Mainstreaming Methodology for Estimating Costs of Crime
For purposes of comparison between countries it is important that unified definitions are applied, and a number of efforts have been made to produce such definitions. The resulting classifications can be used to re-categorise a country’s recorded crime data in a way that makes them more comparable with crime levels elsewhere: the key source in the EU is the European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics. A new questionnaire for the latter, with some variations, has just been completed. For further details see the European Sourcebook web site.
Considerable care is needed when attempting such re-classification or when using re-based figures for cost estimation purposes. For example in a category such as ‘violence against the person’, the average cost of an offence will be very sensitive to the mix of offence types included. For purposes of transferring elements of cost across countries it is important to make allowance both for differences in cost drivers (e.g. health costs of an injury may be higher in one country) and also for differences in the classification of offences (e.g. an action resulting in death from a road accident may be treated as a criminal offence in one country but not another).
Differences in the legal framework used in different countries may also create problems and require care in dealing with them. For example, in one country a given offence may include harm which is caused by negligence, while in another country the offence requires proof that the harm was intended. So also in one country, the offence may be committed where it is attempted but not accomplished, while in another the attempt constitutes an independent offence.
