Running Head: CRIMINAL JUSTICE 1

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

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Institutional Affiliation

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Crime, Place, and Victimization

Rational choice theorist encourages the rationality of choices, the economic principle that

assumes that people always make critical, logical, and prudent decisions. , these decisions are

meant to provide the highest level of personal utility. The decisions are optimized to self-interest

and provide individuals or group with greatest satisfaction or benefits. Rational choice theorists

are people who are best in giving this kind of decisions. The war on terror and subsequent

terrorist has affected many activities in the society today, this has always been left for police and

federal agents to investigate and come up with a solution. Terrorism has happened before and

still happing, it is said to result from economic-political pressure and poverty in weak countries.

However, a recent study shows that both poor and wealthy states people chose to become

terrorist (Lawrence, Kuznar, 2007), and the most chaotic states have the least number of terrorist.

This shows terrorism is rational and irrational it developed from individual minds.

Rational choice theorists have a role to play in the terrorism war, since terrorism starts

from, individual and not states rational theorists can provide awareness and education about

terrorism and terror. The model of people decision-making as said to be explicitly and implicitly

centered to theories on terrorism. Rational decision theorist believes that human is the actor of

crime, crime is driven by an urge for revenge, money, and self-gain. The idea of impulsivity

from theorists would reduce crime (Lambert, 2017). Another concept introduced by theorists is

that places that are affected with a crime would engage operant conditioning, this gives the

terrorist the impression that the areas targeted are risky, and they could be caught, this is made

possible by sub-cultural norms. Victimization will happen in both crime and place of target

scenario, a terrorist would not target an earlier affected place in a while. These shows that to
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rational decision theorist, crime is rational. These perceptions make the terrorist feel that they

would be caught in their activity.

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References

Lambert, R. D. (2017). Routine Activity and Rational Choice: Volume 5. Routledge.

Slovic, P., Finucane, M. L., Peters, E., & MacGregor, D. G. (2004). Risk as analysis and risk as

feelings: Some thoughts about affect, reason, risk, and rationality. Risk analysis, 24(2),

311-322.