Deterrence and the Moral Context: Is the Impact of Perceived Sanction Risk Dependent on Best Friends’ Moral Beliefs?

• Published date: 01 March 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016820949641
• Date: 01 March 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Deterrence and the Moral

Context: Is the Impact of

Perceived Sanction Risk

Dependent on Best Friends’

Moral Beliefs?

Helmut Hirtenlehner

1

and Sonja Schulz

2

Abstract

Research on differential deterrability suggests increasingly that the size of a potential sanction risk

effect is conditional on characteristics of the person and properties of the setting. Whether the

moral context of young people’s action settings shapes adolescents’ responsiveness to deterrent

cues has been a neglected issue, however. Since youths spend much time in the company of their

peers, close friends’ stance toward crime may serve as a measure of the moral makeup of the

immediate environment in which young people make behavioral choices. Based on a longitudinal

adolescent self-report survey, we test whether the impact of an individual’s sanction certainty

perceptions varies according to the level of his or her best friends’ moral beliefs regarding selected

acts of rule-breaking. Lagged negative binomial regression analyses provide mixed support for the

hypothesis that perceived sanction risk matters more for adolescents whose close friends

encourage criminal activity. These findings have wider implications for perceptual deterrence

research: They suggest that efforts to specify the conditions under which sanction certainty per-

ceptions are related to offending should concentrate on the presence of criminogenic factors.

Keywords

individual theories of crime causation, crime/delinquency theory, crime policy, courts/law,

quantitative methods, other

Problem and Research Aim

For more than two centuries, deterrence theory has been representing one of the most prominent

explanations of criminal conduct (Beccaria, 1764; Bentham, 1789). The theory posits that actual or

1

Centre for Criminology, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

2

GESIS—Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany

Corresponding Author:

Helmut Hirtenlehner, Centre for Criminology, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Altenberger Strasse 69, A – 4040 Linz,

Austria.

Email: helmut.hirtenlehner@jku.at

Criminal Justice Review

2021, Vol. 46(1) 53-79

ª2020 Georgia State University

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DOI: 10.1177/0734016820949641

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threatened punishment prevents the perpetration of a cts of crime by creating fear of sanctions.

Despite the plausibility of the argu ment, the state of research on the effect iveness of criminal

deterrence is still inconclusive. Evidence in favor of a nonneg ligible crime-reducing impact of

sanctioning severity is scant, whereas a significant portion of the available empirical studies sup-

ports the presence of a weak or modest deterrent effect of the certainty of punishment (Do¨lling et al.,

2009; Paternoster, 2010; Pratt et al., 2006). Consensus is limited to the “certainty not severity”

conclusion that identifies the likelihood of being sanctioned as the more effective deterrent (Apel &

Nagin, 2011, p. 413).

Difficulties in establishing substantial unconditional deterrent effects of legal sanction threats,

but also recent theoretical developments (Wikstro¨m, 2008, 2010) may be the reason why the idea of

differential deterrability (Hirtenlehner, 2019; Loughran et al., 2018; Piquero et al., 2011) has

become popular in recent years. Building on perceptual deterrence theory (Geerken & Gove,

1975), differential deterrability suggests that the effect of sanction threats is not uniform across

individuals and situations. People are assumed to differ in their susceptibility to sanction risk, and

settings are assumed to differ in their capacity for deterrence. Instead of claiming that deterrence

affects all individuals equally, it is acknowledged that the degree to which an individual responds to

the risk of formal punishment will depend on a variety of other factors, among them characteristics

of the person and properties of the setting (likewise the type of crime in question).

Besides self-control, personal morals have received most attention as potential moderator of an

individual’s responsiveness to deterrent cues (e.g., Gallupe & Baron, 2014; Hirtenlehner & Hardie,

2016; Hirtenlehner & Mesko, 2019; Kroneberg et al., 2010; Pauwels et al., 2011; Piquero et al.,

2016; Svensson, 2015, Wenzel, 2004). A slight majority of the relevant studies show that perceived

sanction risk is more consequential among those of weak morality. Individuals holding strong law-

consistent moral beliefs are less influenced by their perceptions of sanction certainty.

However, to what extent the moral rules that dominate in the setting in which the action takes

place condition the size of a possible sanction risk effect has been a neglected issue in perceptual

deterrence research. Few studies took up the question whether and how the moral makeup of the

immediate surroundings (the moral context)

1

shapes the effectiveness of legal sanction threats. In

these works, the moral nature of the action setting has usually been operationalized as the level of

involvement with delinquent peers. The obtained evidence on the interaction of deterrence and

affiliation with crime-prone others has remained inconclusive. The first inquiry that addressed this

issue found that higher levels of delinquent peer association reduced the impact of young people’s

sanction certainty perceptions (Matthews & Agnew, 2008). Subsequent studies came to opposite

conclusions, showing that perceived sanction risk exercises a greater effect among adolescents who

are more involved with delinquent peers (Hirtenlehner, 2019; Hirtenlehner & Bacher, 2017;

Schepers & Reinecke, 2018).

Inspired by some of Situational Action Theory’s (SAT; Wikstro¨m, 2010, 2019) reflections on the

significance of the current moral context for the perception of action alternatives, we assume that

stronger ties to crime-prone age-mates amplify the deterrent impact of young people’s sanction

certainty perceptions. Because adolescents tend to spend much time together with their friends

(Warr, 2002), the moral context of their immediate action settings is often formed by the attitudes

and beliefs of their peers (Hirtenlehner & Hardie, 2016). We argue that ample exposure to friends

who welcome and encourage criminal conduct provides adolescents with augmented opportunities

for crime, leads them into temptation to exploit the benefits of crime, and makes them perceive

crime as an acceptable action alternative more frequently. All this brings legal sanction risk into play

as a potential behavioral regulative, therewith establishing a dependency of deterrent effects on the

moral attitudes of young people’s close friends. Hence, our concrete research question is “Does the

deterrent effect of young people’s sanction certainty perceptions depend on their best friends’ moral

beliefs concerning the justifiability of offending?” The underlying substantive hypothesis posits that

54 Criminal Justice Review 46(1)