Crime has been a badly underestimated problem: more so among scholarly experts than among ordinary citizens or elected officials. A1% reduction in crime provides economic value — measured in terms of willingness-to-pay – of something like $15 billion a year.
The material losses due to victimization are only a small part of the crime problem. For example, property losses from residential burglary average out to $4 per house or apartment per month. And yet, in a survey, people asked how much they would be willing to pay out of their own funds to reduce burglary in their community by 10% gave an average answer of $100 per year.
One difference between victimization losses and other costs is that victimization doesn’t just happen. Victimization is done to someone by someone else. Being singled out – even anonymously – by another person for ill-treatment is a different experience than being the victim of mere happenstance. “Even a dog,” said Justice Holmes, “knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked.”
As a result, people make extensive efforts to avoid being victimized: everything from double-locking doors to moving to the suburbs. How, in the absence of crime, could one account for the coexistence of housing abandonment and new housing construction only a few miles apart? The direct and secondary costs of crime avoidance easily swamp the immediate costs of victimization.
Now, it might seem that if avoidance costs exceed victimization losses, the avoidance costs must be irrationally high. Not so. The victimization losses we observe are those that remain after potential victims have taken countermeasures in the forms of locks, burglar alarms, gated communities, and suburban addresses. One reason crime has fallen in the past decade is that potential victims – households and businesses – have moved away from high-crime neighborhoods into low-crime neighborhoods.
Much crime-avoidance behavior is wasteful from a social perspective, but not from an individual perspective. If my putting a burglar-alarm sticker on my front door simply leads a burglar to break into my neighbor’s home instead, the victimization loss is shifted rather than avoided, and in effect I incur a real resource cost to make sure that someone else suffered the cost of being burglarized. But that fact makes putting up the sticker no less rational for me as an individual.
Crime-avoidance behavior can impose costs on others beyond shifting crime risk. Residents and businesses fleeing high-crime neighborhoods generally make things worse for those who stay behind; abandoned houses make bad neighbors and shuttered factories and stores provide no jobs. Crime thus becomes an important sustaining cause of concentrated poverty, turning an old notion on its head.
Costs and Benefits in Crime Control
The current total budget for law enforcement and criminal justice, adding together all levels of government, comes to about $200 billion a year. If a 1% reduction in crime is worth $15 billion, even modestly successful crime-control efforts can easily justify their budgets. Even as wasteful a use of prison resources as California’s Three Strikes law would have – had California actually built all those prisons – provided crime-control benefits to California’s residents that would have more than covered its monetary costs.
Money, however, is not the only thing we should try to economize. We should strive to be economical in imposing suffering. Having fewer prisoners is desirable: not, primarily, because prisons cost money but because prisons are horrible places, imposing misery not only on those confined in them but to the people who care about those prisoners: their families, their friends, and their neighbors.
The notion that deserved suffering somehow “doesn’t count” is a piece of mere hand-waving with no rational basis in terms of benefit-cost analysis; desert may be, morally, a reason to punish, or a limit on punishment, but it can’t be a reason to ignore the fact that punishment hurts. And in the usual case the suffering of the families, friends, and neighbors of prisoners is entirely undeserved.
Policing and community corrections involve a higher ratio of threat to actual punishment than do prisons or jails. That means that non-prison spending should be preferred to prison spending if we can achieve a given crime-control gain for the same additional dollars by spending it on cops and probation officers rather than spending it on further expanding institutional corrections.
Expanding even these less punitive parts of the system has a cost in terms of liberty, and that too should be economized. But we should keep in mind that the living under the threat of crime is also liberty-reducing; “freedom from fear” applies to more than fear of arrest.
By the same token, controlling crime by providing services, where it works, is greatly preferable to controlling crime by threatening or inflicting damage. The positive-feedback nature of the crime problem means that services, though they may compete with criminal-justice operations for budget dollars, are synergistic with criminal-justice operations in the field. Whatever shrinks the baseline level of offending increases the pressure on the remaining offender population from any given criminal-justice effort.
The problem is to find actual, practicable, scalable social programs that actually reduce crime, for amounts of money comparable to the cost of reducing crime using force and the threat of force. Given the extent of social gains from reducing crime, any substantial crime reduction we could bring about just by spending practicable amounts of money will be cheap at the price.
Avatar says:
This reads like the cost-benefit analysis is coming from the wrong end. Society doesn’t place costs on breaking the law purely out of a desire to see the criminal suffer, any more than it imposes taxes purely to see the taxpayer poorer. Instead, punishment is society’s way of attempting to modify the criminal’s cost-benefit analysis. The criminal has a large incentive to appropriate other people’s goods, and to commit violence when doing so — they get stuff without having had to pay for it. By imposing an artificial cost on criminal actions, society attempts to incentivize following the law. (Indeed, the punishment is often disproportionate precisely to make it clear that following the law is far preferred, rationally speaking, over breaking the law.)
