Caesar Beccaria's Rational Choice Theory

Caesar Beccaria’s Classical School of Criminology served as the theoretical foundation of which Ronald V. Clarke and Richard B. Cornish’s rational choice theory is derived. Cornish and Clarke developed their version of rational choice theory in the mid-1980s in order to create a method of study that would help improve crime prevention policies (Clarke and Cornish, 1986: 421-422). Beccaria believed that all individuals have free will and that all individuals are hedonistic in nature, rationally looking out for their own personal satisfaction. They chose to modify Beccaria’s “Classical Paradigm of Criminology” because, “offenders seek to benefit themselves by their criminal behavior; that this involves the making of decisions and choices, however rudimentary on occasions these choices might be and that these processes, constrained as they are by time, the offender’s cognitive …show more content…
Knowing at different offences meet various needs and because the situational context of decision making and the information being perceived will vary vastly among offenses. The crime-specific model focuses on groups of crimes rather than the criminal offender. Crime-specific studies of burglary (Clarke and Cornish 1978: 154), reveal that the vulnerability of particular targets can be explained largely on the basis of factors such as ease of opportunity, low risk, and high gain. Cornish and Clarke felt that finer distinctions between crimes were needed and that large exhaustive groups may require further separation into subgroups to fully examine criminals’ motives of offending. Utilizing crime-specific model, the developers intended to provide a framework for understanding all forms of crimes to the nature, development and channeling of common motives and desires by way of background factors, current circumstances, routines and lifestyles (Cornish and Clarke, 1986: