Testing an Expanded Model of Deterrence Applied to Guilty Plea Decision Making
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21560880 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Theodore Wilson (0000-0002-1792-6147, School of Criminal Justice, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy, University at Albany, SUNY, corresponding author), Shi Yan (0000-0002-6484-7687, Arizona State University), Matthew C Kijowski (0000-0002-1438-9323, New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services), Jacob W Forston (Arizona State University) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 363-395 |
| Publication date | 2026-02-23 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Justice Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0741-8825 • E-ISSN: 1745-9109 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/07418825.2025.2527112 |
| OpenAlex | W4412033479 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 60 |
Perceptions of certainty of arrest, prosecution, and conviction are all constituent pieces of certainty of punishment, which is a key component of deterrence scholarship and broader work on offending. Nagin discusses these elements as a sequence of conditional probabilities, but the offender decision making literature has nearly exclusively focused upon certainty of arrest. Plea decision making scholars are similarly concerned with certainty perceptions, but more limited to the likelihood of conviction, and how that perception shapes willingness to take a plea deal, often under a ‘shadow of the trial’ model. We seek to employ certainty perceptions as a construct-based linkage to bridge the offender decision making and plea decision making scholarships, enabling us to test the expanded model of deterrence in the context of plea decision making. We found strong support for this theoretical application and discuss our results in the dual contexts of offender and defendant decision making
Criminology · Plea · Political science · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology
Felony justice
Introducing Lisrel
Vulnerability
Fear of victimization and sensitivity to risk
Deterrence
MTurk Research
Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis
Gauging the Strength of Evidence Prior to Plea Bargaining
Cumulative Disadvantage
Where is the Evidence? Comparing the Effects of Evidence Strength and Demographic Characteristics on Plea Discounts
Developing a model of guilty plea decision-making
Modeling Individual Defiance of Covid-19 Pandemic Mitigation Strategies
How Much Do We Really Know about Criminal Deterrence
Offender Decision-Making in Criminology
Sanctions, Perceptions, and Crime
Elaborating the Individual Difference Component in Deterrence Theory
The promise of behavioral economics for understanding decision‐making in the court
Covid‐19 frauds
Imprisonment and crime
Voluntary, knowing, and intelligent pleas
Privilege and Punishment
Crime and Punishment
The Interaction of Race, Gender, and Age in Criminal Sentencing
The Impact of the Ethnicity and Gender of Defendants on the Decision to Reject or Dismiss Felony Charges
How to overcome the cost of a criminal record for getting hired
Toward a Bifurcated Theory of Emotional Deterrence
An Explicit Test of Plea Bargaining in the “Shadow of the Trial”
Testing a Bayesian Learning Theory of Deterrence Among Serious Juvenile Offenders
Can Rational Choice Be Considered a General Theory of Crime? Evidence From Individual‐level Panel Data
Testing the Transitivity of Reported Risk Perceptions
The psychology of defendant plea decision making
The Relationship Between Likelihood and Fear of Criminal Victimization
Defining coercion
Deterrence
Prosecutorial Discretion
An Integration of Theories to Explain Judicial Discretion
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |