Abstract
There are many reasons why criminologists and criminal justice policy analysts might want to understand the costs of crime. Among the most important reasons are to rank the severity of different crimes, to compare crime to other social ills, and to conduct cost–benefit analyses of alternative criminal justice policies. Estimating the costs of crime requires a significant amount of information that is not readily available. Crimes not only affect victims (with costs such as medical bills, lost wages, pain and suffering), but they also affect the general public who take precautionary measures to avoid victimization (such as burglar alarms or taking taxis at night), taxpayers who pay for the criminal justice system, and society more generally through lost business, community development, and social cohesion. Economists have developed several approaches to estimating the costs of crime and have begun to use these estimates in conducting cost–benefit analysis of alternative crime control policies.
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