STANLEY ASUMANU 33371253
WHAT GUIDANCE CAN ECONOMIC MODELS OF CRIME AND AVAILABLE STATISTICAL EVIDENCE
OFFER TO POLICYMAKERS TRYING TO REDUCE CRIME?
The study of the causes and effects of crime was predominant in sociology and psychology.
Economic analysis of crime did not take effect until the late 1960s when Gary Becker gave thought into the rationality of crime: “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach”. Becker’s work was then followed by George Stigler’s “The Optimum Enforcement of Laws” and Isaac Ehrlich’s
“Participation of Illegitimate Activities: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation” in 1970 and 1973, respectively (Merlo, 2004). Since then, the separation between economics and criminology has broken down as theoretical and empirical economic research on crime has increased (Machin et al.
2014). The issue to be discussed is how these economic models can guide policy makers to reduce crime. Gary Becker (1968) focused his attention to question “how many resources and how much punishment should be used to enforce different kinds of legislation?” Criminals are rational (Becker
1986). They considered the costs and benefits of committing a crime. Essentially, crime should be made unprofitable rather than incurring costs to eliminate it.

Becker (1968) considered the economic importance of crime despite several economists neglecting it due to the immoral aspect of crime. Crime incurs costs; tangible such as medical cost, lost output, cost of creating criminal justice system, etc. and intangible costs like psychological impact (Bradley, 2014). Table 1 shows the various costs of crime in America in 1965. The total costs of about $21billion accounted for almost 4% of national income. Becker devised a model to counter crime in which he broke it down into damages, apprehension and convictions, supply of offenses and punishment. 1