Mainstreaming Methodology for Estimating Costs of Crime
Many criminal justice agencies devote some proportion of their budgets to crime prevention work. Ideally, this activity should be separated out from other parts of their work, particularly responding to crimes that have already occurred. Likewise there may be agencies outside the criminal justice system with crime prevention objectives. A great deal of work with children by education and social services, for example, is designed to reduce crime as well as to meet other objectives such as improving child health, reducing substance misuse and reducing truancy from school. There is plenty of evidence about the risk factors associated with offending risk, and there are many programmes that seek to exploit what is known about the scope for risk reduction.
The background to Government Crime Prevention Programmes reviews the issue briefly.
Police forces in the UK and in the Netherlands have become actively involved in ‘secure by design’ programmes which involve liaison with planning agencies and the construction industry in order to improve the design and layout of buildings from a crime safety perspective. See further: http://www.doca.org.uk/ and http://www.hetccv.nl/.
In practice the difficulty of disaggregating police and other agency budgets between ‘prevention’ and ‘responsive’ activities is such that prevention work is simply ignored as a separate category and incorporated into responses to crime. Nevertheless we look briefly [link to new file under construction on Government Crime Prevention Cost Measurement] at the scope for including this category as a distinct element in cost of crime estimation.
