BRUCE A. JACOBS
School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences
University of Texas at Dallas
The first forays into Western criminological theory came in the lan-
guage of deterrence (Beccaria, 1963 [1764]). The paradigm itself is sim-
ple and straightforward, offering an explanation for crime that doubles
as a solution (Pratt et al., 2006). Crime occurs when the expected
rewards outweigh the anticipated risks, so increasing the risks, at least
theoretically, will prevent most crimes in most circumstances. If deter-
rence describes the perceptual process by which would-be offenders
calculate risks and rewards prior to offending, then deterrability refers
to the offender’s capacity and/or willingness to perform this calculation.
The distinction between deterrence and deterrability is critical to under-
standing criminality from a utilitarian perspective. However, by
attempting to answer “big picture” questions about the likelihood of
offending relative to sanction threats, precious little scholarship has
attended to the situated meaning of deterrability. This article draws
attention to this lacuna in hopes of sensitizing criminology to an area of
inquiry that, at present, remains only loosely developed.
The first forays into Western criminological theory came in the language
of deterrence (Beccaria, 1963 [1764]). The paradigm itself is simple and
straightforward, offering an explanation for crime that doubles as a solu-
tion (Pratt et al., 2006). Crime occurs when the expected rewards outweigh
the anticipated risks, so increasing the risks, at least theoretically, will pre-
vent most crimes in most circumstances.
If deterrence describes the perceptual process by which would-be
offenders calculate risks and rewards prior to offending, then deterrability
refers to the offender’s capacity and/or willingness to perform this calcula-
tion. The distinction between deterrence and deterrability is critical to
understanding criminality from a utilitarian perspective. However, by
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DETERRENCE
1. As Wright et al. (2004: 189) noted, “This line of research frequently uses inten-
tions to commit crimes in response to hypothetical scenarios as the outcome vari-
able. . . . [A]lthough generally a sound and productive strategy with abundant
advantages over other methodologies, it is possible that it may lead to bias.”
Sources of this bias include “trash talk,” in which respondents say they would
commit a crime that they really would not (to demonstrate bravado) or
pseudorationality, in which respondents claim they would not offend given a par-
ticular scenario but really would if they faced that scenario.
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Citing Nagin and Paternoster (1993: 471), Pogarsky (2002: 432) con-
tended that deterrable offenders are “neither strongly committed to crime
nor unwaveringly conformist.” He analogized deterrable offenders to “the
potential criminal, who would have broken the law if it had not been for
the threat of punishment” (Pogarsky, 2002: 404, footnote 3, citing
Andenaes, 1974: 111–2). In the same footnote, Pogarsky drew from ethno-
graphic studies to demonstrate how some offenders show sensitivity to sit-
uational inducements, whereas others “perceive no realistic alternatives to
crime and are therefore unconcerned with the consequences. . . .”
Pogarsky’s typology is useful but preliminary. First, it does not opera-
tionalize the notion of “responsiveness” to sanction threats in a situation-
ally meaningful way. Second, it suggests that deterrability is a binary
construct (you are either deterrable or you are not).4 Third, it implies that
the deterrability categories referenced previously are mutually exclusive
and bereft of variation within offenders and across situations. Fourth, it
implies that deterrability is contingent on criminal commitment. By con-
flating deterrable and undeterrable offenders, Pogarsky had foregone an
important opportunity to identify the conceptual parameters of deter-
rability and to reconcile meaningfully the dynamic tension between
offender commitment and responsiveness to sanction threats. Committed
offenders might be incorrigible, but they are not undeterrable.
Qualitative studies of chronic property offenders bring the tension
between criminal commitment and deterrability into relief. Several offend-
ers in these samples justifiably would be considered incorrigible. Less than
half of Wright and Decker’s (1994) sample, for instance, committed more
than 4,000 lifetime burglaries. Just one of Shover’s (1996: 8–9) offenders
burglarized an estimated 500 structures, whereas a single offender in
Cromwell and Olson’s study (2004: 97) victimized more than 2,000 dwell-
ings during an 8-year period. Despite their apparent incorrigibility, many
such offenders showed conduct that would be considered responsive to
detection concerns. They consulted funeral announcements to identify
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6. In part to address this problem, Wright and his colleagues (Bennett and Wright,
1984; Wright and Decker, 1994) used the “walkabout” methodology in which
they accompanied burglars to prior offense locations to capture extemporaneous
feelings, thoughts, and reflections that might not have emerged in an institutional
setting.
