A police officer's perspective on rational choice theory and crime

Why Do People Commit Crimes?
Introduction
For this paper I interviewed a local city police officer. The first question I asked was, “Why do you think people commit crimes?” The response I received was not based in theory at all but was rather curt and somewhat dismissive: the officer laughed under his breath and said, “For all sorts of reasons. Usually they’re just not very good people.” I asked him then if he thought that everyone who committed a crime was a bad person. He said no, that they just happened to make mistakes sometimes and do something stupid. I asked him if thought that most criminals just weren’t thinking clearly when they committed a crime or whether they were thinking clearly and were just hoping to get away with it. He said it could be a mix but that usually it was the latter. I asked him then if he thought that most criminals were rational when committing crimes. He said, “They think they’re being rational—but really in the big picture I think we all know they’re not. They want to risk going to prison or losing their kids or house for a little smack. They want to shoot up right out in broad daylight and risk losing their lives for a little high. I mean, that might sound rational to them at the moment because they want their fix, but I assure you there is no real good reasoning going on there.”
Rational Theory
Rational theory holds that people make decisions by weighing the costs and benefits of a specific course of action and then acting based on their perception of the risk/reward ratio that they see. It is the ultimate expression of self-interest, according to Miller (2001). Instead of looking at things from an ethical or moral point of view, they look at things from the question of, “Will this benefit me? What are the risks? What is the likelihood that I will not benefit from this?” Rational theory posits that all actors behave in a manner that is inherently self-centered. Actions and consequences are governed by awareness or a calculated sense of the extent to which one expects to reap some benefit, either immediate or long-term, from the action.
The theory is rooted in the neoclassical tradition and the Enlightenment, which held that all knowledge should be based on empirical data. Evidence is what supports belief, and rational human beings should act based on the evidence. This perspective helped to shape rational theory, which has been applied to a range of human activities, from economics to criminology.
The local city officer’s response aligns with rational theory to the extent that the officer suggested that people engage in crime because they expect to gain something from it. He said, “They think they’re being rational…” and identified a number of examples in which an individual engaging in criminal behavior looks to gain some benefit from the actions. Initially, the officer suggested that criminality was a problem of morals, but when pressed on the subject he backtracked and appeared not to want to judge or condemn anyone and instead shifted his explanation of why people commit crimes to rational theory.
Critique of the Response and the Theory
As Boudon (1998) notes, however, there are limitations to rational theory, for the rationalization of action is only part of the process in determining human behavior. There are biological factors involved, psychological factors, environmental factors and so on. For instance, the theory of social learning posits that individuals act and even commit crimes because this type of behavior is learned behavior—i.e., individuals engage in these activities because they see others doing it (Grusec, 2006). Strain theory is another example of how there are different perspectives that explain human behavior. Strain theory posits that individuals lash out at society as a result of a build-up of pressure within themselves which is caused by multiple stressors in their environment that they cannot reconcile or process effectively—so they blow like a geyser in Yellowstone Park and engage in criminal or anti-social behavior (Agnew, 1992). There are many other theories of human behavior as well—all of which shows that there is no single one theoretical perspective on human behavior in the sociological or psychological sciences that explains fully the motivations of human activity. In most cases, a combination of theoretical perspectives is used by prosecutors and defense attorneys to explain human actions.
Rational theory is most helpful as an economic theory because here it makes sense for an individual to focus primarily on the risk/reward of a set of options. There is going to be a financial benefit to one of them, perhaps, but there could also be a cost associated with it—so one has to determine whether to invest in XYZ or sell ABC, and so on. In the world of economics and finance, removing emotion can help an individual be more objective about which decision will be the best one for his or her investment portfolio.
In the real world, there is not always a great deal of time to consider all of one’s options; nor is there always the option of considering choices with cold, calculating objectivity—especially when it comes to human behaviors in environments that are less than ideal for rational thinking. For example, an individual living in a hot, rundown tenement dwelling where there is the fear of being assaulted, mugged, sold drugs and being gunned down in a drive-by shooting nearly every day: these conditions are not optimal for objective, rational scrutiny of one’s options. On the contrary, they produce a panicked, stress-filled environment in which people can feel like cornered dogs. In situations like this, individuals may act more based on emotions than on logic. They may act out of instinct—i.e., based on some inherent motivation inside them that is difficult to define or to say where it comes from. They may act based on fear; they may even act based on famine, hunger, thirst or any set of physical promptings.
True, rational theory could be applied to their actions even if they do act emotionally. For example, one could suggest that a person robbed his neighbor in his tenement dwelling because he could not stand the heat in the building any longer and wanted the neighbor’s wall air conditioning unit. The rational theorist could posit that the perpetrator reasoned that it was better to have a few moments’ cooling off and risk being caught and going to jail for the theft than to continue to suffer in the miserable heat for one second longer.
However, as the officer pointed out, this logic is not good logic nor should it be described as rational. Reason has to be based on solid premises. If one wants to assert that the criminal in the example given above is acting rationally, one would have to ask why the criminal simply chose not to go out and buy an A/C unit. In a sense, this is what prosecutors and attorneys do when they argue a case in court: they look at the facts and then attempt to stitch together a narrative based on the facts. The narrative has to make sense, logically speaking, for a judge or jury to accept it. The prosecutor, for instance, will want to be able to explain that the accused knew what he was doing when he did it, knew why he was doing it, and had a very good reason in his own mind for going ahead and perpetrating the crime.
For the defense, sometimes it is effective to attempt to show that the accused was not actually acting rationally at the time—and the concept of actus reus comes into play in this sense. For a person to be guilty of a crime, there has to be actus reus—the voluntary, willful action by the individual. A person who commits a crime in a state of need or in a state wherein he or she has no control over his or her body cannot rightly be called a criminal. A drug addict would be one who could easily be pointed to as lacking actus reus. The stronger the drug addiction, the less control the actor has. It could be argued that the addict entered into drug use initially of his or her own free will—but this too could be argued by a defense aware of the different theories of human behavior and how they can be applied. Rational theory, in the end, is just one example of how to understand human choices.
The officer I interviewed seemed to hold several different theoretical perspectives in his own mind. First, he simply suggested that people commit crimes because they are not good people—i.e., they lack a strong moral or ethical framework and do not pursue the Good that they should. Their actions are not moral and thus do not depict them as good people. However, the officer also did not want to be accused of judging anyone, so he backed away from this perspective and adopted one that was more sympathetic: people may commit crimes, not because they are bad people, but because they are stupid—this was the essence of his next line of thinking. In other words, he argued that they committed crimes because they foolishly thought their crimes would benefit them somehow.