Choosing crime: Close your eyes and take your chances

Previous research on the incidence of property crimes shows that a small group of repeat offenders is responsible for 60 percent of armed robberies and burglaries. Little is known, however, about the nature and the incidence of their offending and how they incorporate the threat of punishment into the decision to commit a crime. To learn about such processes, I selected and interviewed a purposive sample of repetitive property offenders who had been undeterred by the threat of legal punishment. The most common responses explaining the lack of deterrent effects on their actions are that they 1) thought they would not get caught, 2) thought that if they were caught they would be incapacitated for a relatively short time, and 3) considered prison a nonthreatening environment.