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absence of risk sensitivity as expressed in these tactics can reveal the pres-
ence or absence of deterrability. The more risk sensitive the offender, the
more deterrable he or she is. Consider the following:
An offender robs and assaults three store employees at gunpoint. He
wears a mask and gloves. He instructs his victims not to look at him. He
makes sure not to touch anything in the store despite the fact that his
hands are covered. He waits until all of the customers inside the store have
left, and the store is about to be closed. He is aware of an alarm system
inside the store. He asks about the location of surveillance cameras inside
the store. He strikes one of the clerks repeatedly because she is not open-
ing the safe fast enough—thereby recognizing the relationship between
detection risk and offense duration. He ties up his victims to prevent resis-
tance during the crime and to delay escape after he leaves. Before fleeing
from the store, he even dumps the employees’ purses on the floor to
retrieve identifying information and ostensibly deter them from assisting
an investigation. Singly and in combination, these behaviors betray sensi-
tivity to risk and an offender concerned with detection and arrest.
Contrast this crime with a second offense in which the perpetrator robs
and abducts a woman from the parking lot of her apartment complex and
sexually assaults her at a second location. The offender makes no attempt
to conceal his identity, despite multiple face-to-face encounters with the
victim during a 2-hour period. After robbing the woman at the apartment
complex and transporting her to a public park, he sexually assaults her in
an elevated area of the park, potentially visible to at least seven different
houses on the perimeter of the park. The park itself is in close proximity to
precinct headquarters of the local police department—a staging ground
for approximately 70 commissioned officers. The offender leaves numer-
ous incriminating items at the crime scene, which includes the shirt he uses
to wipe seminal fluid from the victim. Despite having 2 days between the
time of the assault and the time the police processed the crime scene, he
fails to remove these items. Following the assault, the offender kneels
down face to face with the victim, tells her about his life, and asks for her
phone number. Grossly insensitive to risk, such behaviors are inconsistent
with a deterrable offender.
Or consider a third offense in which the implicated offender breaks into
an office suite at a medical building and robs and assaults an employee
working after hours there. The offender targets a medical building for a
noncommercial (person-to-person) robbery despite the fact that the imme-
diate area boasts 7 banks, 16 gas stations, 22 grocery stores, and 42 restau-
rants—more lucrative targets but also ones perceptibly more difficult to
“take.” Person-targets in the area exist by the hundreds. Data from the
local traffic-engineering department reveal that a nearby intersection ser-
vices approximately 9,000,000 vehicles per year. Relative to an isolated
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victim nestled inside a closed office suite, these more public targets benefit
from the protective effect of informal social control. This offender selects
a location in which informal social control was low or absent.
Within the building, the offender targets an office on the second floor,
securing access through a back door away from the main hallway fully 2
hours after downstairs activity at the medical building ceased. The
offender sneaks up on the victim from behind, which gives her no chance
to disrupt the offense or to flee. Before committing what arguably is the
loudest physical part of the offense (the beating), he moves the victim
inside an interior bathroom of the suite, which provides additional per-
ceived insulation from sight and sound. After seizing the victim’s valu-
ables, he directs her to undress. He then hides her clothes in various places
around the office, tells her not to move, beats her to the point of uncon-
sciousness, tells her to lie down in her own blood, and says he will kill her
if she calls the police. Immobilizing his victim in these ways precludes the
victim from yelling, running, or calling anyone for several minutes after he
leaves. The victim herself reports that the offender tells her that he did
these things so she could not chase after him. Each of these behaviors is
consistent with a risk-sensitive offender. Together, they suggest the kind of
responsiveness to sanction threats necessary to establish deterrability
(Pogarsky, 2002).7
As implied in the above vignettes,8 operationalizing risk sensitivity
requires the analyst to assess the tactical and contextual components of
the offense—how it is committed, against whom, where, when, and under
what conditions. Each of these components can be examined and assessed
as part of a risk-sensitivity index. The index catalogs the presence or
absence of concealment, natural surveillance, informal social control, and
other contextual variables relevant to detection risk. It begins with the
offender and works outward. Does he or she wear a mask? Does he or she
camouflage his or her identity in some other way? If the offense involves
the likelihood of leaving physical evidence that might tie the offender to
the crime scene, then does he or she take measures to reduce that possibil-
ity? Is he or she careful not to touch objects that might leave prints? Does
he or she wear gloves? If the offense involves sexual contact, then does the
offender wear a condom?
