Expropriative Crime and Crime Policy: An ...

Ex~ro~riative Crime ar~d Crime Policy: Ak ~;olutionar~Ecological ~ n a l ~ s i & A~STRACT Criminal acts that expropriate goods and services are a serious threat to society. Here we summarize an emerging theory that explains the incidence of expropriative crime as an expression of diverse behavioral strategies that derive from normal patterns of population-level social organization and interaction. By examining the nature of expropriative strategies themselves and the context created by other strategies present in a population, we can explain within one theoretical framework the link between key macro- and individual-level forces responsible for patterns of expropriative crime. After summarizing the basic tenets of our evolutionary ecological theory, we identify the properties of expropriative strategies that increase their chances for successful completion and replication. We next discuss how expropriative strategies are transmitted. Finally, while we offer several suggestions for limiting the proliferation of illegal expropriative acts, we illustrate why the dynamic nature of expropriative strategy evolution makes it so difficult to control such offenses within democratic industrial societies. (Studies on Crime and Crime Prevention Vol. 4 No. 2 1995. National Councilfor Crime Prevention). Keywords: expropriative crime, patterns, ecological theory, expropriative strategies, control difficulties. INTRODUCTION

A recently developed general evolutionary ecological theory of expropriative crime provides a comprehensive explanation for a wide range of empirical findings from the many academic disciplines that have studied crime (Cohen & Machalek, 1988,1994, 1995; Machalek & Cohen, 1991; Vila & Cohen, 1993). This theory focuses on

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criminal acts that expropriate goods and services, explaining how their character and frequency evolve as a result of ecological processes. Following an approach commonly used in behavioral ecology, the theory employs a gametheoretic perspective that interprets expropriative behaviors as "contests" between the strategies employed by

The authors wish to thank Mary Jackman, Kenneth C. Land, Robert Sampson, and Norman Skonovd for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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potential victims and offenders in populations that compete for valued resources. The use of the terms "ecology" and "evolution" are sometimes confusing to social scientists. Ecology is the study of reciprocal interrelationships that occur between individual ocganisms and with their environment; evolution is the study of the processes by which ecological relationships lead to cumulative change over time in the characteristics (including behaviors) of populations of organisms. This theory is ecological because it locates the roots of expropriative crime in ecological processes of society such as routine patterns of activity, the availabilityand distribution of resources, modes of production, and competition and cooperation between individuals and groups. It is evolutionary because it asserts that expropriative criminal strategies emerge and change as a result of dynamic processes that are akin to natural selection. The primary difference between the evolution of criminal strategies and the evolution of biological traits is that the former are transmitted largely via cultural rather than genetic media. Here we first outline the basic tenets of this explanation of expropriative crime, then identify and discuss the characteristics of strategies that increase the chances they will be executed successfully. We next describe the processes by which expropriative strategies are acquired and the factors associated with their differential transmission. Finally, we discuss the policy implications of this synthetic theory and illustrate why it is so difficult to control the spread of such behaviors. (For a complete description of the theory, see Cohen & Machalek, 1988.And for an experimental test of the theory's assumptions and novel hypotheses, see Vila & Cohen, 199.3).

THE INDIVIDUAL AS STRATEGIST

The main premise of this theory is that many forms ofwhat we call expropriative crime are best viewed as normal expressions of diverse behavioral strategies that individuals adopt to meet their needs. Our theoretical approach thus begins with the premise that behavior is strongly influenced by its consequences (whether they are accurately perceived or not). It characterizes individuals as "strategists" who attempt to satisfy their interests in an ecological context subject to environmental constraints. This acknowledges that humans, like all organisms, have evolved to behave in ways that tend to be beneficial to them. While individuals are predisposed (not rigidly determined) to act on behalf of their own interests, we note that they may sometimes act to benefit family members, friends, and even strangers rather than themselves. As we will explain later in greater detail, however, not all strategic actions taken by individuals are necessarily guided by "rational choice" in the narrow sense; strategists do not always pursue ends as effectively as possible, and actors sometimes err in ordering their preferences. It is our view then that strategies are not always executed as well-informed choices, nor are they always selected in order to maximize expected utility. Finally, our theory recognizes that much criminal behavior can best be understood as self-interested only with reference to conditions in particular socio-cultural, economic, political, and historical contexts. Only when we examine expropriative actions within these contexts can we begin to understand what may otherwise appear to some observers as "irrational" behavior. A strategy is a behavioral policy, a way to "get things done." It is one of a set of possible alternative behaviors or programs that yield benefits to individuals or groups, whether these benefits are STUDIES ON CRIME AND CRIME PREVENTION

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intended and consciously recognized or not (Dawkins 1976;Axelrod 1984:14). Our central thesis with respect to the evolution and ecology of what we call expropriative crime is that the social organization of productive activity in societies creates an opportunity structure that often invites invasion by various expropriative strategies. While this thesis is not novel, we argue below that, unlike competing theories of crime that share this view, our evolutionary ecological theory has the advantage in that it is able to explain within one theoretical model the interdependence between offender motivation, victim behavior. and situational differences within which various types of expropriative crime are most likely to occur and succeed. The dynamic interdependence between productiue and expropriatiue strategies

People often acquire resources by strategies associated with production, defined here as the legal processes by which technology, energy and raw materials are used to create goods and services within a society. Although individuals often benefit from mutual cooperation in productive activities, they sometimes may do as well, or even better, by exploiting the productive activities of others. Expropriation is here defined as a strategy for obtaining valued resources from others by using illegal coercion, deception or stealth. When an expropriative act violates a criminal law it is defined as an expropriative

crime.' Thus, expropriative crime is a predictable, but not necessarily inevitable, by-product of normal patterns of social organization and conduct. In our view, a population in which a large proportion of individuals is actively engaged in cooperative productive activities is likely to be highly susceptible to invasion by alternative strategists that we call expropriators. Both "production" and "expropriation" are conceptualized as behavioral strategies within an interactive context described as a "game" (Axelrod, 1984; Dawkins, 1980,1982;Maynard Smith, 1974; 1979; 1982). Alternative strategies compete within a population in the sense that some strategies tend to confer greater benefits to individuals who adopt and successfully execute them. Hence, some strategies can be viewed as more successful than the alternatives against which they compete. Over time, more successful strategies are more likely to proliferate within and across populations. According to evolutionary game theory,* strategies are selectively retained and transmitted (either consciously or unconsciously) because of their consequences, and the processes involved comprise "strategy evolution" as discussed by Axelrod (1984). The success of any given strategy often depends strongly on the kinds of strategies adopted by others within the same population and the relative frequencies with which these strategies are employed. Resources or access to re-

1. Common examples of expropriative crimes include robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, forgery, fraud embezzlement, and counterfeiting. 2. For a discussion of game theory, evolutionary game theory, and how each relates to our theory, see Vila and Cohen (1993).Clearly written and easily accessible introductions to evolutionary game theory are available in Barash (1982) and Dawkins (1982).More sophisticated theoretical treatments can be found in Axelrod (1984) and Maynard Smith (1982). STUDIES ON CRIME AND CRIME PREVENTION

