Updating Subjective Beliefs about Risk and Opportunities: Is Prison Experience a Credible Signal?

• In Event: Old Ideas, New Puzzles: Advancing Offender Decision Making

Abstract

The updating of subjective beliefs about risks, costs and rewards to crime has attracted much recent attention from criminologists, who have found evidence these process can be sometimes either rational (i.e., making optimal use of information; e.g., Anwar and Loughran 2011; Matsuda et al. 2006) or behavioral (i.e., discounting or ignoring relevant information systematically; e.g., Pogarsky et al. 2017; Thomas et al. 2013). The current study seeks to broaden the context of what constitutes ‘information’ in the perception formation process by quantifying the role of signals obtained by offenders in prison and exploring how these signals are incorporated into subjective beliefs. Using a sample of incarcerated offenders who are observed for multiple time periods both inside and outside of prison, along with a comparison group, we test how subjective beliefs about criminal risk and opportunities change in response to certain prison experiences. We consider the broader implications for theory and policy.

Authors

• Thomas Loughran, University of Maryland

• Nicole Frisch, University of Maryland