It is not necessarily enough to ask whether concealment is used. The
nature of the concealment also must be scrutinized because it can produce
the opposite of its intended effect. In one offense known to the author,
7. What specific measures might have deterred this offender is a separate question
and is based on an analysis of the crime-prevention needs of the particular prop-
erty in question.
8. The offenses described in these three vignettes are drawn from actual crimes
reported to the police.
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two offenders carjacked and killed a victim in the parking lot of a local
grocery store. Prior to committing the offense, both offenders placed ball
caps on their heads and bandanas over their faces. The ball caps they
wore, however, were emblazoned with oversized yellow letters on the
front that depicted the name of the street gang to which they belonged. On
the back of the hats were yellow numbers denoting the particular block
numbers where they congregated. The bandanas they wore were bright
yellow—the kind of color that a jogger or road worker might wear to draw
attention to him- or herself. Importantly, the offense was not undertaken
as part of any gang initiation (thus, removing doubt about the role of crim-
inal commitment in their deterrability or lack thereof).
The wrong concealment paradoxically can expose offenders, but the
right concealment can be undermined by inattention to detail. One drug
dealer I interviewed recounted being robbed and carjacked by a masked
offender. During the offense, the robber wore a particular pair of boots,
which had distinctive paint stains. My respondent recognized them to be
owned by a customer he periodically served. Locating the robber the next
day (he lived upstairs in the same extended-stay motel), my respondent
beat the man terribly, retrieving his stolen car and some money the man
had seized. In most stranger-on-stranger crimes, inadvertent giveaways
will not be a problem. Where prior knowledge exists between the victim
and the offender, risk-sensitive offenders will account for the possibility
and act accordingly.
Potential for exposure can come from co-offenders and even target
choice, so attention might be directed toward these factors as well. Prior
research (Jacobs, 2000) suggests, for example, that the decision to offend
by oneself or only with trusted co-offenders might be risk sensitive inas-
much as the offender makes the choice to prevent being “snitched on” by
unreliable compatriots. As for target selection, risk-sensitive offenders
might choose “extralegal” crime victims because they are beyond the law
and realistically cannot report the offense to the police (Jacobs, 2000;
Wright and Decker, 1997).
Tactical elements of risk sensitivity are contextual as well, which require
the analyst to focus on the venue in which the offense is performed. Does
the location have a lot of natural surveillance or a little? Is natural surveil-
lance at the incident location typically jumpstarted at a moment’s notice
(e.g., from frequent and/or predictable intrusions); how strong is that pro-
clivity relative to the anticipated offense duration, and does the offender
recognize this potential prior to acting? Does the location have physical
surveillance or not? If so, what kind and how much? Does the location
permit easy escape? Does the location have strong or weak informal social
control? Informal social control long has been recognized as one of the
most powerful crime deterrents, but some offenders are oblivious to it. In
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one offense known to the author, the offender walked up to a man and his
girlfriend as they were entering a restaurant to eat dinner. Unmasked, the
offender shot the man at point-blank range, took his car keys, and
attempted to start the man’s vehicle (parked a few feet away). The offense
occurred in full view of a row of large windows at the restaurant. It was
peak dinner hour, and the restaurant was packed. Two patrons were leav-
ing the restaurant right before the shooting and had just walked by the
offender as he approached the victim. The parking lot was well lit. A sur-
veillance camera mounted on top of the restaurant was recording.
