2021/11/01 by David A. Anderson · 1 citation
Engineering · Social Sciences · #Actuarial science #Business #Crime Patterns and Interventions #Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis #Criminal justice #Criminology #Deterrence (psychology) #Economics #Enforcement #Law #Law and economics #Law enforcement #Political science #Public economics #Scope (computer science) #Sociology #Traffic and Road Safety #Violent crime
paper · doi:10.1086/715713
openalex publication_date 2021/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Estimates of crime’s burden inform public and private decisions about crime-prevention measures. More than counts of criminal offenses, the aggregate cost of crime conveys the scale of problems from crime and the value of deterrence. This article offers an estimate of the total annual cost of crime in the United States, including the direct costs of law enforcement, criminal justice, and victims’ losses and the indirect costs of private deterrence, fear and agony, and time lost to avoidance and recovery. The findings update crime-cost estimates of past decades while expanding the scope of coverage to include categories missing from past studies. The estimated annual cost of crime is 4.71–5.76 trillion including transfers from victims to criminals and 2.86–3.92 trillion net of transfers.