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sources tend to be scarce, and different strategies employ different means to acquire these resources. Rare alternative strategies often enjoy a competitive advantage over more conventional ones simply because fewer people are using them. In situations such as these where the average payoff for a strategy varies inversely with the number of others who are employing the same strategy, the likely success of the strategy is said to be "frequency dependent" (Fisher, 1930). Given the general frequency dependent nature of strategy payoffs, the ecological dynamics of the theory suggest that a population of productive strategists often invites invasion by innovative expropriative strategies. For example, a population of producers who always pay back others from whom they have received a resource is initially extremely vulnerable to invasion by an innovative "cheater," or expropriator. This helps explain why confidence game artists can thrive among populations of producers. As information on cheating strategies spreads and the proportion of cheaters in a population increases, competition among cheaters is enhanced and the average payoff to each cheater then may decline. Thus, the average yield of a strategy is dependent upon the frequency with which it is employed. The evolutionary dynamics of our theory are perhaps exemplified best by describing the processes through which successful expropriative strategies provoke deterrent or protective counterstrategies from individuals and groups within societies. Over time, ecological interactions that give rise to expropriative crime frequently lead to defensive counter-responses executed by producers and law enforcement agents that are aimed at crime prevention. The spread of anti-crime counter-measures, if effective, could limit payoffs and/or

increase the costs of crime. Such anticrime measures then may serve to decrease rates of specific types of crime strategies - at least temporarily. Effective anticrime counter-strategies, however, also encourage the evolution of new or modified illegal expropriative strategies. These new or modified illegal strategies will succeed to the extent that they continually evolve and adapt to new counter-strategies and opportunities. At the same time, however, these new expropriative strategies stimulate further defensive counter-responses from producers and law enforcement agents, until a self-reinforcing dynamic system emerges that resembles an "arms racen (Cohen & Machalek, 1988). This dynamic process eventually will yield one of two possible outcomes: 1) either the expropriator/producer strategy ratio will oscillate indefinitely within the population at some non-zero level; or 2) a stable proportion of expropriative criminal to productive strategies will evolve. In either case, the resulting ratio of criminal to non-criminal behaviors within a population reflects mainly the advantages of certain strategy proportions in the population and does not necessarily reflect the individual traits and social characteristics of persons within societies. This is important because it introduces an explicitly sociological dimension to the evolution of expropriative criminal strategies. It means that the population-level dynamics of social interaction among strategies (rather than just the different individual traits o r social characteristics of strategists) can become a crucial driving force shaping the relative incidence and emergent patterns of criminal and expropriative behaviors in populations (Cohen & Machalek, 1988).


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BRINGING T H E INDMDUAL OFFENDER BACK IN

So far we have concentrated on identifying population-level dynamics that affect the nature and spread of expropriative crime within populations. Our theory thus is most concerned with how populations will behave - that is, what proportion of the individuals in a population are likely to adopt which types of strategies. We are well aware, however, of the vast amount of data that indicate certain personal and social traits consistently and significantly correlate with the incidence of serious crime among individuals (see Wilson & Herrnstein, 1985, and Vold & Bernard, 1986, for a summary of this research). The utility of our theory is enhanced to the degree that it is able to explain both population- level factors and individual and social traits that influence crime. Below we illustrate how, where, and why individual and social characteristics may influence (but not determine) illegal expropriative strategy selection within populations. By so doing, we bring offender motivation into our theoretical perspective, and are thus able to account simultaneously for both individual and population-level variables. We agree with many contemporary theories of crime that the probability of individuals adopting and/or successfully executing expropriative strategies can vary significantly with a wide range of socio-cultural, physiological, psychological, and developmental factors (that is, with social and individual traits, and with structural and historical conditions). We argue, however, that the social and personal traits that are most predictive of persons who a d o p t expropriative criminal strategies are generally those that affect differentially one's ability to compete strategically (both legally and illegally) for valued resources within specific social environments. STUDIES O N CRIME AND CRIME PREVENTION

More generally, at the individual-level of analysis, the outcomes of contests between expropriators and their intended victims usually do not depend solely on the combination of offensive and defensive strategies that happen to meet in time and space. Competitive ability also is influenced by a suite of non-strategic traits as they are brought to bare on a contest situation via a particular strategy. This means that contestants' non-strategic characteristics also can affect the outcome of expropriative criminal events. It seems certain that - in addition to the strategy selected - the likelihood of a successful outcome in an expropriative contest often will vary with a number of basic factors identified previously by many criminologists. We parsimoniously divide these factors into three broad categories: 1) differences in competitors' individual traits; 2) differences in their access to resources; and 3) differences in the value that individual participants assign to the contested resources or to the uses of different strategies. In the argot of behavioral ecologists, the suite of traits employed by an individual engaged in strategic contests has been labeled the contestant's "resource holding potential" or "RHP" (Parker, 1974). There may be asymmetries between contestants in terms of personal attributes (e.g., size strength, intelligence, speed, dexterity, etc.), social attributes (e.g., inequalities of status, wealth, power, etc.), and access to resources (e.g., weapons, security devices, guardians etc.). RHP differences may be balanced or even offset by the value each contestant assigns to the contested resource - what behavioral ecologists call "resource valuation" or " R V (Paker, 1974). That is, RHP deficiencies sometimes can be overcome in competitive encounters when the trait-deficient participant assigns a greater value to the contested resource than does his or her

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more advantaged opponent. The "RHP superior" opponent may refuse to incur the cost needed to acquire o r retain a resource that he or she values less than his or her more highly motivated, but less advantaged, opponent. Finally, we note that not only are resources valued differently by contestants but so too are various strategies. Later we argue that some expropriative strategies are adopted because their very enactment is intrinsically satisfying or stimulating to their executors. We reiterate that for over a century criminologists have repeatedly identified certain social, physical, and personal traits as significantly associated with criminal behavior. We argue that the vast majority of these traits can be conceptualized as RHP or RV factors (see Cohen & Machalek, 1988, pp. 479488). By including RHP a n d RV asymmetries as enabling or predisposing factors that precipitate conscious and unconscious decisions by offenders to pursue available criminal opportunities, our theory can accomodate the influence of individual and social traits on expropriative criminal behavior that "Routine Activity" and other situational and victimization theories have been criticized for ignoring (see Birkbeck & LaFree, 1993). It is our view, however, that the causal significance of many of the biological and psychological traits that have been associated with crime is more indirect and contextual than many "trait-oriented" criminologists contend. That is, we believe that many of these individual traits assume their relevance to criminal involvement mainly within particular kinds of cultures, or in situations where possession of the trait can enable and facilitate the strategic acquisition ofvalued resources. For example, mesomorphic body type may predict the use of physical force to obtain resources in many societies, not because persons with this body type are

innately predisposed to engage in such behavior, but because (all other things equal) mesomorphs are more capable of successfully executing strategies based on force than are persons with ectomorphic or endomorphic body types. In other words, in societies where mesomorphy did not confer advantage in the use of physical force to obtain valued resources, we would not expect it to be significantlyassociated with criminal behavior. For instance, an extreme example might be a society where all people carried firearms and skill in their use was unrelated to morphology. An alternative extreme might be a society that placed less value on material resources which could be obtained by physical force, and more value on symbolic resources such as spirituality. Similarly, the RHP value of mesomorphy might vary from one social context to another. For a young male corporate executive, possession of a mesomorphic body type might confer a modest advantage in how receptive people were to his ideas in a business setting. For a female employee in the same firm, possession of a mesomorphic body type might confer a disadvantage because it could make male personnel feel uncomfortable around her. For a young man walking the streets of a slum, a mesomorphic body could decrease the probability that someone would attempt to use physical force to steal from him - and/or increase the probability that he could successfully employ such a strategy against someone else. Within different social contexts then, the frequency dependence of strategies and asymmetries of individual ability, and/or the value placed on a contested resource can be important predictors of strategy evolution, victim selection, and contest outcome. For instance, to the extent that the variables identified in the criminological literature as biologically-based correlates of crime (e.g., STUDIES ONCRIME AND CRIME PREVENTION

