Article Reflection “Does the Perceived Risk of Punishment Deter Criminally Prone Individuals? Rational Choice, Self-Control, and Crime”
Nowadays, society utilizes a preemption model to foresee and prevent illicit events. The engagement of individuals in delinquent actions is commonly connected to the official and casual threats of reprimand. According to Wright, Caspi, Moffitt, and Paternoster (2004), further research should be conducted in this area. This decision is supported by the claim that the contingency on the pre-emption model increases spendings on the punishment of criminals. Moreover, the alleged criminals are not always the ones to be punished, and this imposes serious limitations on the current detention system (Wright et al., 2004). The authors of the article discuss the information concerning criminal behavior and review medical, psychological, and sociological premises of the delinquencies. Wright et al. (2004) concentrated their efforts on evaluating the impact of low self-control and self-perceived criminality on the outlooks of the wrongdoers. Their research also utilizes societal consent and the event of getting caught as the two core measures of preemption discernments.
After the analysis of the article, I can confirm that the research reached the expected results. Several factors helped me to make this decision. First, the findings of the study showed that the preemption discernments among individuals susceptible to wrongdoing could be characterized as a rather powerful influence (Kleck & Barnes, 2013). This is why the authors of the article were able to identify an interesting pattern in individuals with low self-control and high self-alleged delinquency which prevented them from taking part in illicit activities when they felt like it was costly and perilous. Moreover, I consider that the researchers have successfully reached their investigational objectives because their other discovery revolved around the individuals who were not so predisposed to delinquency. In this case, both the preventive measures and threatened punishments had almost no effect on the wrongdoers. Wright et al. (2004) concluded that threatened punishments are ultimately inappropriate when it comes to strong incentives against felonious behavior. The authors of the article developed a specific model based on the interdependence between biological and psychological peculiarities of the wrongdoers and the influence of a variety of societal processes (Siegel, 2015). This allows us to conclude that the criminological nature of delinquencies should be viewed as a social-psychological phenomenon functioning within the framework of the individual’s social state of affairs.
The key notions associated with the study of crime and criminology that can be found in the article are criminal behavior (connected to sociological theories) and the criminal deterrence model. The first concept relates to the numerous theories which define the origins of crimes and the premises of delinquent behavior (Glenn & Raine, 2013). For the first time, wrongdoers’ behavior and sociological factors were associated with Aristotle. The latter supposed that poverty is the root of all crimes. Throughout the development of the world, new theories appeared and used various causes as the reason for certain behavior (Siegel, 2015). The second concept appeared as an attempt to respond to the events of the Cold War. It became an efficient military strategy and helped the government of the United States to address the issue of the growing number of criminals (Kleck & Barnes, 2013). On a bigger scale, the deterrence model allowed us to identify a vast quantity of illicit activity patterns and prevent numerous serious crimes during its existence.
References
Glenn, A. L., & Raine, A. (2013). Neurocriminology: Implications for the punishment, prediction and prevention of criminal behaviour. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 15(1), 54-63.
Kleck, G., & Barnes, J. C. (2013). Deterrence and macro-level perceptions of punishment risks. Crime & Delinquency, 59(7), 1006-1035.
Siegel, L. J. (2015). Criminology: The core (5th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Wright, B., Caspi, A., Moffitt, T., & Paternoster, R. (2004). Does the perceived risk of punishment deter criminally prone individuals? Rational choice, self-control, and crime. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 41(2), 180-213.