Your First Five Crime Studies of January 29
Today's crime studies include work on rational choice theory
I'm Aaron Jacklin, and this is Explaining Crime, an independent newsletter that helps you explain crime to your audience.
Your First Five is a daily (M-F) series that publishes a curated selection of recent research related to crime and justice. Each post contains links to new studies that I hope will enhance your work explaining crime. Published each weekday at about 7 a.m., E.S.T.
These new criminology and criminal justice studies were published recently by journals I monitor.
1. Revisiting the tautology problem in rational choice theory: What it is and how to move forward theoretically and empirically, published in European Journal of Criminology. (Restricted access)
2. Unfitness to stand trial and the social model of disability: challenges for Latin American criminal justice, published in Current Issues in Criminal Justice. (Restricted access)
3. Bullying at School and Students’ Learning Outcomes: International Perspective and Gender Analysis, published in Journal of Interpersonal Violence. (Restricted access)
4. A Typology of Family Relationships among Older Adults in Prison, published in The Prison Journal. (Restricted access)
5. A Bayesian Aoristic Logistic Regression to Model Spatio-Temporal Crime Risk Under the Presence of Interval-Censored Event Times, published in Journal of Quantitative Criminology. (Open access)
I might cover some of these studies further in Understanding Crime. If one sounds interesting or important, let me know in the comments.
Right now, I'm considering number 1. Here's why:
Criminological rational choice theory is blighted by tautology—that if a crime occurs, then by definition the benefits must exceed the costs. The current analysis details the nature of this tautology as well as its theoretical and philosophical implications concerning the circumstances under which offenders make rational (thoughtful and reflective) or irrational (habitual, intuitive, or instinctual) choices.