Of course, this analysis has a much harder time justifying restrictions against “victimless” crimes (and to the extent that hurting yourself is imposing a cost, what’s the point in imposing a punishment for that infraction?)
The real problem you have, though, is demonstrating that an “actual, practicable, scalable social program” has actually reduced crime. In an environment where there has been a significant general decrease in crime, how can you possibly control for the general reduction, in part attributable to precisely the practice you condemn (i.e. locking criminals up)? You would need extremely good evidence in order to make a convincing case.
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October 28, 2009, 1:56 amtheobromophile says:
I realise that you’re blogging about costs (i.e. cash or the equivalent), so this is outside the scope of your discussion, but there are other factors besides monetary loss in crime avoidance. Many people — women and parents of children especially — will do a lot of things to avoid any sort of crime, since initially non-violent crimes can become violent, which is not necessarily irrational. A pure analysis of the monetary aspects of crime and deterrence misses some of the reasons for avoiding crime.
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October 28, 2009, 2:33 amPublius says:
Underestimating the reality of crime, both in terms of mere social costs and as an infringement of human dignity, is the kindest explanation for the misguided “reform” of the criminal justice system in the late 50s and early 60s. This reform, as our author has already noted, more than doubled the crime rate.
Undo the radicalism of the 1960s and restore the human dignity of Americans too accustomed to living in fear of crime.
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October 28, 2009, 2:39 amTracy W says:
The problem with Mark Kleinman’s approach to crime here is that it ignores justice to the victims of crime. Kleinman proposes that suffering to the criminals should be minimised, but does not mention justice to the victims, only a desire to minimise the economic costs of crime and crime avoidance.
There was a case in NZ a few years ago where a mother killed her severely-disabled child. Under the circumstances it seemed incredibly unlikely that she would kill again in the future (she had no other children and was past menopause), it also seemed very unlikely that not punishing her would encourage a rash of child murders — parents who killed children for other reasons already got ample jail time. Yet the court gave her a many-year jail term, and I think that was just. The daughter’s life had value, and I would not like to live in a society where a person could murder another, be convicted with evidence beyond reasonable doubt, and yet not pay any price for it.
This is what I like about the redistributive justice idea — it places victims at the centre of dealing with crime, unlike Kleinman’s approach which basically ignores them except as economic entities. Though I’ve never read a really strong attack on redistributive justice so I probably have a biased view of it.
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October 28, 2009, 5:10 amTamerlane says:
What is ignored here is the cost to the victims — all the victims — of not punishing. I cannot imagine the anguish of a parent — the cost to the parent in the dry language of economics — who has a child raped and brutally murdered and then suffers the further tragedy of learning the child’s killer will spend less than life in prison. Similar costs are endured by all victims whose violators are punished to a disproportionately mild degree.
Also, removal of many offenders from the midst of their families and neighbors far from imposing costs on those families and neighbors may actually reduce their costs, e.g., the hospital bills and psychological trauma created by an abusive spouse or father and the general discomfort created by a rowdy and violent neighbor. I speak from some personal experience here.
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October 28, 2009, 8:54 amtom hynes says:
Off topic alert — desert vs dessert
The phrase “desert may be, morally, a reason to punish” caught my eye. I thought, “Isn’t it ‘just desserts’”? I was wrong: “desert” relates to “deserve”, and that is how Shakespeare uses the word.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/desert
Googlefight shows 4 million “just desserts” to 400,000 “just deserts”, so people are ten times as likely to get this wrong as right.
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=just+deserts&word2=just+desserts
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October 28, 2009, 9:31 amAllan Walstad says:
The word “impose” is completely gratuitous here. If all the eligible bachelors in a town marry gals from out of town, yes the result is fewer opportunities for the town gals, but there is no imposition. It’s the same thing.
You mean driven out of high-crime neighborhoods? The costs are being imposed by the criminals, not by the people and firms seeking to get away from the criminals.
Or is “cost-benefit analysis” too often an exercise in mere hand-waving?
Tax-based services? So, we increase government robbery to buy off private robbers? Government at all levels is already robbing us blind to provide its “services,” and it looks as though the price will be going up astronomically in the near future. So spare me, please.
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October 28, 2009, 10:51 amRowerinVA says:
I criticized Mr. Kleinman’s last two posts but on this one, I’m mostly in agreement.
Where I depart, or at least I believe I do based on this admittedly short piece, is this para:
“Usual[ly] ... entirely undeserved?” How does he reach that conclusion? Frequently, those with collateral suffering to some degree condoned, directly or indirectly benefitted, or failed to exercise their moral duty to prevent, the criminal behavior. Certainly this is the case in the great majority of pro bono clients I have seen with such problems. E.g., Mom happily spent Son’s drug money and provided him a “business” location. Her suffering at Son’s resulting incarceration is real, but people will differ over calling it “undeserved.”
