The economic and social costs of crime

Sam Brand and Richard Price

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Every day decisions are made by policy makers and managers in the Criminal Justice System which reflect implicit judgements about the relative seriousness of different crimes, or about the benefits of pursuing one approach to reducing crime rather than another. This study represents a first step towards making such judgements more explicit and in making sure they better reflect the available evidence on the impacts on society of different types of crime. Cost of crime estimates can play an important role in helping the government to achieve the greatest impact on crime for the money spent. They can be used in both appraisal and evaluation of crime reduction policies, such as those in the Government’s evidence-based Crime Reduction Programme. They can help us to prioritise, focusing scarce resources on policies that have the biggest impact on harm caused by crime, rather than simply the number of crimes. Moreover, one of the two aims of the Criminal Justice System (CJS) is “to reduce crime and the fear of crime and their social and economic costs”. This study reports on progress towards a cost of crime measure that can be used to assess performance against this aim. Figures used here represent the best available evidence, but nevertheless needs to be much improved. The aim of this report is to stimulate debate and improvements in the evidence.

Keywords: Crime; Justice; Cost; Evaluation; Economics; Policy; Social; Impacts; Victimisation; Police; Prison; Offending (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H0 H43 K00 K14 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (69)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/74968/1/MPRA_paper_74968.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:74968

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter (winter@lmu.de).