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low I.Q., mesomorphic body type, depressed arousal level, poor conditionability, volatile temperament, and impulsiveness) can be said to "predispose" persons toward crime, we consider their influence to be largely facilitative, indirect, and contextual. We thus view such individual differences as less stable and of less direct causal relevance in explaining crime than do many of those who see crime mainly as the result of the biological impairment of offenders. We contend therefore that within different social contexts, many of the constitutional and other individual traits identified as stable predictors of crime are not necessarily as enduring and/or invariantly related to illegal expropriation in the same ways across different cultures. That is, the influence of such traits on expropriative crime may be much less stable than is contended, and many individual traits could have different impacts on strategy evolution among different social groups in different cultural environments. We believe then that even the most integrated of the biological and psychological theories of crime underestimate the sociological significance of the relationship between individual traits and crime. For example, after reviewing the empirical evidence, Wilson and Herrnstein (1985: 148) contend that low I.Q. is a biologically-based trait that has been found to be clearly and consistently related to crime among individuals in Europe and the United States. Their primary interpretation of this finding is that these variables are indirectly related to o n e another through an intervening variable they term the "time horizon." Persons with low I.Q. are generally less able than others to appreciate the nature and future consequences of their behavior, and because of this limited "time-horizon," such persons are more likely than others to engage in impulsive acts, many STUDIES ON CRIME AND CRIME PREVENTION

of which constitute criminal behavior. Regardless of whether or not we can agree that I.Q. is a biologically based trait, we suspect that the effects of this (and other "constitutional traits") on crime are even more contextual and hence, less stable predictors of crime than Wilson and Herrnstein imply. This relationship is better explained through a more sociologically orientated perspective, rather than by the integrated but biologically and psychologicallycentered theory offered by Wilson and Herrnstein. That is, we believe that "low I.Q." (when possessed by persons not born into wealthy families) may indeed increase significantly the risk of participation in expropriative crime, particularlywithin relativelywell-educatedcompetitive societies. This occurs, however, not necessarily because persons with low I.Q.'s are predisposed to commit crime due to their "time-horizons," but instead, because of the limited life chances available to such persons through productive strategy alternatives in such societies. We believe that Wilson and Herrnstein are able to show a "clear and consistent" relationship between low I.Q. and crime, because their data are derived solely from highly competitive industrial societies. I.Q. is a shorthand symbol for a complex and multifaceted set of human capabilities that are good predictors of educational and career success in European and North American countries (Gould, 1981:24, Harrison et al., 1988:321). In societies such as western industrial countries, people with low I.Q.'s can't compete equally in many tasks that other people value highly (Jencks, 1993, p. 109).This means that they sometimes may opt for expropriation as a strategy for obtaining resources they value. On the other hand, in countries where persons with low I.Q.'s can make a valued and productive contribution to society through relatively simple but important tasks,

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we would not expect a significant correlation between I.Q. and crime. Unfortunately it is difficult to test this hypothesis because, asJencks notes, "less competitive societies" tend not to keep records on I.Q. and crime. Anecdotally, we note that in Japan, a highly competitive industrialized society with an exceptionally low crime rate, the contributions of less skilled workers arevalued. Street sweepers, shop clerks, and taxi drivers keep themselves and their implements immaculate. Although they defer to people in more prestigious occupations, they still are shown substantially more respect than their counterparts in North America or Europe. In other words, while I.Q. may tell us something about the potential to succeed in all societies, like many other human personal traits, it may not be very useful in explaining expropriative crime cross-culturally, especially among individuals who have experiencedvastly different cultural and intellectual milieus. Not only might the relationship between constitutional traits and crime differ across culturally diverse spatial areas, but it also is possible that such relationships could change over different historical time periods - as changes in, for example, technology, social structure, or the types and relative distribution of competing strategies caused one or another set of traits to be favored. The success or failure of a person's application of an expropriative strategy often depends on both individual - and macro-level factors. In order for a strategy to be executed successfully it must be employed by an individual with appropriate RHP traits. Which contestant prevails in an expropriative criminal event will depend substantially on characteristics of the strategies themselves and how compatible they are with the contestants' RHP and RV. Similarly, social organization and cultural factors

also can inhibit or promote the success of a particular strategy. For example, among human groups, a well-organized society with a sizable and well-trained police force and a culture that is intolerant of crime may effectively reduce the success rate of expropriative strategies. Finally, historical and material circumstances also may impinge on the success or failure of various strategies at different points in time within the same society. Under certain environmental and historical conditions - particularly in repressive countries - it is possible that crime simply does not pay. We have been told, for example, that Nazi Germany had a relatively low expropriative crime rate. An important point to remember, however, is that with respect to determining patterns of expropriative behavior within populations, it is not solely or even primarily the individual characteristics and social attributes of persons that affect expropriative strategy evolution, but also, the frequency dependence of strategies within populations. Frequency dependence affects the average payoff for alternative strategies employed within populations. Many strategies tend to spread (or decline) within a population depending upon how much better (or worse) their average payoff is relative to the average payoff for alternative strategies. Thus, the incidence of one strategy type over another cannot be predicted from individual traits alone precisely because payoffs for productive and expropriative strategies often will vary significantly according to their relative proportions within populations (Cohen & Machalek, 1995). In sum, we believe that an evolutionary ecological perspective has greater integrative power than other criminological theories. To many psychologists and economists who study crime, largescale crime patterns are seen as the aggregate result of individual behaviors. STUDIES ON CRIMEAND CRIME PREVENTION

