Mainstreaming Methodology for Estimating Costs of Crime
Crimes are classified differently across time and space. Legislators may add to the list of crimes activities which were previously legal or were dealt with by non-criminal enforcement methods. For example in both the financial and environmental areas many countries now apply criminal law in cases where previously this would not have been possible. Some activities may also be decriminalised, either because social or moral attitudes change, or because it is thought more appropriate to control them by other methods, for example administrative sanctions. See further the section on Principles of classification.
In our approach to estimating the costs of crime the classification of an offence plays a central role: the objective is to produce an estimate of the average costs of an offence of a particular type. The fundamental methodology for estimating costs does not vary: but an estimate can be made only once it has been agreed in detail exactly which kinds of incident are to be included.
It is possible to start with a broad set of definitions as in our Suggested classification
A category such as ‘violence against the person’ will comprise a long list of specific offences. The contents of this list will vary from country to country. This may not matter if the cost estimates are to be used for purely domestic purposes, such as estimating the cost of violence offences relative to the costs of domestic burglary offences. It is generally easy to track down a classification of offences for a country, although there may sometimes be more than one: see Domestic harmonisation
But for international comparative purposes differences in definition may matter a great deal. An estimate of the average cost of a ‘violence against the person’ offence made in one country cannot be directly compared with an estimate made using the same methodology somewhere else if the offence definition is different. For more see International harmonisation.
