Policy Choice

A s we approach the fiftieth anniversary of Nobel laureate Gary Becker's seminal contribution (Becker, 1968), it is fair to say that the economics of crime is part of the standard portfolio that makes up the discipline. On both sides of the Atlantic, a critical mass of academic economists has specialised in the study of crime and its control. For example, a series of CEP studies has contributed to making sense of the UK's 'riddle of peacefulness' (Draca, 2013) and analysing which policies can be most effective in reducing crime (Marie, 2010). Of course, social scientific study of crime was well established by the time of Gary Becker's contribution. Prior to that, from the 1920s, the dominant disciplines were sociology and psychology, and that continued as criminology departments and schools were established in the postwar period. Becker chose to bypass rather than engage with that tradition, stating that 'a useful theory of criminal behaviour can dispense with special theories of anomie, psychological inadequacies, or inheritance of special traits and simply extend the economist's analysis of choice.' With this bit of disciplinary imperialism as a guide, subsequent contributions from economics tended to adopt the view that crime research was virgin territory. Economists were initially not so welcome in criminology and, for the most part, were unconcerned, feeling that they had little to learn from the 'natives'. More recently, that separation between economics and criminology has begun to break down, an encouraging trend that can be traced in part to the growth of multidisciplinary public-policy programmes and think-tanks. In a new book, we examine what economists have contributed to the study of criminal behaviour and crime control and identify four key strands: n A normative framework for evaluating criminal law and crime prevention. n The application of sophisticated quantitative methods to analyse the causes of crime and the effects of crime-control measures in this framework. n The conception of criminal behaviour as individual choice, influenced by perceived consequences. n The aggregation of individual choices into a systems framework for understanding crime rates and patterns. During the tumultuous years of the 1960s, with riots in US cities and escalating rates of crime and drug abuse, Congress created several high-profile commissions to assess the underlying problems and recommend effective reforms. When these commissions turned to the prominent criminologists of the day, they offered their opinions but had little in the way of relevant evidence. …