The Science of Why People Don’t Commit Crimes When They Could

Every day, millions of people pass up chances to break the law. An employee with access to company funds submits an honest expense claim. A driver cut off in traffic resists the urge to retaliate. A trader who could quietly manipulate a price does not. Criminology has spent more than a century asking why people offend, but a newly published theoretical framework in the American Journal of Criminal Justice argues that the opposite question deserves equal attention: what exactly stops a crime from happening when a realistic opportunity to commit one is sitting right there? The article, written by Henry Prunckun of the Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security at Charles Sturt University, proposes a formal theory of what the author calls non-crime, and it comes with a set of testable predictions that could reshape how researchers think about conformity, compliance, and the fragile machinery of self-restraint.

The core move in the framework is definitional, and it is more consequential than it might first appear. Prunckun defines non-crime as the absence of a specified criminal act during an identifiable episode, even though the person had a practicable opportunity to commit it and faced a relevant incentive, provocation, or occasion. An episode, in this scheme, specifies the person, the possible act, the setting, and the period under examination. This episode-level focus deliberately separates non-crime from two related concepts that criminologists have long studied: long-term abstention, in which a person never offends across repeated observations, and desistance, the process by which people with offending histories stop. One honest expense claim, the framework insists, establishes neither a lifetime of virtue nor a turning point in a criminal career. It is a single outcome that demands its own explanation.

The definitional work also draws careful boundaries around what counts as an opportunity. A practicable opportunity exists when a person has the ability and access needed to commit the specified act during the study period, and the situation presents a potential benefit, grievance, or temptation connected to the offense. Crucially, the person need not consciously consider offending at all. An employee might recognize a chance for financial gain without ever viewing dishonesty as an acceptable route to it, a distinction that echoes Per-Olof Wikström’s Situational Action Theory, which separates seeing an act as a possible choice from selecting it. Complete elimination of opportunity, such as an access restriction that renders theft impossible, is treated as a distinct and valid form of prevention but is excluded from the comparison, because the framework is interested in episodes where the offense remains genuinely possible and yet does not occur.

At the heart of the theory are five categories of restraint that may explain why the offense does not happen. Moral restraint operates when a person rejects an act because it violates an ethical standard they accept or conflicts with the kind of person they believe themselves to be, whether or not discovery is likely. Prudential restraint stems from expected costs, including legal punishment, dismissal, loss of income, or damage to future prospects; a narrower version, detection-only restraint, depends specifically on the perceived risk of being caught and the consequences expected to follow. Relational restraint arises from obligations, trust, belonging, and accountability to particular people, so that deception feels unacceptable because it would betray a colleague even if no practical loss would result. Situational restraint covers practical barriers that make an offense harder but still possible, such as extra procedural effort, guardians who might interrupt, or delays that sap the appeal of completing the act. Legitimacy-based restraint, finally, operates when a person follows a rule because they regard it as proper or believe the authority issuing it has the right to do so, a mechanism long associated with Tom Tyler’s procedural justice research.

None of these categories is entirely new, and Prunckun is explicit that the contribution lies elsewhere. The framework builds on Travis Hirschi’s social control theory, in which attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief explain conformity; on Walter Reckless’s containment theory, with its inner and outer buffers against delinquency; and on Anthony Bottoms’s distinction between prudential, normative, situational, and habitual compliance. What the new framework adds is the insistence that these processes be treated as separable, measured independently, and compared within a single episode. A social bond such as employment, the article notes, can supply several kinds of restraint at once: fear of losing a career is prudential, obligation to colleagues is relational, commitment to professional integrity is moral, and respect for the institution’s right to regulate conduct is legitimacy-based. Treating the bond as a single protective force, the argument goes, obscures which process actually did the work.

The framework’s most provocative claims are four conditional propositions about what happens when restraints change. The first holds that when one restraint weakens, the probability of non-offending should decline less among people whose conduct is also supported by other relevant restraints, and more among those who depended primarily on the weakened one. The second proposition is a detection-focused version: an equally large drop in perceived risk of being caught should produce a bigger decline in non-offending among people whose restraint depends mainly on detection, while leaving others largely unaffected, particularly where a moral filter prevents the offense from even entering consideration. The third proposition turns within-person, predicting that weakening a restraint in one setting, compared with another setting where the same person faces comparable opportunities, should reduce non-offending only when that restraint’s activation conditions are present. The fourth extends the logic to desistance, proposing that increases in separately measured restraints should predict continued non-offending among people with offending histories, with the greatest benefit appearing after a previously dominant restraint has weakened.

