Criminal Expertise and Offender Decision-Making An Experimental Analysis of How Offenders and Non-Offenders Differentially Perceive Social Stimuli

Do criminals and non-criminals think differently? Although we often assume so because of way that they behave, there is little research that specifically addresses this issue. If differential cognitive functioning patterns are assumed to exist between offend ers and non-offenders, then more specific questions regarding the nature of those dif ferences must be addressed. Cognitive operations specifically germane to the planning or execution of crimes are of particular interest to criminologists as they relate to offender decision-making. In a classical assessment of offenders, Hirschi (1986) argued that they 'are not very good at what they do', maintaining little or no expertise that is particular to the enactment of crime in general or to specific types of crime. Indeed, he asserted that the offender career 'does not appear to be a career of increasing skill and sophistication', but rather one that '. . . starts with litde of either and goes downhill from there'. Yet, rational choice perspectives would argue that offenders maintain some form of specialized knowledge emanating from their personal histories of engaging in crime and that such specialization increases their chance of initiating crime and experiencing success. A small body of experimental research (Wright et al. 1995; Decker et al. 1993; Wright and Logie 1988) confirms this, maintaining that offenders perceive the environment of their crimes differently from non-offenders and that differences in perception are directly related to specialized offending knowledge. Their work has focused on how burglars assess the immediate physical environment and settings within which their crimes occur. Active burglars and non-offender control participants were shown photo graphs of residences and asked to judge whether they would make for attractive bur glary targets. In a later stage of the study, participants viewed altered versions of the previous photographs and were asked to point out burglary-relevant target changes. Contrary to Hirschi's appraisal of offenders as unskilled, results indicated that they do indeed develop, maintain and use crime-specific cognitive abilities in assessing their targets. Offenders were more attuned and sensitive to alterations in photographic stim uli than were control participants and employed such knowledge in selecting dwellings for burglary. Results confirmed previous interview-based work by Carroll and Weaver (1986) that linked technical expertise and interactional personal skills to the assessment of criminal opportunities. Since then, a number of other studies have tackled the issue of criminal expertise, with some success. Some have continued to focus on the capabilities of burglars, looking at their proficiency in breaking into automobiles (Michael et al 2001), comparing their assessments of defensible space to those of police officers (Ham-Rowbottom et al. 1999),