ABSTRACT
Interest in the rational actor model of crime and criminal behaviour was revived both in the UK and the USA during the rise of the political new right – or populist conservatives – during the 1970s and 1980s. The second decade of that time period was to see the infl uential emergence of the ‘nothing works’ (Martinson, 1974) agenda at the British Home Offi ce, which seriously questioned the effectiveness of rehabilitation – proposed by the then dominant paradigmatic orthodoxy of the predestined actor model of crime and criminal behaviour – as a crime control strategy. This chapter considers three groups of contemporary rational choice theories that have come to prominence with that revival: (i) contemporary deterrence theories; (ii) rational choice theories; and (iii) routine activities theory.
Contemporary deterrence theories