It’s correct to look at crime dispassionately and employ cost-benefit analysis where one can. It’s not correct to try to remove perpetrator’s suffering — the more they suffer, the more they are deterred (not an exact equation but it’s strongly correlated). and suffering that punishment causes to the perp’s immediate friends and family, while unfortunate, is also part of the feedback that prevents crime: parents, kids, neighbors etc. will do more, at the margin, to discourage criminality if it hurts them as a collateral effect. Mr. Kleinman is correct that we need to draw some boundaries; at one extreme, it’s good that family “suffers” by being separated from the criminal; at the other extreme, we wouldn’t burn down the mother’s house (some countries at war may do this, but we’re not at war; let’s not get sidetracked about that tactic, I’m using it only to illustrate). We might forfeit that house, but only in extreme cases. Line drawing is always difficult but the need for it can’t be dismissed as “hand waving.”
Mr. Kleinman needs to distinguish between suffering that is reasonably proximate and therefore just, and is also deterrent, and suffering that isn’t proximate, is unjust, and serves no purpose or is affirmatively counterproductive. He hasn’t made that distinction yet, at least not persuasively. Perhaps a fertile area for him to explore in future posts?
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October 28, 2009, 11:03 amroad2serfdom says:
I agree with you that counting criminal’s utility should be part of cost-benefit analysis. In doing so you actually make a stronger case against crime and for punishing criminals, when after counting the cost of time in jail to the criminal, it still makes cost-benefit sense to punish harshly. David Friedman has made a similar point in one of his books.
I disagree with, “By the same token, controlling crime by providing services, where it works, is greatly preferable to controlling crime by threatening or inflicting damage.”
You seem to be claiming “threatening or inflicting damage” is automatically trumped by “providing services”. I think you would need to perform a specific cost-benefit analysis to know that. (Unless by your phrase “where it works” you mean where a full cost benefit analysis demonstrates it is preferable to the “threatening or inflicting damage” approach. But if so you would be saying ‘it is preferable when it is preferable’.)
Consider a hypothetical:
Society A: No punishment
Annual Drunk driving reduction 0%
Annual Drunk Driving Deaths: 20,000
Socitey B: Free Taxi Rides
Annual Drunk Driving Reduction 10%
Annual Drunk Driving Deaths: 18,000
Society C: Death Penalty for Drunk Drivers at roadside
Drunk Driving Reduction: 95% first year, 100% in later years
Annual Drunk Driving Deaths: 1000 in first year, 0 in later years
Annual Execution Deaths: 600 in first year, 0 in later years
You are saying B would be automatically preferable to C because B “works” and is a “providing services” approach. In doing so you drop your cost-benefit objective approach and insert normative statements into the analysis. I am saying that a full cost-benefit analysis would be necessary before claiming B is preferable. For example you have would have to estimate the beneft of drunk driving. (Yes there is a benefit to drunk driving otherwise rational people would not do it.) (That was directed to other readers not at you. I know you understand.)
My point is you don’t know B is preferable to C just because it “works” and it is a “providing services” approach. Any one of A, B, or C might win out in a complete cost-benefit analysis.
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October 28, 2009, 11:17 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
Isn’t an example of this the policy that some public housing organizations have, of evicting the entire family when one family member is convicted of a crime like drug dealing? The idea is that somebody has to get some control, and they probably can if they have a strong enough motive to. Don’t know if this has been shown to work, or even if it’s still being done.
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October 28, 2009, 11:49 amASlyJD says:
Laura,
While most public housing organizations have that rule, it is also precedent in New York that parents are not assumed to be aware of their children’s drug use. I’ve lost the citation, but the case had 18 people living in a three bedroom apartment. The 52 year old great grandmother was not presumed to know about the daughter and granddaughter’s cocaine, and so she did not get evicted from the apartment.
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October 28, 2009, 12:23 pmBarry says:
Interestingly enough, statisticians, social scientists and economists have actually thought about this. If you intend to hold that standard, much of economics goes bye-bye.
In fact, most of life experience not involving controlled, randomized, replicated experiments with good covariate data collection goes bye-bye.
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October 28, 2009, 2:21 pmAvatar says:
Hey, now, don’t read into that statement a standard that isn’t there. Nowhere am I demanding “absolute proof”; I’m aware of the limits of social science as well as the next guy (actually, significantly better than the next guy.)
