Law Enforcement Costs Research Articles

Criminal choice, nonmonetary sanctions and marginal deterrence: A normative analysis

This paper develops a normative model of optimal sanctions in the Becker Tradition which emphasizes the role of marginal deterrence. The paper complements Shavell's 1987 American Economic Review paper, the essential difference being that Shavell's model concentrates on variations in the sanction imposed within a single category of acts (a specific crime) while the model in this paper concentrates on variations in the sanction imposed across categories of acts (different crimes). In their most general formulations, neither Shavell's model nor the model developed in this paper yields the result that acts with greater social harm should receive greater sanctions. But special cases, which readers may or may not find reasonable, do yield that result, within crimes for both models and across crimes in the model developed in this paper. This paper also identifies the necessary condition of jointness in the cost of law enforcement in the case of comparisons across crimes.

The social value of crime?

criminal gains in welfare economics and cost-benefit analysis. It has been common practice among economists working in this area to make use of social welfare functions containing the gains from criminal activity as a positive value. The inclusion of criminal gains is an ethical judgment, but economists often fail to acknowledge it as such, or even seem to be aware that it is controversial. There has been considerable interest in the economics of crime and optimal law enforcement since Gary Becker’s well-known article of two decades ago.’ In deriving an equation for the optimal level of law enforcement, Becker employed a social loss function in which the total loss to society equals the harm done by the crime plus the cost of law enforcement, but minus the “social value of the gain to offenders.“‘Becker thus treated a reduction in criminal gains as a cost of law enforcement.’ In a response to Becker, George Stigler questioned the assumption that the gain to offenders has a positive social value: The determination of this social value is not explained, and one is entitled to doubt its usefulness as an explanatory concept: what evidence is there that society sets a positive value upon the utility derived from a murder, rape, or arson? In fact, the society has branded the utility derived from such activities as illicit.4

Evolving a New Policy for Illicit Drugs

The primary objective of drug policy should be the minimization of harm which can result from the consumption of certain drugs. The pharmacological and toxicological properties of drugs can cause harm by inducing antisocial behaviors, causing morbidity or death from overdosage, or tissue damage. Other social problems attributed to drugs, such as crimes of property or violence and corruption, are essentially the unintended negative consequences of the policy of prohibition. Prohibition also represents an increasing financial burden to the state because of costs of law enforcement, court proceedings and prisons. Modifications to prohibition policy which may attenuate some of its disadvantages are reviewed. Alternative policies are offered which should offer greater individual and social benefits and fewer negative consequences. It is proposed that the essential problem associated with the policy of prohibition is the nature of the illicit market. The proposal favored is one which can eliminate the illicit market by the employment of “market forces.” However, some questions remain to be answered and this paper may encourage some responses.

Savings in California marijuana law enforcement costs attributable to the Moscone Act of 1976--a summary.

(1988). Savings in California Marijuana Law Enforcement Costs Attributable to the Moscone Act of 1976—A Summary. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs: Vol. 20, Marijuana—An Update, pp. 75-82.

Optimal control analysis of a simple criminal prosecution model

AbstractThis paper analyzes an optimal control model dealing with a problem in criminal justice policy. It is assumed that a society generates criminals at a constant rate. The size of the criminal population at any time depends on the criminal generation rate and the number of criminals prosecuted and imprisoned. Optimal prosecution rate over time is found by using Pontryagin's principle. The objective is to minimize the total discounted cost of the damages inflicted by the criminals plus the cost of law enforcement. Explicit forms of the optimal trajectories are found in both the finite and infinite horizon cases. In the latter case, a stability analysis of the optimal steady‐state is also presented. The paper concludes with a comparative statics analysis of the equilibrium and a description of the optimal control of a more detailed criminal justice system model.

Deterring Sex Sales to International Tourists: A Case Study of Thailand, South Korea, and the Philippines

In developing areas, large-scale international tourism often offers a market for illegal goods and services. Unable to directly control sex sales, governments may decide to discourage prostitution by making the industry less profitable. Sex is sold to international tourists in Thailand, South Korea, and the Philippines through the oligopolistic hotel/travel agency and competitive streetwalker markets. Applying legal sanctions prices change and sales decrease in both markets. The per unit cost of law enforcement is borne more heavily by customers on the street and by firms in the hotel/agency market owing to the markets' respective inelastic and elastic demand segments. If enforcement against sellers in both markets represents a fixed cost, initially sales will not decline, but firms will experience diminishing profits. The optimum short- and long-run effects result from applying enforcement against firms in the hotel/agency market.

