Beyond Stafford and Warr's Reconceptualization of Deterrence: Personal and Vicarious Experiences, Impulsivity, and Offending Behavior

Recently, Stafford and Warr identified four categories of experiences hypothesized to underlie judgments about the risk of legal sanctions: personal punishment experience, personal punishment avoidance, vicarious punishment experience, and vicarious punishment avoidance. Using original data to test the Stafford and Warr model, five key findings emerge. First, both personal and vicarious avoidance experiences relate positively to offending. Second, punishment and avoidance experiences affect behavior by influencing sanction risk perceptions. Third, the combination of low personal and vicarious punishment avoidance strongly dissuades offending. Fourth, prior offending conditions the influence of punishment and avoidance experiences in a manner consistent with Stafford and Warr. Fifth, while impulsive individuals are influenced primarily by their own experiences, individuals who are not as impulsive tend to attend more to the experiences of others. Finally, punishment experiences appear to encourage rather than discourage future offending. We discuss how the self-serving bias and the gambler's fallacy help explain this latter, anomalous result

Can Punishment Encourage Offending? Investigating The “resetting” Effect

Several recent studies report that punished individuals appear more likely to offend in the future and believe that the certainty of punishment is lower than do their less punished/unpunished counterparts. This article investigates two competing explanations for the latter finding. Under the selection account, punishment simply identifies the most committed offenders whose certainty estimates, even following punishment, remain lower than those of less committed offenders. The second account, resetting, invokes a judgment and decision-making bias known as the “gambler’s fallacy.” Under this explanation, punished offenders reset their sanction certainty estimate, apparently believing they would have to be exceedingly unlucky to be apprehended again. Herein, we report a preliminary empirical investigation of these explanations and address the challenge to contemporary deterrence theory posed by the “positive punishment effect.

Studying the reach of deterrence: Can deterrence theory help explain police misconduct?

This article reports the first perceptual deterrence study of a sample of police officers. The study investigated the influence of traditional deterrence considerations, extralegal sanctions, and impulsivity on the intention to commit several hypothesized acts of police misconduct. The results were largely consistent with perceptual deterrence findings from samples of college students, experienced offenders, and corporate managers. In particular, this study found that both legal and extralegal sanction threats potentially deter police misconduct. Further, it found that impulsivity diminished the deterrent influence of both sanction forms. The study also found that some of the effects of the explanatory variables depended on whether officers had prior punishment experience. The article discusses the implications of its findings for combating police misconduct and for deterrence research generally

Modeling Change in Perceptions about Sanction Threats: The Neglected Linkage in Deterrence Theory

Deterrence theory describes a process of offender decision making that consists of two linkages—one in which official sanctions and other information affect a would-be offender’s perceptions about the risks of criminal conduct, and another in which such perceptions influence the decision whether or not to offend. Decades worth of empirical research has concentrated virtually exclusively on this latter linkage, and in so doing, has produced an incomplete account of the deterrence process. This article develops a model of how perceptions of sanction certainty are modified in response to an individual’s involvement in criminal activity and the consequences (if any) therefrom. Implications of the model are tested with data from a multi-wave, panel survey of 1,530 high school students from the southeastern U.S. Key findings include: the manner in which new information affects perceived certainty depends on the level of perceived certainty before the new information is received, and the extent of peer offending was one of the most influential factors in determining change in perceived sanction certainty over time