But it’s not enough to say “we instituted this program and violent crime dropped 10% in this community”. You’d also need to account for the community next door, which didn’t institute the same program, yet crime also dropped 10% there as well (or 9% or 11%, or maybe only 5% or 15%...) As a society, we take many steps to attempt to reduce crime, and it can be difficult to establish which solution is having which effect. It’s not enough to show a correlation between a given social program and crime reduction, but you’d also need to demonstrate that, statistically speaking, it has that correlation independent of possible conflating factors (increases in incarceration, changes to the socioeconomic makeup of the area, the performance of the economy, etc.)
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, what social scientists, statisticians, and economists do. You can do it yourself at home, with enough data and the right software. I’ve done it myself, back in stat class.
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October 28, 2009, 2:35 pmPatHMV says:
Surveys that find things like “people would pay $100 to reduce crime in their communities by 10%” are beyond useless. The figures are invariably significantly larger than the amount that the individual would actually pay, when an outlay of hard cash is required. The survey question is meaningless, because both the payment mechanism and the potential for actually achieving the resulting 10% reduction in crime are always vague and hotly contested.
For example, suppose the local municipality proposes an extra 1% sales tax to fund an increase in the size of the police force, which would result in an additional $100 of sales tax from each individual making $10,000 in taxable purchases each year. Will all the people who answered the survey saying they would pay $100 per year or more vote “yes” on the tax? Of course not. Some will vote against because they simply lied in the survey. Others will vote no because, while they really meant it at the time they answered the survey, in reality they just aren’t that committed. Others still will vote against it because 1% on every single purchase is a significant amount, and seems likely, on a gut level, to lead to more than $100 per year.
And that’s before you get to the people who would vote yes if they thought that increasing the police force size would help, but simply disagree that it will result in a 10% reduction in crime. It is, after all, a speculative matter of prediction in any given case, no matter how statistically likely a proposal is to be successful. Some will be ideologically disposed against more cops, out of distrust or hostility to law enforcement generally. Others will be opposed to the current administration of the city.
Perhaps these “background” type of posts are necessary for people not familiar with the issues, but I look forward to posts addressing the real issue... what measures really are successful at reducing crime, how much do they cost, how repeatable are they, where does the money come from, how do we really know they are successful (rather than benefiting from, say, demographic changes over the time studie), etc., etc., etc.
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October 28, 2009, 5:03 pmPatHMV says:
Tracy W... I think you mean restorative justice, not “redistributive justice” (which is basically socialism or communism, taking from the rich to “equalize” wealth by redistributing it).
Restorative justice, properly done, can have exceedingly beneficial impacts on both victims and criminals. It helps criminals by forcing them to confront the impact their crimes had on other human beings. Only the true sociopaths are really able to remain unmoved and unchanged by being forced to look more closely at how their crimes made others suffer. They help victims by providing more closure; the victims learn from the criminal the answers to many of their “why” questions. Even if they don’t like the answers, they appreciate having them, in my experience. Directly confronting the criminal is also cathartic; it releases a great deal of pent-up tension. There is often a palpable sense of relief that one has stood up for oneself (or one’s loved one), and spoken the truth.
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October 28, 2009, 5:12 pmThe Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Crime and punishment, race and class says:
[...] covered the logic of crime control policy, positive feedback and strategic enforcement, and benefits and costs. A final post will provide a laundry list of specific recommendations.] Categories: Criminal [...]
Tracy W says:
Ooops, PatHMV you’re right, all I can plead is a brain glitch. That’s a lot of what I like about restorative justice, the reason I’m still a bit doubtful is that, never having read a strong attack on it, I don’t know if there are any credible arguments against it. If I read a few attacks that were frothing at the mouth plus evidence-free I’d feel more confident about restorative justice.
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October 29, 2009, 4:22 amdisconnect says:
“For example, property losses from residential burglary average out to $4 per house or apartment per month. And yet, in a survey, people asked how much they would be willing to pay out of their own funds to reduce burglary in their community by 10% gave an average answer of $100 per year.”
Because it’s not about the $4, but about the loss of liberty. The cost of replacing your TV pales next to the mental cost of knowing your home was violated. Even if your monetary losses are completely covered by insurance, your new laptop will still take a boatload of time to set up properly, and it’s never going to be the same, and you probably lost important personal documents (not to mention somebody else has copies of your baby pictures).
And it’s disingenuous to list average property losses per month and what people are willing to pay per year. Why not take it another step and note that people would willingly pay $1000 per decade?
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October 29, 2009, 9:19 amfj says:
Although a couple of people have touched on the utility of punishment to the victims, I don’t see anyone commenting on the utility to third parties. Consider the social outrage at, say, Bernie Madoff: it wasn’t just his victims who wanted to see him wearing an orange jumpsuit. Criminals, especially notorious criminals, should arguably be injured (where permissible by justice) simply because it makes the rest of us happy to see them suffer, even if their victims are indifferent.
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October 29, 2009, 5:02 pm