NCJ Number
144158
Date Published
1991
Length
10 pages
Annotation
Thirty active burglars were observed and interviewed extensively over a period of 16 months to determine how their decisionmaking was modified or changed when alone or working with accomplices.
Abstract
The burglars all came from an urban area of 250,000 population in Texas and were recruited for the research using a snowball sampling procedure. They were paid for their interviews and for obtaining other participants. The final sample consisted of 27 men and three women, including 10 white, nine Hispanic, and 11 black burglars with an average age of 25 years. They were asked to evaluate sites that they had previously burglarized and those burglarized by others. Results revealed that burglars who evaluated sites singly rated the sites as more vulnerable than they did when evaluating the sites in the presence of their usual co- offenders, indicating a trend toward more cautious decisionmaking while in groups. In contrast, self-reports indicated that burglars committed more crimes when working as part of a group than when working alone. Their self- reported apprehension rate was also five times greater when working in groups than when working alone, possibly indicating task impairment as a result of social facilitation effects. Table, footnotes, and 30 references