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To the macro-level sociological theorist, the explanation of large scale crime patterns often is to be found among causal processes acting on the scale of whole societies that, in turn, influence individual behavior. Our evolutionary ecological theory, on the other hand, explains that the two levels of analysis are reciprocally linked. Our fundamental unit of analysis is the behavioral strategies that are-expressedby a population of individuals - rather than the individuals executing those strategies. The distribution of these behavioral strategies within a population of individuals varies because of the forces of cultural evolution. Some of these forces originate in individual learning and "rational calculation" and express themselves as what Boyd and Richerson (1985) have called "guided variation" and "biased cultural transmission" (to be discussed later). Other forces result from large-scale population-level social processes, such as frequency dependentselection (Fisher, 1930).In this connection, an important point deserving reemphasis is that it is more useful to focus on the success of any given strategy averaged over all individuals using it, rather than the success of any individual actor employing that strategy. Such an approach is at once both decisively sociological and consistent with the undeniable fact that it is always individuals who commit criminal acts (Cohen & Machalek, 1994). CHARACTERISTICS OF SUCCESSFUL CRIME STRATEGIES We have argued that patterns of illegal expropriative activities are influenced strongly and decisively by the characteristics of expropriative strategies. As was discussed previously, one of the basic assumptions of our evolutionary ecological theory is that "what works" is more likely to proliferate than what


fails. However, unlike the neoclassical economic approach to crime (e.g. Becker, 1968), our evolutionary ecological perspective accounts also for the possibility of biases toward adopting a particular strategy that are independent of consciously perceived utility. In a previous experimental test of the theory, we referred to this increased probability as the transmission bias constant "alpha" (Vila & Cohen, 1993:882-898). With respect to such biases, Cohen and Machalek (1995) have identified a preliminary list of traits that (all other things equal) tend to increase the likelihood that expropriative strategies will succeed once they are executed. They contend that expropriative strategies in general are most likely to succeed in situations to the extent that they are: 1) cryptic, 2) deceptive, 3) bold, 4) surprising, 5) evasive, 6) stimulating, 7) mutable, 8) mobile, and 9) resistant. Strategies can possess more than one of these qualities simultaneously. Since public policies aimed at controlling crime must lessen the probability that expropriative crime strategies will be executed successfully, as well as their proliferation, a closer examination of these properties is warranted. Successful cryptic expropriative strategies involve stealth, and go undetected at the time they are perpetrated. Burglarizing a home while the residents are away is a common example of a cryptic strategy. In spite of the fact that residents are aware of the possible risk of being burglarized, and thus generally lock doors and windows and/or use other security devices, burglars often are successfulbecause they employ cryptic or surreptitious techniques to gain entry to structures. For example, daylight burglars may select a residence as a potential target because shrubbery or fences obscure the doors or windows, and thus can mask their illegal entry. Before approaching the structure, bur-

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glars may attempt to assure that no one is home by first watching for movement in the windows, or perhaps by telephoning the residence. If there is no movement and/or answer, they then may qucikly force entry and slip inside. When possible, they may take steps upon leaving to make the home seem undisturbed so the burglary will go unnoticed for as long as possible in order to increase the chance of distancing themselves from the crime scene. Deception is a property of various illegal strategies through which an offender attempts to improve his or her chances of successfully expropriating material resources or services from another individual or group through the use of subterfuge and trickery. For example, in the U.S. many thousands of people subscribe to basic cable TV services, then use illegal devices to unscramble the signals for expensive services such as premium and pay-per-view movie channels and sporting events. In contrast to those who steal cable TV signals cryptically by making unauthorized connections, these criminals use deception to attempt to trick the cable TV provider into thinking that they are only receiving the most basic services. Still another set of deceptive expropriative strategies used by physicians to defraud government paid medical programs is described by Jesilow, Pontell, and Geis (1993). Because they are reimbursed a fixed amount for each procedure, physicians can increase their income by charging for more expensive procedures than the ones performed, by double-billing, "ping-ponging" (sending patients back and forth for unnecessary visits), "family ganging" (examining all members of the family in one visit), "churning" (mandating unnecessary visits), and prolonging treatment beyond what is necessary for full recovery. Other examples of deceptive criminal expropriative strategies are

those used by attorneys who pad bills for services and fly-by-nightcontractors who promise to re-seal driveways, then merely coat them with a useless black paint. Bold criminal strategies attempt to overpower intended victims by confronting them directly and aggressively without any attempt to hide or disguise their intended purpose. Intimidation often is a central component of bold strategies, because it increases the probability that perpetrators will not actually have to use force to obtain resources. For example, robbers armed with guns are both more likely to complete their crimes successfully, and less likely to use weapons than are robbers armed with knives (BJS, 1986). Examples of bold expropriative criminal strategies also are blackmail and extortion. These types of strategies tend to take advantage of RHP asymmetries between expropriator and victim in such traits as physical size and/or strength, use of weapons, or accesses to sensitive information that the intended victim does not want passed on to others. Bold strategies also may take advantage of past interactions. An extreme example would be an otherwise RHP inferior (i.e., smaller, less well armed) individual who wins an initial fight over resources with an RHP superior opponent due to, say, greater RV, home court advantage, or perhaps just plain luck - and seriously hurts him or her. In future encounters, the otherwise RHP deficient person's reputation may enable him or her to extort resources from otherwise physically superior opponents (Archer, 1988:166-171). Surprise also can enhance the RHP of individuals employing bold or deceptive expropriative strategies - they know what is to come while their intended victims do not. The element of surprise often increases the vulnerability of victims and reduces the time available for STUDIESON CRIME AND CRlME PREVENTION

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them to recognize and attempt to counter o r avoid bold or deceptive strategies. For example, robbery and car-jacking victims often are initially paralyzed by surprise. This allows criminals to establish their authority and better control the expropriative encounter (see ~ e t k e m a n n ,1973:108-1 16). Purse snatching is another example of the sudden bold application of what often turns out to be the application of minimal force to expropriate resources. Evasiveness is a quality that enhances the ability of expropriative strategies to avoid defensive ,counter-strategies. After being executed a number of times, strategies often earn a "reputation" among the population of potential victims. As a consequence, more successful expropriative strategies eventually tend to evoke defensive counter-strategies from producers and law enforcement officials. More evasive strategies are better able to "stay ahead of their reputations" by minimizing the amount of time spent victimizing one population. A good example of an evasive expropriative criminal strategy is telemarketing fraud in which victims are offered non-existent goods at very low prices and are induced to pay for the merchandise by giving a credit card number over the phone. These criminals then immediately use the legitimately obtained credit card number to make fraudulent purchases. The constant movement of their operations from one location to another makes it extremely difficult for police to capture these perpetrators. Thus far the traits we have discussed all have tended to increase the probability that strategies will be adopted and successfully executed by decreasing the risks associated with the counter-strategies of victims and authorities. We now consider traits of expropriative strategies that may bias favorably the probability that they will be transmitSTUDIES ON CRIME AND CRIME PREVENTION

ted, and therefore proliferate within a population. In other words, the following traits may themselves tend to motivate potential expropriators to adopt and employ various strategies. Stimulation is a quality common to many expropriative strategies that makes them intrinsically satisfying to those who execute them. Stimulation can be a powerful proximate motivator of expropriative activites, many ofwhich entail substantial risk-taking. As we explained earlier, although evolutionary ecological theory assumes that strategies often proliferate because of their desirable consequences, it does not require that we assume people always are motivated by a conscious awareness of the utility of adopting and executing a particular strategy. The excitement, stimulation, and feeling of power associated with committing armed robbery, burglary, or grand larceny may alone be sufficient to motivate these behaviors independent of material rewards. In fact, our evolutionary ecological theory allows for the possibility that the intrinsic rewards of stimulation associated with risky thrill- seeking behaviors can be an even more powerful motivator of risky expropriative behavior than perceptions of extrinsic benefits of material rewards that can be gained by executing a particular expropriative strategy. That is, there are characteristics of strategies themselves that can increase the value a person places on a resource. A trivial example of this is the childhood perception that chocolate chip cookies "snitched" when Mom wasn't looking - or pretended not to be tasted better. By being stimulating, an expropriative strategy may effectively overcome the potentially inhibiting effects of conscious a priori assessments of "expected utility" likely to be associated with the decision to execute an expropriative criminal strategy. Research supportive of this view has