These propositions are framed as empirical questions rather than settled findings, and the article is candid about conflicting evidence. David Nagin’s review of deterrence research found more consistent support for the likelihood of being caught than for punishment severity as a deterrent, while studies of whether morality conditions deterrence have produced mixed results: Raymond Paternoster and Sally Simpson found sanction threats mattered most when moral inhibitions were weak in corporate crime scenarios, whereas later work found perceived certainty associated with offending even among participants with stronger moral beliefs. The framework also warns against circular reasoning. Inferring that someone depended on detection merely because they offended after monitoring was reduced would render the explanation unfalsifiable. Restraints must be measured before conduct, using indicators such as moral judgments about the specific offense, perceived risk, expected losses, obligations to particular people, beliefs about an authority’s rightness, and observable practical barriers.

A hypothetical workplace example illustrates the machinery. Imagine two employees who both submit accurate expense claims, though each could profit from a false one. Independent evidence shows the first is supported by moral objections, workplace attachment, and acceptance of the rule’s legitimacy, while the second relies mainly on the expected risk and consequences of detection. If reduced monitoring lowers both employees’ perceived risk by the same amount, the framework predicts a larger increase in the second employee’s likelihood of offending. Other changes help disentangle the processes: a breakdown in workplace relationships weakens accountability without touching expected sanctions, perceived unfairness erodes legitimacy without altering moral objections, and relaxed verification makes the false claim easier without changing either. By contrast, an access restriction that makes the false claim impossible for both employees removes the episode from the comparison entirely, because prevention by eliminating opportunity is a different phenomenon from restraint while opportunity remains.

The framework also situates individual restraint within broader social conditions, assigning them three distinct roles. Social influences may act as antecedents that help develop restraints, as contextual conditions affecting access to opportunities and resources, or as moderators that alter when and how strongly restraints operate. Research linking neighborhood collective efficacy to lower violence, for example, does not by itself identify what prevents violence in a particular episode; the framework asks whether the mechanism runs through supervision, valued obligations, or something else. Gendered patterns of access to positions of trust shape opportunities for corporate fraud, suggesting that observed sex differences may reflect roles and exposure rather than inherent differences in moral restraint. Childhood self-control, linked in a New Zealand birth cohort to later criminal conviction, may affect whether a person can follow through on a commitment when competing motives arise, while genetic associations with self-regulation traits do not by themselves establish a biological pathway to non-crime.

The practical implications cut in uncomfortable directions. Evidence that multiple restraints are present does not show that withdrawing an effective restriction would be safe, because moral commitments, relationships, and perceived legitimacy may weaken or conflict, and apparently distinct restraints may depend on the same institutional arrangement and fail together. The framework likewise cautions against labeling people as uniformly risky or safe: prior offending may improve average-risk predictions, but explaining a specific episode requires evidence about the processes operating at that moment. The author acknowledges real limitations, including overlapping categories, self-reports that may overstate principled motives, and the difficulty of establishing that a practicable opportunity existed independently of motivation and conduct. Yet the central challenge stands. Offending has causes, and so, the article argues, does its absence. When a realistic opportunity remains and the crime still does not occur, that outcome is not a null result to be ignored but a phenomenon requiring its own evidence, its own measurement, and, at last, its own theory.

Subject of Research: A criminological theory of non-crime explaining why offenses do not occur when opportunities remain available

Article Title: Why Crime Does Not Occur: Toward a Theory of Non-crime

Article References: Prunckun, H. (2026). Why Crime Does Not Occur: Toward a Theory of Non-crime. American Journal of Criminal Justice. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-026-09954-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12103-026-09954-8

Keywords: criminology, non-crime, restraint, social control theory, deterrence, compliance, desistance, legitimacy, situational action theory, crime prevention, self-control, criminal justice