An Overview of Crime and Punishment

Abstract

Introduction Estimates of the social cost of crime vary, but there can be little doubt that throughout the globe, crime is among the most damaging of social problems. Murder represents a squandering of life. The quality of life for many individuals is considerably lower because of the threat of violent and non-violent crime. Crime induces self-protection and these resources are an added cost of crime. Property crime reduces investment, because individuals resist investment, if criminals reap the returns. The time of criminals, which could otherwise be spent productively, is also a social loss. These significant social costs imply that research on crime is among the most important areas in economics. Furthermore, as economics addresses issues beyond its conventional topics, work on economics and crime has indeed been among the most productive areas for research. Over the past 30 years since Becker (1968), there has been a surge of activity in trying to understand the economics of crime.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 61 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.