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recently been reported by Katz (1988) who obtained data from extensive interviews and participant observations of street criminals in the U.S. Katz contends that some of the most important motivations for crime are located in the "seductiveness" of the criminal experience itself. Indeed, Katz concludes from his data that the experience of crime itself is, on average, a stronger motivating force for expropriative strategy adoption than is the acquisition of material benefits. The mutability of a strategy is yet another trait that can contribute to the proliferation of expropriative strategies within populations. Mutability describes a strategy's ability to evolve in response to counter-strategies, as well as opportunities or challenges presented by changes in the behavior of potential victims, and/or the environment. Thus, strategies can adapt in response to social, cultural, material, o r physical change. It is in this context that the phenomenon of "arms races" between expropriators and potential victims becomes central. Consider car theft as an expropriative strategy that has mutated in response to anti-theft counter-strategies devised by car manufacturers and security experts. Car thieves adapted to ignition locks introduced in the 1940s by learning to "hot-wire." When steering column locks were introduced in the early 1970s, thieves learned to use auto-body tools to pull off the entire locking collar. This stimulated the use of increasingly elaborate car alarms. Some thieves then adapted by using such highly sophisticated strategies as pouring liquid nitrogen on critical components to overcome alarms. Others shifted to a bolder strategy- carjacking - that requires little sophistication. This process continues: A colleague argued that some cities have reported initial success in reducing auto theft after extensive campaigns to distribute steer-

ing wheel bars (e.g. "The Club"). When we asked a young man who recently was released from juvenile hall how one might overcome steering wheel bars, he replied, "It's easy, you just use bolt cutters to cut the steering wheel in two places and slip off the bar." Strategy mobility also can enhance the spread of expropriative strategies within populations. Mobility refers to the ease with which an expropriative strategy can be transmitted between individuals and from population to population. Mobility should not be confused with evasiveness which refers to the ability of an expropriative strategy to avoid being neutralized by anti-crime counter strategies because its executors are themselves highly mobile. Some strategies are more mobile than others because they are easier to learn or imitate, others because they are communicated widely and efficiently by media such as newspapers, radio, television, and motion pictures. The rate at which expropriative strategies are transmitted also is enhanced when they are introduced into social contexts in which there are high concentrations of experienced expropriators. Because of these effects, it seems possible that incarceration actually may increase the amount of crime in a population because it facilitates the transmission of criminal strategies by bringing large concentrations of experienced expropriators together. Incarceration also places people in a social context where prestige often is associated with criminal conduct; this could further serve to increase the likelihood that expropriative strategies will be transmitted. Compared to traditional societies, modern industrial societies are especially vulnerable to the rapid spread of criminal strategies because they provide near optimal environments for the evoluiton of highly mobile expropriative strategies. Highly efficient communicaSTUDIESON CRIME AND CRlME PREVENTION

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tion and transportation systems provide excellent conduits for the transmission of expropriative criminal strategies. Increasing interconnectedness and societal openness also provide more opportunities for acquiring and enacting expropriative strategies. Many of the factors that enhance conventional economic and social opportunities in modern industrial societies also favor the proliferation of expropriative strategies. Perhaps more so than other qualities that enhance the success of expropriative strategies, mobility best demonstrates why it is especially difficult to implement effective policies for coping with expropriative criminal strategies in more developed countries. Since the spread of expropriative strategies is enhanced greatly by modern communication and transportation technologies, and more free political climates that impose relatively minimal restrictions on the activities and movements of populations, those who would attempt to control expropriative crime by limiting strategy transmissibility face an agonizing dilemma. Many actions that would inhibit the transmission of expropriative strategies - and thus the proliferation of expropriative crime also would restrict legal communication, transportation, and discretionary activities. Finally, several of the above characteristics can combine to give a criminal strategy the quality of resistance. Resistance enables expropriative strategies to cope successfully with counter-strategy tactics. Unlike evasive strategies that attempt to stay ahead of their reputations, resistance enables strategies to stay in place, because it protects them from retaliation. Like the element of surprise, resistance enhances the probability of success for bold strategies that otherwise are very likely to provoke retaliatory counter-responses. Extortion and protection rackets run by organSTUDIES ON CRIME AND CRIME PREVENTION

ized crime families and ethnic gangs that prey on specific communities often are good examples of resistant strategies. When such activities are rooted in a long historical tradition within immigrant neighborhoods, they often are impervious to legal counter-strategies. Victims tend not to retaliate either by notifying the police or via self-help strategies. Even when police make arrests, convictions tend to be difficult to obtain becuase witnesses are reluctant to testify. Further, in terms of the persistence of such strategies, these neighborhoods provide a virtually endless supply of recruits to fill the vacancies created in criminal organizations by the incarceration of those who previously occupied positions in the underworld. Having identified the qualities of expropriative strategies that increase their chances for successful completion, we turn now to a more detailed discussion of how such strategies are transmitted between individuals a n d populations. HOW CRIMINAL STRATEGIES ARE TRANSMITTED Given our theoretical explanation of expropriative crime, it is important to examine how expropriative criminal strategies are acquired before addressing policy alternatives. We argue that many expropriative criminal strategies literally evolve through a form of natural selection as they proliferate by means of culturally mediated processes. Again, from this view, evolution is to be observed at the level of strategies and strategy proportions rather than at the level of individuals per se. It bares repeating that, while differences among individuals with regard to RHP and RV may influence their propensity to adopt criminal strategies under different circumstances, the incidence of expro-

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priative crime and the proliferation of crime strategies within populations cannot be explained by individual differences alone. Our evolutionary ecological theory recognizes the important effects of contextual factors on individual behavior and fixes the roots of crime in a matrix of social patterns and processes. Whatever t h e influence of criminogenic individual traits and attributes on individual behavior, we contend that using strategies rather than individuals as the unit of analysis is important because characteristics of strategies a n d interactions between them contribute independently to their evolution, proliferation, o r decline. Our contention that strategies evolve through "natural selection" is n o t merely analogical. Researchers from many disciplines have argued that, since natural selection may operate upon both genetic and non-genetic informational media, evolutionary reasoning is appropriate for the study of culture - as long as media-specific differences in evolutionary mechanisms and processes are taken into account (e.g., Boyd & Richerson, 1992, 1985; Anderson, Arrow & Pines, 1988; Cohen & Machalek, 1988:491; Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman, 1981; Lumsden, & Wilson, 1981; Dawkins, 1980). For example, genetically determined traits such as natural hair

color are inherited from parents via sexual reproduction while cultural traits such as criminal strategies may be "inherited" via social learning. Since more successful strategies are more likely to be transmitted and hence to become more common over time (Vila & Cohen, 1993),culture is a system of inheritance to which fundamental evolutionary processes apply.$ The principles by which cultural information is transmitted and selected, however, are markedly different from those that govern genes. Unlike most organisms whose adaptations are driven directly and constrained by genetic information that can be transmitted only from parents to children over generational time, humans readily transmit large amounts of cultural information within and between generations, between related and unrelated individuals, and across vast distances. Since human cultural traits may be modified intentionally to adapt to environmental opportunities and challenges, we may even sometimes have the ability to guide the evolution of culture. No other organism is capable of intentionally guiding its evolution. These differences between cultural and genetic evolution often lead to predictions about behavior that differ considerably from those derived from genetic approaches to trans-