A Differential Games Solution to a Model of Competition Between a Thief and the Police

This paper contains an extension of an optimal control model considered by Sethi (Sethi, S. P. 1979. Optimal Pilfenng policies for dynamic continuous thieves. Management Sci. 25 (6, June) 535–542.) to a differential game situation. It is assumed that Sethi's concave thief, i.e., a risk-averter, plays against the police, whose objective function incorporates convex costs of law enforcement, a one-shot utility at the time of arrest and a continuous utility or cost rate after the thief is arrested. The probability that the thief is caught by time t is influenced not only by the pilfering rate (as is the case in Sethi's model) but also by the instrumental variable of the police, namely its rate of law enforcement. Our aim is to analyze noncooperative Nash solutions of the differential game sketched above. Due to the special structure of the Hamiltonians, a system of two nonlinear differential equations for the control variables of both players can be derived. The system is solved explicitly under special assumptions. It is shown that the optimal rate of law enforcement of police increases monotonically whereas for the Nash-optimal pilfering rate three cases may be characterized in which increase, decrease or constancy occur. Thus the Nash-optimal solutions show in each case monotonic behavior, i.e., changes in trend never occur. Moreover, the dependency of the terminal values of control can be described. Finally, an interpretation of the model as market entrance game is sketched.

Citizen Rights and the Cost of Law Enforcement

There is an inherent tension between the idea that individuals have certain inalienable (natural) rights and the economist's postulate that the rate if utilization of anything whose production requires scarce resources must be limited by considerations of opportunity cost. Remarks about rights to life, liberty, health, justice and the like are readily inserted into political pronouncements, legislative preambles and court decisions, but they (should) cause economists to raise questions about costs and quantities. Unfortunately, neither in ordinary language nor in the jargon of moral philosophy can such ultimate desiderata as liberty and justice be related to costs or quantities. Hence in the first section we sketch a model of social choice in which the necessary relationships can be defined. In section II, we give instances where, despite protestations to the contrary, the Law Enforcement System (LES) has made de facto reductions of citizen rights (liberties) in order to increase the efficiency if law enforcement. The final section considers some of the normative implications suggested by the positive arguments of section II.

The Measurement of Police Output: Conceptual Issues and Alternative Approaches

Soaring crime rates and law enforcement costs have produced widespread disillusionment and disenchantment with our criminal justice system. Even those who operate its basic institutions, police officers, judges, and correctional officials, are frequent critics of its performance, although they often differ about what wrong. The mood of the country with regard to crime and law enforcement is one of frustration and bewilderment.1 This discontent has resulted in the questioning of our basic law enforcement institutions and our basic concepts of justice. While the system as a whole has been subjected to critical re-examination, the evaluation of performance has focused on the police. What we have been asking ourselves and our public officials is, can we stem the rising tide of crime, and if so, what will it cost? The attempt to obtain answers has raised additional questions. With regard to the police, the three critical questions are: (i) what do the police produce, or should they produce, and how can it be measured, (2) are the police producing at minimum cost, and (3) how much police service do we want to buy? As we shall demonstrate, the answers to these questions are a part of the overall answer to the same set of questions posed for the criminal justice system as a whole. A fundamental tenet of this paper that the activities of the police cannot be measured and evaluated without reference to the totality of criminal justice institutions and to the social environment in which these activities take place. This paper discusses the conceptual and practical difficulties of defining and measuring police output. The first section sketches the overall problem of criminal justice resource allocation as it relates to the measurement of police output. We argue that police services are not a final product, but rather an intermediate product in the overall production of justice or law enforcement. The effectiveness of the police with regard to overall law enforcement depends not only on their own operations but on the operations of the courts, the prosecutor's office, the correctional system, and the other participants in law enforcement. We then introduce the concept of the social cost of crime and demonstrate that the problem of defining justice can be circumvented-