Behavioral criminology and public policy

• Published date: 01 November 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12465
• Date: 01 November 2019
• Author: Thomas A. Loughran

DOI: 10.1111/1745-9133.12465

RESEARCH ARTICLE

BEHAVIORAL CRIMINOLOGY

Behavioral criminology and public policy

Thomas A. Loughran

Pennsylvania State University

Correspondence

ThomasA. Loughran, Depar tment of Sociology

andCr iminology,Pennsylvania State Univer-

sity,1011 Oswald Tower,University Park, PA

16802.

Email:t al47@psu.edu

Iwish to thank Holly Nguyen, Justin Pickett,

SarahTahamont, Bob Apel, Shawn Bushway,

PilarLar roulet, Greg Pogarsky,Volkan Topalli,

DanNagin, and all of the par ticipants in atten-

danceat t he 2018 Symposium on Criminal

JusticeDecision-Making in Social and Legal

Contextat SUNY Albany for helpful comments.

Research Summary: Public policy, including crime pol-

icy, is heavilyshaped by economic theory. Recently, refine-

ments based on the application of behavioral insights into

the study of public policy applications have become en

vogue. Although criminologists have made some inroads

into incorporating behavioral principals into the study of

crime and offender decision-making, these contributions

have mainly been limited to the area of risk. In this arti-

cle, I offer a more widespread description of how behav-

ioral economics (BE) can be applied to the study of offender

decision-making and crime policy. Specifically, I focus on

several main areas that move beyond the traditional foci

on perceptions of risk: intertemporal choice, criminal labor

supply, mental accounting and consumption, and social

preferences. For each topical area, I first identify a presum-

able, normative model that could reasonably be drawn from

traditional rational choice theory. I then describe ways,

based on existing contributions from BE, that scholars have

sought to make the assumptions (and anomalies) of this

model more realistic.

Policy Implications: The primary aim of this article is to

highlight implications to theory and policy that increase the

utilization of BE by criminologists.

KEYWORDS

behavioral economics, offender decision-making, rational choice

More than evercr iminologists areinterested in more than just ‘rational choice’ theory, but

atheory of offender decision-making. What would a theory of offender decision-making

Criminology & Public Policy. 2019;18:737–758. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/capp © 2019 American Society of Criminology 737

738 LOUGHRAN

look like? What would its assumptions be, what would its main theoretical constructs be,

and what would its hypotheses consist of? Finally, what empirical support is there for a

theory of offender decision making and do you think such a theory would be a substan-

tively important contribution to the field?

—Recent University of Maryland comprehensive exam question, submitted by

Ray Paternoster

Public policy, whether we criminologists choose to admit it or not, is heavily shaped by economic

theory or, more specifically, by predictions about how individuals will make choices in response to

various (dis)incentives. For instance, we routinely enact and debate policies based on theoretically

derived expectations regarding how individual actors will make choices about things ranging from

saving for retirement to selecting health-care plans to choosing to which schools to send their children

based on economic theory. As Cook, Machin, and Mastrobuoni (2015) pointed out, crime policy—

particularly in the United States—is no exception to this general rule. For instance, Durlauf and Nagin

(2011) noted that the tremendous rise in U.S. incarceration rates over the past 40+years is congruent

with a theoretical framework outlined earlyon by Becker (1968). Even critics who have called attention

to the ineffectiveness of policies such as mass incarceration and zero tolerance in reducing crime still

tend to emphasize the role of other types of incentives in alternative crime control strategies such as

increased certainty, swiftness, and fairness (Kennedy, 2009; Kleiman, 2009; Durlauf & Nagin, 2011;

Nagin, Solow, & Lum, 2015).

That said, there is a limit to the effectiveness of designing policies strictly around the assumptions

that human actors always make choices that in are in their best interests, an assumption often criticized

on the basis of the limits of human rationality (Simon, 1955, 1978). For example, Thaler and Sunstein

(2003, p. 176) offered that, “Research by psychologistsand economists over the past three decades has

raised questions about the rationality of the judgments and decisions that individuals make.” As a result,

a growing movement to incorporate insights from behavioral economics (BE) to generate refinements

into the study of public policy applications has become en vogue worldwide (Madrian, 2014). Akerlof,

Oliver, and Sunstein (2017, p. 1, emphasis added) described this emergent ideological shift as follows:

“There are many indications of the growth in what may be broadly classified as behavioural pub-

lic policy.”1This new increased emphasis on incorporating behavioral science principles into public

policy has been widely embraced by many areas, including health policy (Hallsworth, 2016), environ-

mental policy (Carlsson & Johansson-Stenman, 2012; Venkatachalam,2008), accounting and financial

regulation (Hirshleifer, Huang, & Teoh, 2017), and the study of substance use disorders (Bickel et al.,

2014).

It is only natural then that this domain of thinking should also move into the study of crime policy.

Yet to date, with some notable exceptions (Pickett, 2018; Pogarsky & Loughran, 2016; Pogarsky,

Roche, & Pickett, 2018), there remain few active advancements as to how behavioral economics can

more fully inform the study of crime and policies aimed at crime prevention. Darley and Alter (2013,

p. 181) argued that, “[C]onventional approaches to dealing with crime, punishment, and deterrence in

the legislative policy arenas deviate from what research on behavioral decision making has recently

discovered about how people actually think and behave.” There are several reasons why this might

be the case. First, many criminologists have either a limited or a lack of exposure to BE, including

generally lacking understanding of its careful genesis and development through the documenting

of observed anomalies from standard economic models. Second, we as criminologists rely on a

rudimentary conceptualization of theoretical models of how offenders make choices, stemming from a

static conceptualization of rational choice theory. To embrace BE more fully, we must first expand our