3. This is not to say that the ways in which selective forces operate in

human societies are identical to those in the rest of the biological world. Socio-culturalvariations, for example, differ from their purely genetic counterparts in that they can proceed at an extraordinarily fast pace, frequently result from social diffusion which may have no close parallel in the biological world, and often arise non-randomly - humans may direct the evolution of culture. Nevertheless, Boyd and Richerson (1985) present a powerful and convincing argument for the similarities in I selection processes between biological and cultural evolution. In so doing, they offer a cogent explanation of how natural selection can act directly and indirectly on culturally transmitted information. In addition, they offer formal mathematical models to determine the circumstances under which natural selection might favor klifferent modes of cultural transmission in human societies.

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mission and reproduction. However, the choice-based "Lamarckian" mechanisms of cultural evolution are derived ultimately from natural selection (Campbell, 1965) and are easily incorporated into the Darwinian analytic framework (Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman, 1981). Hence, a Darwinian approach can be used to describe the proliferation and/or demise over time of learned behavioral strategies based on media such as language or other forms of symbolic expression - so long as the mediaspecific differences in the constituent processes and mechanisms of evolution by natural selection (replication, mutation, selection, transmission) are taken into account (Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Cohen & Machalek, 1988;Vila & Cohen, 1993). In sum, since expropriative crime strategies are transmitted primarily through cultural media, and culture is a system of inheritance, expropriative crime is tractable to evolutionary analysis. If cultural traits such as expropriative criminal strategies are inherited by learning and imitation, and if more successful strategies generally have greater likelihood of being transmitted than do less successful ones, then a Darwinian model of criminal strategy evolution is applicable, even though this inheritance is not mediated by DNA, and even though Lamarckian processes as well as natural selection contribute to differential transmission (Vila & Cohen, 1993). Consequently, expropriative crime can be interpreted as a form of strategic activity that is influenced significantly by processes of sociocultural evolution. Unlike most other animals, humans acquire the majority of their adaptive information from other humans by imitation, teaching, and other forms of cultural transmission. The work of Boyd and Richerson (1985) makes a seminal contribution toward our understandSTUDIES ON CRIME AND CRIME PREVENTION

ing of the forces by which cultural media evolve and proliferate within societies and across generations. According to these scholars, in order to understand human behavior we must be able to identify the processes in the lives of individuals that increase the frequency with which some cultural variants are expressed and decrease the frequency of others. Boyd and Richerson concur with many sociologists that humans are not simply passive imitators. We actively learn for ourselves, and often select what to imitate from others. Individuals modify the culture they receive by conscious and unconscious decisions that are influenced by a number of nonrandom "forces." Boyd and Richerson argue that two such forces (identified earlier, as "guided variation" and "biased transmission") act as proximal agents in selection through imitation and learning, and that they predispose persons to select certain cultural variants over others. "Guidedvariation" involves individual trial and error learning or deliberate goal-oriented invention that non-randomly generates behavioral variation in a population. For example, guided variation would change the relative mix and composition of behavioral strategies in a population if a person who wanted to steal a new luxury automobile with elaborate alarm systems independently set out to develop and test a novel technique. In effect, that person would have "guided" the direction in which that type of expropriative strategy evolved. Although trial and error learning and independent invention can be rewarding, they also are costly in terms of effort and risk. People therefore most often acquire strategies from others by learning. "Biased transmission" occurs when imitators or teachers non-randomly select behavioral variants to express or acquire. Biased transmission forces usu-

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ally are more powerful than guided variation and cause more rapid evolution. Boyd and Richerson (1985) identify three distinctive types of biased transmission forces: 1) "Direct bias" occurs when a behavior is imitated because it is consistent with a personal preference or goal that has direct consequences for the actor (e.g., a car thief who wants to be successful deliberately learns about the expropriative strategies used by others in his neighborhood then chooses the one he believes is most likely to be effective); 2) "Frequency dependent bias" occurs when a behavior is imitated because it is what the majority of people in a society are doing (e.g., here our car thief simply would trust in the common wisdom and choose the most commonly-used expropriative strategy); and 3) "Indirect bias" occurs when a behavior is imitated because it is displayed by prestigious individuals whom the actor wishes to emulate (e.g., in this instance the strategy for stealing cars used by the most successful criminal in the neighborhood would be imitated). Informed readers will recognize that types 1and 3 above are the variants most commonly identified in the criminology literature to account for the learning and imitating of criminal behavior (see, for example, Nettler, 1984; Vold & Bernard, 1986). Let us recap these ideas. Consistent with processes identified in the more traditional theoretical literature on crime, our evolutionary ecological explanation argues that expropriative criminal strategies most often are acquired through communication and social learning processes. These processes allow humans actively to go beyond the rather passive adaptation to reinforcement that is characteristic of other species. In the case of biased transmission forces, individuals sample culture either by observing others or being taught, and then themselves become

potential models or teachers. Unlike genes, culture can be sampled from more than two "parents" and directly transmitted across many generations. The relative mix and/or composition of expropriative strategies in a population evolves as individuals develop new or modified strategies, decide whom to imitate, and adopt new strategies. Individuals learn primarily through socialization and imitation, and by so doing they often pay lower information costs than if they were to rely completely on individual learning. No matter how rational, logical, and utilitymaximizing we attempt to be, given the enormous number of decisions we make daily, it simply is not possible to rely solely on guided variation. Hence, people often rely (consciously or unconsciously) on simple "rules of thumbn when selecting between behavioral options. These "strategies for choosing strategies" often are rather crude guides that enable people to make choices that work well enough to get by, rather than to maximize each of our myriad daily decisions. The main point here is that many of the criminal and noncriminal behavioral options selected, and the "rules of thumb" adopted by individuals, are themselves the product of beliefs, preferences, norms, and social attitudes that have been acquired through cultural transmission via decision-making forces in the cultural system such as guided variation, and especially various forms of biased transmissions. Importantly, Boyd and Richerson contend that when acquiring cultural traits, people (particularly the poor and less educated for whom the relative costs of erroneous choices often are higher) most often give preference to imitating models of high local status whose general life situation is very similar to their own, rather than to socially distant elites (see also, Cloward & Ohlin, 1960). At this point, it is time to make a STUDIES ON CRIMEAND CRIME PREVENTION

