Mainstreaming Methodology for Estimating Costs of Crime
The first phase of work on this site was completed in December 2008. We propose to maintain and update it for at least some months into 2009. During that time we welcome contributions and suggestions, while reserving editorial rights.
These are early days in the development of the topic. Clearly there is great scope for further work on the costs of crime. Areas that would benefit from further work include:
1. Trans-border issues. At a European level there are offences involving international linkages, such as the trafficking of migrants, sex workers and drugs, cyber-crime, intellectual property offences, terrorism and tax fraud. Modelling costs in these settings is a challenging task, since victims are mobile and criminal justice responses need to be multilateral. A national perspective is not sufficient. Collective action at an EU (or global) level requires analysis at an international level to assess the costs of such crime and thus the potential benefits from finding collective measures to prevent or reduce it.
2. Transferability of estimates. The scope for applying cost estimates made in one country to other countries is a controversial matter. Making adjustments for income and wealth levels may sometimes be enough, but other times it will not. Further exploration of the scope is needed.
3. Application to offending careers. The 'standard' approach to the costs of crimie has a focus on single offences. A lot of policy however is aimed at repeat offenders. Better understanding of the costs of strings of offences may help target crime prevention efforts more effectively.
4. Increasing policymaker awareness. Making cost of crime methodology more widely available should encourage criminal justice policy-makers to make use of cost of crime estimates when evaluating interventions and projects.
5. Refocus of victim survey questions. Crime victim surveys can be a great aid to policy making. Closer matching between the framing of survey questions and the cost typologies used in cost of crime estimation could make the surveys more productive still, as could larger sample sizes.
6. Extension to further countries. There are still lots of countries where good cost of crime estimates have not as yet been compiled. And there remain some important offence types to which the standard methods have not as yet been applied.
7. Technical challenges. And there still remain some important unresolved technical challenges. These include questions like: a. How much scope is there for extending 'top-down' approaches to measuring the costs of crime? b. Is the QUALY approach the best way of characterising the losses from violent and sexual offences? c. Can we use the average property loss reported by crime victims as a proxy for losses from recorded crimes?
