The Future of Rational Choice for Crime Prevention

Bringing together leading experts from psychology, criminology, sociology and economics, this book asks whether the rational choice approach exceeded its usefulness in crime prevention and considers alternative possibilities for future research.

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The rational choice perspective (RCP) is currently the core theoretical approach underpinning situational crime prevention (SCP). To date, many crimes have been studied through the lens of RCP, which increased our understanding of these phenomena, how they are committed and how they could potentially be prevented through SCP. This book, designed with the hope of moving RCP forward for SCP purposes, takes a challenging but novel step in providing leading experts from different disciplines with the opportunity to express themselves on how we could best achieve this task.

This book explores various perspectives, which include the development of frameworks based on the role of situations in crime or forensic sciences for improving crime prevention practices. The need to consider affective states and other offender-related factors to improve our understanding of offender decision-making models is highlighted as a means to better predict which SCP mechanisms may be most useful in discouraging particular types of offenders. Finally, it is also argued that the use of RCP should be more pragmatic and that this perspective should be preserved and adapted based on what we find in our experiments.

Taken together, these theoretically distinctive and challenging contributions ultimately guide how crime prevention practices could be best approached in the future.