Roger Bowles

Casual police corruption and the economics of crime

We extend Beckers model of crime by allowing for collusion between an arresting officer and the criminal at the expense of the police department. The weakening in the deterrent power of a given set of criminal sanctions that results is explored in a perfect information setting. Applying a solution concept developed in related work by Cadot we derive optimal policies for each group. We show in particular that the well-established results from the Becker model do not all carry through. In particular we find that the maximal fine may no longer be optimal.

The Application of Economic Analysis to Criminal Justice Interventions: A Review of the Literature

Public policy makers and practitioners have become increasingly reliant on economic analysis to provide valuable insights into decision making. However, answers from economic analyses are only as good as the quality of the analyses themselves. This article presents the findings of a literature review of the application of economic analysis to criminal justice interventions. The review started with 748 relevant bibliographic records after two consecutive screenings of 9,919 records. Ten studies, out of a total of 154 studies reviewed, were judged to encapsulate rigorous applications of economic analysis to criminal justice interventions. These findings reveal the general shortage of sound applications of economic analysis to criminal justice interventions. This article proceeds to summarize the methods used to value the costs, outcomes, and benefits in the 10 studies selected. With very few exceptions, the studies reviewed were based on less rigorous study designs.

Economic analysis of the removal of illegal gains

The purpose of the present paper is to explore both the motivation for confiscating illegal gain and also to look at some of its legal aspects and economic effects. It is argued that the removal of illegal gain may be able to play a significant complementary role, if only by closing the gap between the maximum punishment the law will allow and fines sufficient to represent a credible deterrent. The paper develops a deterrence model and applies it to confiscation powers introduced to help combat drug trafficking.

Parable of Two Agencies, One of Which Randomizes:

This article examines the design of evaluations in settings where there is a choice as to how an intervention is to be introduced and evaluated. It uses data from a supervision program for offenders on probation in the UK (Bruce and Hollin forthcoming) that had been indicated by a pilot evaluation in one probation area to merit wider-scale implementation and evaluation. For the remaining two probation areas in the region, a randomized controlled allocation of participants to conditions was recommended. One of the areas adopted a stepped wedge design, in which probation offices were randomly allocated sequentially to the program. The second area opted to launch the program across the whole area simultaneously, with a retrospective sample as control group. The article compares the results of implementation in each probation area and seeks to draw wider inferences about the management of program implementation and the randomized controlled designs appropriate for similar field studies.

Estimating Costs of Crime

This chapter reviews the theory, methods, and evidence on estimating the costs of crime. Criminal justice policy analysts increasingly want to know more about an intervention or project: not only “does it work?” but also “is it cost effective?” or “does it contribute positive net benefits?” To answer many questions of this kind, requires estimates of the costs of different types of crime so that the benefits from a crime reduction policy can be assessed.This chapter outlines how such estimates are normally made by economists and some of the alternative methods that are sometimes appropriate. It gives examples, including a comparison of costs across countries for a similar offence type. There are many different types of costs of crime estimates in the literature – including many that are “incomplete” or poorly founded.Part of our purpose is to help users become informed about the different approaches and their limitations. The chapter is primarily limited to estimates of the cost of traditional “street crime,” and largely ignores white collar, corporate, and regulatory crimes. However, many of the techniques discussed are also appropriate to estimating the costs of these other types of crimes.

Impatience, reputation and offending

Reconviction rates for offenders are high despite sentence severity increasing with the number of convictions. The standard one-shot model of crime provides little scope for exploring ‘persistence effects’, although recent papers by Emons and others have sought to put offending decisions into a more dynamic setting. This article develops a simple two-period model of offending in which criminal convictions act as an adverse signal in labour markets. Ordinary and multinomial logistic regression modelling is used to test the predictions of the theoritical model and explore the link between unemployment and convictions. The empirical results, which are based on longitudinal data from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) in the UK, strongly support the view that, ceteris paribus, individuals with previous convictions are at higher risk of being unemployed.

Household dissolution, child care and divorce law

This paper sets up a model of household dissolution in which one party decides to leave a household that contains children. We study the effects of divorce law on this decision and, in particular, the role of legal provisions governing the post-dissolution care of the household’s children. In particular, we show that there is an inevitable tension between achieving efficiency in marriage and at the same time achieving efficiency in divorce.

Equity and the EC Budget; a Pooled Cross-Section Time Series Analysis

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the EC budget over the period 1985-89. It begins from the premise that economic variables influence both a member states contributions to the finance of the budget and its receipts under the various spending programmes. We examine this hypothesis using data from 5 years relating to all EC members. A regression model is fitted in order to establish whether (and to what degree) a member states contributions to the budget and the receipts it can expect under the main budget heads, are likely to increase with the countrys income. The principal findings are that a countrys GDP is an accurate guide to the contributions it can expect to make but a much less reliable guide to receipts. The result is that net contributions are not strongly correlated with GDP. We find also that economic indicators such as unemployment rates and the proportion of the population employed in agriculture have limited additional explanatory power. The paper extends the analysis by exploring how the position might have changed had recent moves to switch more EC spending from agricultural price support to structural measures taken place earlier. This simulation assumes that the structural part of the budget had been expanded while the agricultural price support remained the same, the extra spending being financed by a proportionate increase in contributions. It emerges that such measures would have made a members net contributions slightly more sensitive to GDP. But it would not have been sufficient to give the budget a significant role in terms of redistributing income from poorer member states to richer ones.

Evaluation of the Citizenship Evidence-Based Probation Supervision Program Using a Stepped Wedge Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial

This study evaluated a Risk-Need-Responsivity (RNR) evidence-based offender supervision program, Citizenship, using a randomized controlled trial (RCT). Citizenship has a cognitive-behavioral basis and focuses on education, increasing motivation to change, and community integration. The RCT is a stepped wedge cluster randomized design that has rarely been used in criminal justice and overcomes some ethical objections to RCT implementation. Participants were all medium- and high-risk offenders commencing probation supervision (N = 1,091) in any one of the six office units during the 1-year rollout of the program. Overall, there was a non-significant 20% effect of Citizenship in reducing reconvictions. However, controlling for risk, the hazard with higher risk offenders was 34% lower than for the control group. Results therefore support RNR-based probation supervision.

Political participation and the limits to redistribution

Abstract The possibility that a majority may ‘tyrannise’ a minority has long been regarded as a potential deficiency of a simple majority voting rule. Even with constitutional rules requiring 50% + 1 of the votes to win, minorities may be at the mercy of the majority. In this paper we explore a limit to such ‘exploitation’. This relies simply on the observation that, as the minority becomes smaller and the majority becomes larger, each member of the minority has more at stake, relative to each member of the majority. With costs attaching to political participation, members of the minority may collectively resist the interests of the majority.