In another incident known to the author, an offender stabbed a victim
after a traffic dispute in a fully lit Taco Bell drive-thru lane. The dispute
and subsequent stabbing took place in view of at least ten potential eye-
witnesses. The entire encounter was captured on surveillance video and
(subsequently) broadcast worldwide on YouTube. The offender began the
altercation with the victim while the victim was on the phone with the police
(to report the traffic accident) and under the reasonable presumption that
the police were on their way. The offender did not attempt to conceal or
disguise his identity in any way. The offender attacked the victim despite
the fact that he (the offender) had $6,000 worth of marijuana packaged for
sale under the seat of his car— a quantity that would trigger a charge of
intent to distribute (as opposed to simple possession) if the police were to
discover it (recall that the police were on their way). The offender
attacked the victim despite the presence and direct intervention of at least
two peacemakers (a cousin of the offender and an unrelated customer).
Following the stabbing, the offender made no attempt to flee, despite the
fact that he knew the police were coming and were arriving at the Taco
Bell as the stabbing concluded.
The various tactical and situational elements explored previously can
inform a relatively simple checklist that operationalizes risk sensitivity in
discrete circumstances. The concealment variables (e.g., mask or not, con-
dom or not, gloves or not) can be nominal level; lighting, natural surveil-
lance, physical surveillance, and informal social control can be ordinal
level. Both sets of variables can be disaggregated into different subcom-
ponents (e.g., informal social control might be measured by the number of
bystanders, their proximity to the offense location, or the extent to which
they actually witnessed the incident in question). The index would yield a
sum-total measure that would comprise a risk-sensitivity score. The
indexed score, in turn, could be compared across offenders and offenses
and regressed against any number of other relevant variables (e.g., type of
crime, motive, victim–offender relationship, weapon involvement,
offender age, victim age, offender educational level, offender marital sta-
tus, offender employment status). The actual data would come from police
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430 JACOBS
9. As Felson (1998: 48) noted “No human being [however conforming he or she
typically is] is immune from committing a crime, even a major one . . . [A]nyone
can be tempted by something at some time. . . . Keeping temptations out of sight
or mind also helps people to follow rules.”
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IN CLOSING
Criminologists long have contended that some offenses are more deter-
rable than others, although most such claims focus on the type of crime
involved (Paternoster and Simpson, 1993), the motives that drive the
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offense, (Chambliss, 1967), or the people who commit the crime. The dis-
cussion offered here incorporates type, person, and motive within a
broader situational rubric of risk sensitivity.
To be sure, responsiveness to sanction threats traditionally has been
conceptualized in abstract terms distal to the actual offense. Routine activ-
ity theory has spent the better part of 30 years arguing that threats of
severe punishment are irrelevant and that the “crime triangle” must be
disrupted if deterrence is to be achieved. As Eck (1997: 243) remarked,
Most offender based strategies try to sway offenders’ minds weeks,
months, or years before they confront a tempting criminal opportu-
nity. If offenders pay closer attention to the situation immediately
before them than to the uncertain long term risks of their behavior,
then it is quite possible that prevention at places may have a greater
impact on offending than increases in penalties or less tangible
increases in risks (e.g., decreases in police response time, increased
police presence, or greater numbers of arrests and convictions).
Cromwell and Olson (2004: 23) concurred, concluding that “considera-
tion of long-term risk is almost non-existent in the decision process of
most [offenders]. . . . Not only do they not consider next month or next
year, most do not even consider next day.” The challenge is to identify
which offenders in which situations make contemporaneous considera-
tions and to operationalize how they do that. Domain analysis (Spradley,
1980) that attends to the tactical and situational aspects of risk sensitivity
can help generate data to answer these questions empirically.
Although this type of approach might not provide hard-and-fast answers
in regard to why risk sensitivity does or does not exist in particular circum-
stances, it does reveal specific incidents that likely would have been inhib-
ited by preventive measures appropriate to the setting in question. Such a
revelation cuts to the core of the nexus between crime-prevention policy
and crime etiology by linking the absence of a particular measure (or mea-
sures) to the proximate cause of a crime. In so doing, the approach fills
two theoretical gaps—one spawned by deterrence theory (by nesting
deterrability in situated decision making rather than in criminal commit-
ment or in crime propensity), the other by routine activities theory (by
identifying which offenders in which circumstances could have been inhib-
ited but were not).
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