Justice for Kids: Keeping Kids Out of the Juvenile Justice System

9. Deterring Serious and Chronic Offenders: Research Findings and Policy Thoughts from the Pathways to Desistance Study

| 201 9 Deterring Serious and Chronic Offenders Research Findings and Policy Thoughts from the Pathways to Desistance Study Thomas A. Loughran, Alex R. Piquero, Jeffrey Fagan, and Edward P. Mulvey Introduction Deterrence, as traditionally hypothesized, is based upon the logic that criminal sanctions that are certain, severe, and swift will work to increase perceived sanction risk and cost, and in turn reduce criminal activity (Beccaria 1764; Zimring and Hawkins 1973; Andenaes 1974). Offenders’ perceptions of certainty and severity are closely linked to economic and criminological theories of rational choice. A rational would-be offender will engage in crimes that are attractive because the expected rewards will exceed the expected costs (Becker 1968; Cornish and Clarke 1986). The expected costs of crime can be operationalized as an individual’s perception of the severity of any sanctions, weighted by the perceived risk of detection. Thus, if this expected cost of crime can be made large enough to exceed any potential rewards, increasing an individual’s perception of either costs or risks (or both) will cause him or her to see a decision to engage in crime as no longer rational. Simply put, the individual will be deterred from committing the crime. There is a substantial body of empirical research testing theoretical and perceptual deterrence theory, dealing mainly with samples of adults, nonoffenders , or primarily nonserious offenders (Grasmick and Bursik 1990; Nagin 1998; Nagin and Paternoster 1993; Nagin and Pogarsky 2001, 2003; Piquero and Tibbetts 1996). This literature demonstrates an important, albeit often weak, relation between sanction-threat perceptions and criminal activity : what people think about the likelihood of getting caught and the likely sanction is related to level of criminal activity. However, an important limi- 202 | loughran, piquero, fagan, and mulvey tation on this literature is that there is a lack of research attention to active and serious offenders, the precise group for whom studies of deterrence are ultimately most relevant (Apospori and Paternoster 1992; Decker et al. 1993; Piquero and Rengert 1999). The dearth of findings among serious offending adolescents presents a particularly important limitation, given the high level of involvement of this group in crime and the developmental deficits that may affect their cognition and decision-making ability with respect to crime (Steinberg and Scott 2003). Accordingly, a critical meta-policy question is whether or not more seriously or chronically offending adolescents consider and respond to sanction threats in their decision making and, by extension, whether they can actually be deterred at all (cf. Fagan and Piquero 2007). This chapter reviews recent evidence from the Pathways to Desistance Study about deterrence (hereafter called “the Pathways study”). This study is a multisite, longitudinal sample of over thirteen hundred adolescent felony offenders that includes regular interviews with these adolescents as they moved from adolescence into early adulthood. The Pathways study addresses the issue of perceptions of deterrence directly and illuminates the mechanisms of deterrence for serious offenders. In this chapter, we provide a brief overview of current evidence on the role of deterrence and perceptions developed to date from the Pathways study. We consider possible policy implications and outline avenues for future research and policy development. The chapter unfolds in five sections. First, we provide a brief summary of the Pathways to Desistance Study. Second, we review empirical evidence that demonstrates the rationality of high-risk adolescents (many of whom are now young adults) regarding involvement in crime. We show that offenders do consider rational-choice perceptions in their offending decisions, and can even be subclassified according to observed heterogeneity in their perceptions of risk and costs. Third, we discuss the elasticity and malleability of these perceptions, and whether adolescent offenders act differently when they change risk and cost perceptions. Fourth, we discuss extensions of findings to policy efforts aimed at maximizing deterrence among this group of offenders. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of future directions for theory and research. The Pathways to Desistance Study The Pathways to Desistance Study is an ongoing, multisite, longitudinal investigation of the transition from adolescence to young adulthood in serious adolescent offenders. Participants are adolescents who were adjudicated delinquent in juvenile court or found guilty in criminal court of a Deterring Serious and Chronic Offenders | 203 serious offense (almost entirely felony offenses) in either Maricopa County, Arizona, or Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. These youth were ages fourteen to seventeen at the start of the study. A total of 1,354 adolescents were enrolled, representing approximately...