October 30, 2002
NASHVILLE, Tenn.—Given the chance, America’s households would spend more of their own money to reduce serious crimes—such as burglary, sexual assault and armed robbery—in their neighborhoods.
A new research report by Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management states that the typical U.S. household would pay between $75 and $150 more per year for crime prevention, if these programs could lead to a 10 percent reduction in specific crimes in their communities. The report, “Willingness-to-Pay for Crime Control Programs,” sampled 1,300 U.S. residents.
“We felt there was a need for this research because we found large knowledge gaps about the overall cost of crime, as well as the benefits of crime reduction,” said the report’s lead author, Mark A. Cohen, professor of economics and strategy at the Owen School. “Although cost-benefit analyses are quite common in developing environmental and health and safety regulations, criminal justice programs have rarely been examined this way,” Cohen said.
He noted that previous attempts to estimate the costs of crime focused on differences in property values in low crime versus high crime areas. Other methods have suffered from both theoretical and empirical weaknesses that most certainly resulted in underestimates of the true cost of crime.
For his sampling, Cohen used a research model called “contingent valuation,” a methodology not usually employed in criminal justice research. His survey revealed how much the average U.S. household would be willing to pay to reduce crime, which translated into aggregate sums of $23,000 per burglary, $60,000 per serious assault, $213,000 per armed robbery, $225,000 per rape and sexual assault and $9.1 million per murder.
Cohen noted that the final estimated figures, based on a willingness-to-pay approach, are between two and 10 times higher than any prior estimate of the cost of crime to victims. “These figures more fully represent the true cost of crime to society,” he said, “and illustrate that past studies of crime-control programs ignored the social costs of crime by focusing exclusively on costs to victims and the criminal justice system.”
The research was done in collaboration with Roland Rust at the University of Maryland, Sara Steen at the University of Colorado-Boulder and Simon Tidd at the Owen School and was supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice and the U.S. Sentencing Commission.
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Contact: Susanne Loftis, 615-322-NEWS, susanne.loftis@vanderbilt.edu