Examination of systematic variations in burglars' domain-specific perceptual and procedural skills

Abstract

This research examines systematic variations in residential burglars' domain-specific perceptual and procedural skills. Utilising a formula incorporating frequency of offending, generation of offending-related income, burglary charges, and estimated duration of burglary career, 53 experts and 53 novices were objectively identified from a sample of 209 interviews conducted with incarcerated burglars. The perceptual and procedural burglary skills of these two groups were compared and the results demonstrated important differences indicative of superior domain-specific performance for objectively classified experts. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed, along with suggestions for application of this knowledge to crime prevention initiatives.

Keywords:

• perceptual skills
• procedural skills
• burglary
• expertise
• offender decision-making

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the Western Australian Government Office of Crime Prevention's Research and Development Fund for supporting this research (RDF020708). The author also wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their valuable suggestions.

Notes

1. No further offender demographic information was available. No access was provided to information about the offenders' histories or the reasons for their current sentences. All that was known was that all offenders involved had recorded at least one burglary conviction in the previous five years. The sample was drawn from prisons across the Perth metropolitan area, Western Australia, participation was voluntary, no remuneration was received, and all participants were free to discontinue their involvement at any stage during the interview.

2. Prior to commencing the interview, all participants were informed that their names would not be recorded (in accordance with the framework proposed by Roberts & Indermaur, 2003), and that the interviewers were not interested in names of accomplices or specific details (such as the time and place) of any crimes that the authorities were not aware of. However, all participants were cautioned that if they did discuss something very serious, such as physically harming someone, the interviewer was obliged to forward this information to the correct authorities. Participation was entirely voluntary and the offenders were not reimbursed in anyway for their involvement.

3. In this case, less than 10 lifetime burglaries was considered to be too few to provide a meaningful response to a question asking how much income was typically generated when offender was at their greatest prevalence for committing burglaries.

4. At first glance this appears to contradict recent findings by Hodgson and Costello (2006), where analysis of cleared burglary co-offending data suggested that offenders whose initial apprehensions stemmed either from solo offending or offending in the company of previously arrested burglars were more likely to have longer burglary careers. However, it is clear from analysis of the frequency of offending and arrest patterns summarised in the Appendix to Wright and Decker's (1994) investigation of active residential burglars that it is highly unlikely that first apprehensions are always representative of first burglaries. As such, because the current data examines co-offending for the first burglary that each respondent remembers committing rather than co-offending at the time of first burglary apprehension it is sufficiently different from Hodgson and Costello's research to make meaningful comparison difficult.

5. These results should be interpreted with caution, as two of the four cells had expected counts less than five.