Testing an Expanded Model of Deterrence Applied to Guilty Plea Decision Making

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.