What does the existing research evidence say about how to reduce crime? Jennifer Doleac offers and over overview in “Why Crime Matters, and What to Do About It.” It appear as an essay in a book published by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, Strengthening America’s Economic Dynamism, edited by Melissa Kearney and Luke Pardue. You can download individual chapters or the book as a whole.
Doleac emphasizes that the costs of crime are considerably higher than the direct effects on the victims, severe as those can be. She writes:
Crime affects community members even when they are not directly victimized. For example, fear of crime can affect foot traffic, property values, and school attendance (if parents think it’s not safe to walk to school, they might keep their children at home). In general, high levels of crime reduce residents’ quality of life and have detrimental effects on neighborhoods (Lacoe, Bostic, and Acolin 2018). Dustmann and Fasani (2016) found that crime causes “considerable mental distress for residents.” Effects are driven by property crime, are larger for women, and manifest mostly as depression and anxiety. They estimate that an increase in local crime causes two to four times as much mental distress as an equivalent decrease in local employment. Cornaglia, Feldman, and Leigh (2014) estimate that, in terms of effects on mental well-being, the “society-wide impact of increasing the crime rate by one victim is about 80 times more than the direct impact on the victim.” … Combining tangible and intangible costs, Anderson (2021) estimates that the aggregate cost of crime in the United States is $4.7–5.8 trillion each year …
What practical and cost-effective steps might be taken to reduce crime? I can’t do justice to the full range of Doleac’s essay, but here are some thoughts that caught my eye.
- More Police.
The most traditional approach to increasing the probability that perpetrators are caught is to put more police on the street. Indeed, a long literature shows that hiring more police officers and increasing police presence in communities both have large deterrent effects on crime—especially violent crime like homicide. Based on the fiscal costs of police and the estimated crime-reduction benefits of additional police, most US cities are substantially under-policed …
2) Better use of technology could include surveillance cameras, DNA databases of known offenders, and requiring blood-alcohol monitors in cars for those previously convicted of drunk driving. Another step is electronic monitoring rather than incarceration for nonviolent first offenders, or as a substitute for pretrial detention in some cases, or as an intermediate condition for being released from incarceration:
Outside the US, electronic monitoring (EM) is widely used as an alternative to incarceration—either in place of short prison sentences or as a means of early release from prison. People placed on EM are typically confined to their homes with limited opportunities to leave only for court-approved purposes such as work, school, and medical appointments. A GPS monitor tracks their whereabouts. This kind of monitoring provides much of the public-safety benefit of incarceration (incapacitation), while minimizing incarceration’s negative effects (being locked up with other high-risk people, disrupting work or schooling).
3) A certain amount of crime involves young adults with nothing in particular to do. Thus, summer jobs or training programs can be a useful step.
4) Reducing air pollution and lead exposure have a variety of positive health effects, and also seem connected to reducing crime rates.
5) My own sense is that having fewer people locked up can pay for these programs. Electronic monitoring is a lot cheaper than incarceration. Sure, longer prison terms for violent and/or repeat offenders are probably needed. On the other side, many offenders “age out” of crime as they leave their 20s. Also, a shorter sentence that you are actually likely to serve is probably a bigger deterrent to crime than longer sentences that relatively few offenders end up serving. Doleac points out: “A primary takeaway from this literature is that increasing the probability that perpetrators are caught and face consequences has a much bigger deterrent effect on crime than does making the punishment longer or harsher …”
What are some programs that promise to reduce crime but don’t have much support in the research evidence? Among these, Doleac mentions: programs that offer a job to those just leaving prison, programs that offer “wraparound” services to those leaving prison, “truth-in-sentencing” rules that require an offender to serve almost their full term before being eligible for parole (because such rules reduce incentives for good behavior in prison), and widespread use of long prison sentences (because criminal behavior tends to peak for those in their 20s).