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clearer distinction between our approach and "traditional rational choice" models of social science, especially those employed by neoclassical economists who follow the "expected utility" model. First, unlike our approach, the expected utility model of rational choice theory does not try to account for the origin of preferences or goals. Second, unlike many of the expected utility theorists who study crime, we need not assume that individuals rationally calculate and always opt for the best strategy (see also, Cornish & Clarke 1986). Instead they may select a strategy that has proved useful in the past, imitate the one most frequently used by others in similar circumstances, or imitate one used by a person they consider successful. Moreover, some may act on impulse without fully intending or consciously recognizing the potential consequences of their actions. Thus, we need not necessarily assume that individuals always fully understand the strategic implications of the actions they choose. POLICY IMPLICATIONS OF EVOLUTIONARYECOLOGICAL THEORY

We now turn our attention to the policy implications that may be derived from our evolutionary ecological theory of expropriative crime. We would be less than candid if we were to attempt to argue that our theoretical perspective suggests easy and effective methods to control expropriative crime within democratic societies. Recall that the central thesis of our theory is that much expropriative crime is anormal by-product of the social organization of productive activity. We therefore expect it to be difficult to eliminate a substantial amount of expropriative crime in democratic industrial countries without modifying significantly a way of life that residents take for granted. Despite the fact that relative freedom and prosperity STUDIES ON CRIME AND CRIME PREVENTION

often give rise to social and ecological conditions that favor proliferation of excpropriative crime strategies, do any counter-strategic approaches offer at least some hope for controlling these behaviors in heterogeneous democratic societies such as the U.S. and those in Europe? We take as a given that it is counterproductive in societies such as these to introduce policies for controlling expropriative crime that would reduce personal freedoms below current levels in favor of increased social control. Furthermore, we doubt that there currently is the political will or the economic means to implement fundamental changes in the structure of these societies such as the reduction of social and economic inequality - even if it could be demonstrated that such factors were indisputably the root causes of crime. Therefore, in keeping with the scope of this paper, the following discussion examines the potential utility of practical and direct short-term measures aimed at limiting the success of expropriative strategies (see, also, Cohen & Machalek, 1995). We suggest an approach to limit the success of ecxpropriative crime strategies that is modeled after the way public health officials treat epidemics of highly contagious diseases. We term this approach the "alert and educate" counter-strategy. We caution, however, that this type of approach has definite limitations. It cannot change the motivation for illegal self-interested behavior. Neither can it keep expropriative strategies from evolving and emerging in systems of cooperative production. And such an approach probably would be of little assistance in anticipating novel expropriative strategies before they appear. If continually implemented with sufficient intensity over long time periods, however, the counter-strategies we suggest might enable some significant reductions in expropriative crime.

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The main components of our "alert and educate" counter-strategy involve the following actions: 1. Monitoring: Develop extensive nation-wide systems for collecting and disseminating information on social and ecological circumstances that favor the evolution and proliferation of different types of expropriative strategies. This would allow agents and researchers to identify specific expropriative strategies in use, and to focus attention on expropriation-prone, susceptible, andvulnerable social and spatial areas. 2. Assessing Risks: Identify which populations or sub-populations (e.g., minorities, recent immigrants, the elderly, particular types of customers/clients, etc.) are most at risk of becoming victims of particular types of expropriative strategies. 3. Educating Target Populations: Conduct intense and highly-focused education campaigns to teach members of the most at-risk groups how to detect, avoid, and report specific expropriative strategies that have appeared recently. In other words, give particular strategies a "reputation" among more vulnerable populations. 4. Informing the general public: Conduct on-going public information campaigns alerting the general public about how to recognize expropriative strategies and avoid being victimized by them. Taken together, programs such as these might realistically have some significant benefits in crime reduction - if they were conducted with the same effort and persistence as that used by public health officials to combat diseases such as smallpox and polio. Below we offer more specific preliminary suggestions on how these programs might counter characteristics that contribute to the success of expropriative crime counter-strategies.

Controlling rrim.e

First, it would be helpful to establish national "Centers for the Prevention of Crime" (henceforth referred to as CPCs) modeled after - or perhaps as components of - the disease control centers in many countries. These permanently staffed and budgeted centers would perform "crime assays" analogous to the "disease assays" used in preventative medicine (Cohen & Machalek, 1995). They would continually receive reports on expropriative crimes from law enforcement agencies, news media, and private citizens (perhaps via tollfree telephone numbers), collecting complete and accurate case history information on the strategies employed to execute these crimes. It is important to note that the focus of these centers would be o n diagnosing forms of expropriative behavior and identifying at-risk populations rather than identifying criminally-disposed individuals or solving crimes. The essential difference between this and other contemporary crime control approaches is that CPCs would be oriented toward countering strategies rather than individuals. CPCs also would be responsible for alerting potential victims and law enforcement agencies through official channels and the popular media. In addition to their general informational role, CPCs would be responsible for more narrowly targeted education of at-riskpopulations. Care must be taken, however, that these programs be balanced so that they do not become counterproductive by promoting undue suspicion and distrust among the general population or aiding in the transmission of expropriative strategies. Our approach suggests a number of specific actions that might help combat characteristics that tend to enhance the success of expropriative strategies. For example, the fundamental problem associated with attempting to counter STUDIES ON CRIMEAND CRIME PREVENTION

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deceptive, cryptic, and evasive expropriative strategies is how to identify them and disclose their expropriative character. General information to help make the population more resistant to these strategies could be provided by national television programs, school classes and public meetings. Potential victims could be educated further by such things as distributing leaflets and posters, publicizing strategy-specific warnings in newspapers and radio, and the use of telephone chains. Public service announcements - or perhaps even a special crime control cable channel - could issue bulletins and alerts about particularly "virulent" new forms of deceptive, cryptic, and evasive strategies. With proper marketing, it is theoretically possible that the rapid and thorough disemination of such information could inhibit significantly the proliferation of these kinds of expropriative strategies by giving them "reputations" as soon as possible (see also Machalek & Cohen, 1991, Cohen & Machalek, 1995). Although some might fear that publicizing an expropriative strategy could have the unwanted effect of transmitting it more efficiently, it would be of little value for people to learn deceptive, cryptic, and evasive expropriative strategies after an effective public education campaign because these kinds of strategies depend for their success on unaware or uninformed victims. Moreover, this approach might in some small way increase people's perceptions of the social undesirability of expropriative strategies and thus help reinforce marginal expropriator's attitudes against adopting such behaviors. The "alert and educate" counter-strategies discussed above may be expected to be less effective against bold expropriative strategies. Since the effectiveness of bold strategies depends on RHP and RV asymmetries, the prospective victim's problem usually is not STUDIES ON CRIME AND CRIME PREVENTION

one of recognizing the strategy for what it is, but of avoiding or deterring it. Here, people would have to be educated to avoid ecological situations that favor bold strategies. Information gathering and analysis functions of CPCs thus would try to inform people about contexts in which bold strategies were most common. Mobility appears to be the most obvious - and challenging - focus for expropriativecrime control efforts. Theoretically, it is the univeral key to effective counter-strategies. Expropriative strategies can proliferate only if they are transmitted. This is because the rate at which guided variation can produce strategies is so low compared to biased learning. Thus even strategies that possess other success enhancing characteristics (e.g., crypsis, boldness, surprise, evasiveness, etc.) probably will be crippled by a low or limited mobility. Unfortunately, restricting mobility is, with a few possible exceptions, impractical and undesirable. Most of the actions that would limit strategy transmissibility also would restrict licit communication, transportation, and discretionary behavior because expropriative strategies take advantage of modern comminication and transportation technologies and a political climate that encourages people to move about and communicate freely. We believe that the key to countering the mobility of expropriative strategies is to out-compete rather than attempt to restrict them. What the monitoring, risk assessment, educational, and informational programs we advocate seek to do is to use the cooperative power of society in order to enable counter-strategies to out-transmit expropriative strategies. Since the amount of sociality and cooperation among expropriators generally is quite low compared to conventional productive strategists, this approach appears to offer at least some hope at crime reduction.

