour. The fact that street criminals, for example, are discussed as being subject to stressful circumstances ‘largely of their own making’ (Topalli and Wright, p. 49), it seems a little short-sighted given the very real possibility that many of them are likely to have had few experiences for developing self esteem and efficacy. This chapter goes on to suggest that situational controls or target hardening can be applied to disrupt the journey towards offending by necessitating more time and effort ‘highlighting the chances of detection and increasing the inhibitory fear associated’ (p. 54). The chapter concludes that the harder the target the more desperate potential offenders will have to be to attack it, thereby recommending a crime prevention strategy which increases fear and desperation in people who are already struggling to survive. The authors of this chapter do not consider the possibility that it might be beneficial to crime statistics for people to feel less desperate.

Finally, much of the book discusses emotional events as if they will occur without complexity. Sariti Kamerdze and colleagues talk about how regret may actually be a constellation of other emotions such as shame or guilt, but the majority of the book does not consider the intricacy of emotional events. For example, the fact that sexual arousal may be complicated by (distorted) experiences of intimacy or power, and anger in conflict with emotions of shame, rejection or humiliation, is not generally considered. RCP was, no doubt, a theory that allowed for a range of brilliant strategies for the management of crime. The introduction of emotion makes this theory now appear over-simplistic and, in many cases, as if it is missing the point.