This monograph explains what economic analysis is, why it is important, and forms it can take in policing and criminal justice. Costs are important in all forms of economic analysis but their collection tends to be partial and inadequate in capturing key information. A practical guide to the collection is therefore also provided.

Crime and Economics provides the first comprehensive and accessible text to address the economics of crime within the study of crime and criminology. The economics of crime is an area of growing activity and concern, increasingly influential both to the study of crime and criminal justice and to the formulation of crime reduction and criminal justice policy. As well as providing an overview of the relationship between economics and crime, this book poses key questions such as: What is the impact of the labour market and poverty on crime? Can society decrease criminal activity from a basis of economic disincentives? What forms of crime reduction and methods of reducing re-offending are most cost beneficial? Can illicit organised crime and illicit drug markets be understood better through the application of economic analysis? For those interested in economic methods, but without previous economic training, this book also provides an accessible overview of key areas such as cost-benefit analysis, econometrics and the debate around how to estimate the costs of crime. This book will be key reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of criminology and economics and those working in the criminal justice system including practitioners, managers and policy makers.

Although evidence-based crime prevention has been identified as a priority in Canada's political and policy settings, very little is known about the economic efficiency of crime prevention programs in the Canadian context. This is an important issue given current fiscal constraints in this country and around the world. To that end, the objective of the following report is to provide an overview of two of the most widely-used economic approaches to assessing the costs and/or financial benefits of crime prevention programs. Cost-effectiveness analysis links program outcomes (e.g., crime reduction) to investment costs in order to estimate the per-outcome expense of a crime prevention project. Cost-benefit analysis takes this a step further and attaches monetary values to program outcomes, which are then compared to program costs in order to provide an estimate of the financial return on investment. Issues and challenges associated with each type of economic analysis approach are discussed, as well as recommendations for next steps.

Topics covered include crime statistics, criminal behaviour, sentencing and punishment, privatization of crime prevention, prisons and policing.

Is cost-benefit analysis the best means to determine and formulate public policies? To answer this question Jeffrey Leigh Sedgwick examines its application to crime and criminal justice and the implications of that application. In this interdisciplinary study, Sedgwick first assesses the value of applying economic models to the social problem of crime. He compares economic models to sociological ones and then addresses the question of whether economic models are compatible with the values of a liberal political order. He shows that cost-benefit analysis suffers from technical and ethical problems when used to set law enforcement goals. Current techniques for measuring the costs of crime are crude and unreliable, he argues, and overreliance on citizen and consumer preference may lead to the adoption of policies incompatible with American political traditions and respect for human rights. Sedgwick concludes that economic analysis cannot, by itself, lead to the adoption of effective and publicly defensible policies to combat crime.

Research from the United States, Europe, and South America demonstrates the usefulness of the tools of economic analysis for the study of crime. Economists who bring the tools of economic analysis to bear on the study of crime and crime prevention contribute to current debates a normative framework and sophisticated quantitative methods for evaluating policy, the idea of criminal behavior as rational choice, and the connection of individual choices to aggregate outcomes. The contributors to this volume draw on all three of these approaches in their investigations and discuss the policy implications of their findings. Reporting on research in the United States, Europe, and South America, the chapters discuss such topics as a cost-benefit analysis of additional police hiring, the testing of innovative policy interventions through field experiments, imprisonment and recidivism rates, incentives and disincentives for sports hooliganism (“hooliganomics”), data showing the influence of organized crime on the quality of local politicians, and the (scant) empirical evidence for the effect of immigration on crime. These contributions demonstrate the eclectic approach of economists studying crime as well as their increasing respect for the contributions of other social scientists in this area. Contributors Brian Bell, Paolo Buonanno, Philip J. Cook, John J. Donohue III, Jeffrey R. Kling, Jens Ludwig, Stephen Machin, Olivier Marie, Giovanni Mastrobuoni, Sendhil Mullainathan, Aurélie Ouss, Emily Greene Owens, Stefan Pichler, Paolo Pinotti, Mikael Priks, Daniel Römer, Rodrigo R. Soares, Igor Viveiros

Jeremy Bentham and Gary Becker established the tradition of analyzing criminal law in utilitarian and economic terms. This seminal book continues that tradition with specially commissioned, original papers that span the philosophical foundations of the use of economics in criminal law, both traditional economic perspectives and behavioral and experimental approaches to the discipline. The contributors examine and evaluate the optimal design of criminal law norms as well as the ideal structure of law enforcement institutions. They delineate what wrongs ought to be criminalized, identify the boundaries between criminal law and tort, and determine the optimal size of sanctions given the differential vulnerability of victims. They also analyze the special considerations that apply to the regulation of corporate crime, the effects of technology on crime, and the effects of the distribution of wealth on sentencing. This essential Handbook provides students and scholars of criminal law and law and economics the opportunity to explore the diversity of contemporary approaches to the economics of crime. Criminologists, sociologists and policymakers will also find it a valuable addition to their collections.