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As with mobility, attempts to restrict mutability also are problematic. High rates of cultural innovation are a core feature of modern industrial society (Lenski, Lenski & Nolan l991:54-58). Once again, therefore, we advocate outperforming the mutability of expropriative strategies. The following goals would help enhance counter-strategy mutability: (1) Maximize detection and recognition efforts so as to identify a novel form of expropriation as soon as possible after it evolves. (2) Disseminate information about new strategies as rapidly as possible to potential victim populations. (3) Anticipate and prepare, rather than wait and react to the fact that new technologies of production, communication, and transportation will create opportunities for the evolution of new or modified expropriative strategies, and therefore, maximize the alertness and responsiveness of potential victims. (4) Dedicate resources to the rapid development of effective new counter-strategies as soon as novel expropriative strategies are identified (Cohen & Machalek, 1995). In sum, we recommend that efforts to limit expropriative crime strategies attempt to counter directly features such as deceptiveness, crypsis, and evasiveness; help people avoid bold strategies; and out-compete mobility and mutability. In each of these endeavors, we emphasize the importance of focusing public policy more on strategies than individuals. In the foregoing brief discussion we have attempted to provide a stragegy for managing what we believe to be the inevitable arms race between expropriative strategies and counterstrategies. Evolutionary ecological theory provides a framework for understanding in a unified manner the ways that interelationships between sociocultural, individual, and environmental factors cause expropriative crime strategies to evolve over time in and

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across populartions. If lowering the expropriative crime rate were our prime concern, we might do better by focusing on strategies that alert and educate potential victims, than we have by concentrating the vast majority of our resources on apprehending and punishing self-interested offenders. We see the CPC concept as a prophylactic complement to traditional efforts to reduce and control crime primarily thorugh enforcement of laws and imposition of sanctions. More proactive approaches appear to be long overdue. DISCUSSION

We close with a general discussion of why, according to our theory at least, it is often so difficult to implement effective crime control policies - especially in highly stratified capitalist societies. One of the most fundamental problems is that contemporary crime control policies are hopelessly static: they ignore the fact that criminal strategies evolve, tending to treat them as fixed rather than mutable (Cohen & Machalek, 1995). Evolutionary ecological theory indicates that many contemporary anticrime strategies will set off spirals of illegal counteractions and thus have severe but unintended negative consequences. Government efforts to increase public safety and security thus can place people more at risk. Efforts to contain adversaries engaged in illegal activities can create even more committed criminals. And programs intended to reduce a criminal's illegal opportunities can have the unintended effect of greatly increasing his or her ability to expand them. We are not optimistic about the longterm effectiveness of situational crime prevention strategies that attempt to reduce illegal opportunities through "target hardening,"citizen surveillance, or by designing out crime environmenSTUDIES ON CRIME AND CRIME PREVENTION

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tally. While these strategies are necessary and modestly beneficial over the short-term (Roshier, 1989:118), evolutionary ecological theory predicts that the long-term consequences of such strategies generally will be crime displacement and the stimulation of arms races that will lead to subsequent increases in expropriative crime. Theoretically, even if criminal behavior were to become rarer d u e to effective situational counter-strategies, society's investment in guardianship then would tend to decline. Due to the frequency d e p e n d e n t dynamics i n h e r e n t in expropriative crime, this situation then would favor the rare criminal strategy and soon invite an increase in illegal expropriation. We will end this paper with one more illustration and a prediction that the interested reader may soon be able to confirm or refute. It appears that a timely example of an application of a static crime control policy that may soon be both ineffective against crime strategies and unable to provide for the security of the general public has recently made national headlines in the U.S. (see for example, Holtz, 1993). Specifically, technological advances have made encryption devices available to the general public that can protect the confidentiality of their telephone calls, faxes, and computer files - even against U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) supercomputers. In an effort to retain its ability to conduct legal wiretaps and conduct electronic intelligence gathering considered vital to national security, the federal government is strongly advocating a national encryption standard that it asserts will allow people to protect their privacywhile ensuring that law enforcement agents still can monitor telecommunications. Under this proposal, which is expected to be enacted in late 1995, inexpensive "clipper chips" designed by NSA and produced STUDIES O N CRIME AND CRIME PREVENTION

by Mykotronx Inc. of Torrance, California would be included in telecommunications devices manufactured in the United States. Advocates argue that these should become the only legal encryption means. Manufacturers that did not use these encryption chips in their telecommunications equipment would not be able to participate in the potentially lucrative National Information Infrastructure telecommunications "superhighway." In addition to scrambling outgoing signals and decoding incoming signals from other similarly equipped devices, the clipper chip would broadcast a unique identifying serial number. Law enforcement agents wanting to monitor the transmission would first obtain a court order, then copy the chip's serial number from the transmission - presumably while recording it. T h a t number would be taken to the Treasury Department and the National Institute of Standards and Technology which would provide the government's digital key to the chip's transmission. Agents then would be able to unscramble the transmission. A dynamic, rather than static, view of crime strategies suggests that the national encryption standard will be ineffective against expropriative crime in the future. First, the assumption that clipper chips provide a foolproof encryption standardjust because NSA's supercomputers and experts are now unable to break them ignores the incredible pace of technological innovation. Today's supercomputers are tomorrow's laptops. Static strategies such as these fuel arms races that encourage expropriators to develop ever more effective means of evading, deceiving, or overpowering conventional capabilities. Moreover, policies such as this may be expected to set up an entire set of new criminal opportunities to privide illicit equipment and services to potential

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users. Imagine how much an individual's RHP would be enhanced if he o r she obtained the ability to break the only encryption standard allowed in the United States; the opportunities for expropriation could be nearly limitless. Perhaps even more troubling is the high probability that the national encryption standard will diminish rather than enhance the security of the public by establishing the primacy of government's "right to know." And it will tend to increase the probability that criminal strategies have access to privacy-insuring devices that may provide them with advantages over non-expropriators. Again, the above example demonstrates how in relatively free societies the social organization of productive activities often provides relatively easy

opportunities for certain, swift, andvaluable rewards through expropriation. Effective expropriative crime reduction will have difficulty succeeding in environments where the rewards for illegal behavior are sometimes much larger, more quickly obtained, and more stimulating than those provided by conventional activities. Indeed, it seems that the opportunities for rewards through expropriative crime are so intertwined with the opportunity structure of legitimate productive activities in open societies, that the prospects for effective solutions - at least those that would reduce substantially the volume of such acts without modifying many of the freedoms that such societies now take for granted, appear to be quite limited.

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Received October 1994 Lawrence E. Cohen University of California at Davis Davis, California 9561 6 USA