David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

charge me with this, I’ll admit to that,
and so let’s make a deal. And then third,
I’m going to only serve half the time.
Weigh all three, the odds are you’re
going to do one hell of a lot of crime
before you ever in fact get caught and
prosecuted.”
Reynolds was making a version of the
argument that Leites and Wolf made in
their classic work on deterrence:
Fundamental to our analysis is the
assumption that the population, as
individuals or groups, behaves
“rationally,” that it calculates costs
and benefits to the extent that they can
be related to different courses of
action, and makes choices accordingly.
In Reynolds’s view, criminals found the