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Rational Choice Theory Of Crime

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In Bucks County, Pennsylvania William C. Thomas, age 58, was taken into police custody over 13 counts of severe rape, and child pornography charges in February of 2017. Mr. Thomas was a handy man in the local trailer parks in Bucks County. It was there that Mr. Thomas is said to have committed most of his crimes. Bail was set at 150,000 dollars (Smith, 2017). Mr. Thomas was said have a sexual predator’s shrine located in his own home, which was found by the owner of the trailer park he was staying at before his arrest. Investigators were able to find 1,000 pairs of soiled little girl’s underwear which were descried to be set up in a display or torture, along with 1,000 pieces of child pornographic photos (Lockett, 2017). It is said that …show more content…

If this proves to be true, then Mr. Thomas would have had to run over many decisions in his mind before going, and committing these mala in se crimes. Rational choice theory assumes that offenders commit crimes in order to meet their own person basic needs such as: money, excitement and sex. Based on this premise, it can be concluded that the perpetrator was possibly seeking out sex, and excitement based on the type of crime, and how often the crime was committed. Mr. Thomas was obviously going over the possible ways to get what he deemed necessary. He took a job that would require him to go into many victim homes, and get up close enough to be near children. In one of the articles it stated that the perpetrator was a babysitter for a few of the victims as well, giving him a full abundance of victims. What also is interesting with this particular case is that, it is believed that Mr. Thomas has been committing these crimes for multiple decades. It is known that males tend to commit more violent crimes during their adolescence and young adulthood years. If this was true for Mr. Thomas, then he would have aged out of his behavior around his …show more content…

The only way to have an evidence pile so large, one would have to see that he had some sort of intellect in order to not get caught for such a long time. He was collected, unimpulsive and cunning. He targeted a group of victims that can’t exactly speak for themselves, and was able to keep the victims moths shut with his sheer terror he held over them. He worked in a location that provided an abundant amount of prey. A serial rapist such as himself had to have thought, planned, and rationalized

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