Crime and punishment: An economic approach
BibTeX
@incollection{becker1968crime,
title={Crime and punishment: An economic approach},
author={Becker, Gary S},
booktitle={The economic dimensions of crime},
pages={13--68},
year={1968},
publisher={Springer}
}
Abstract
Since the turn of the twentieth century, legislation in Western countries has expanded rapidly to reverse the brief dominance of laissez faire during the nineteenth century. The state no longer merely protects against violations of person and property through murder, rape, or burglary but also restricts ‘discrimination’ against certain minorities, collusive business arrangements, ‘jaywalking’, travel, the materials used in construction, and thousands of other activities. The activities restricted not only are numerous but also range widely, affecting persons in very different pursuits and of diverse social backgrounds, education levels, ages, races, etc. Moreover, the likelihood that an offender will be discovered and convicted and the nature and extent of punishments differ greatly from person to person and activity to activity. Yet, in spite of such diversity, some common properties are shared by practically all legislation, and these properties form the subject matter of this essay.
My Notes
- Author
- Gary S. Becker
- Summary
- Discusses the issue of criminal punishment from the perspective of a constrained optimization problem.
In Becker’s model, there is some cost of crime, some cost of inflicting punishment, and some cost of investigation which determines the probability that someone is punished (innocents are never punished in this model). The social planner must balance the cost of implementing punishment with the benefit of deterring crime.
This paper is commonly cited for the ‘Becker Rule’, the notion that the severity of punishment should be very (perhaps arbitrarily) high while the probability of punishment should be very low. However, this implication only comes about in Becker’s model when criminals are risk neutral; he points out that the criminal justice literature claims that criminals in the US are more sensitive to the probability of punishment than to the severity of punishment, which suggests that criminals are ‘risk-preferrers’ at the margins of policy.
Becker also uses the paper to compare the relative merits of costly punishment purely for the sake of deterrence to something like fines (which in a sense have no social cost), arguing for the latter unless the crime is so severe that no level of monetary compensation can make the victim whole.