Tim Worstall

An Economic Explanation of Crime

Burglary is an entirely rational response to the incentives on offer:

They make burglary
and other crime a rational choice, especially given the low rate of
detection. (One burglary in every twelve reported ends in conviction, and
one conviction in thirteen ends in a prison sentence, which means that
burglars, on average, serve about one day per burglary in prison. Given the
value of unskilled labour on the market, it is a very poor burglar who
cannot steal more than one day’s wages from a house.)

Until those incentives are changed the problem will never be solved. Could be longer sentences, could be raising either the detection or the conviction rate. But the incentives do have to be changed if there is ever to be a solution.

(The other one, raising the returns to low skilled labour, seems even more difficult.)

In

20 responses

  1. Roger Thornhill Avatar
    Roger Thornhill

    Considering 1 in 13 convicted ends up inside, I think A sentence is needed, let alone longer!
    A burglar inside cannot break an entry.

    Reply
  2. triticale Avatar
    triticale

    This also explains why the actually rather slight probability of encountering an armed homeowner produces such a large reduction in the relative burglary rate in the United States.

    Reply
  3. john b Avatar
    john b

    Out of burglars who are convicted, the vast majority go to prison – c.75% according to these charts from Civitas:
    http://www.civitas.org.uk/data/burglars1981-1999.htm
    http://www.civitas.org.uk/data/burglarsConv1981-1999.htm
    I don’t know where Dalrymple’s stats are from, but they are completely wrong (possibly, since sentencing has been toughened up since 1999, 12/13 of convicted burglars now receive a prison sentence, and Dalyrmple has misinterpreted this as 1/12 * 1/13).

    Reply
  4. john b Avatar
    john b

    [side note: it’s amazing that not only Dalrymple, but also the Times’s editor and subs, Tim, and more than one commenter above all believed the stat about only 1/13 of convicted burglars going to jail, despite it being really, really obviously wrong to anyone with the slightest idea about how these things work. I guess the whole tabloid ‘judges are pansies and let people off all the time’ meme has been successful…]
    Tim adds: Err, John, those charts show 4 incarcerated burglars per 1,000 alleged such. That’s hardly a hgih rate now, is it?

    Reply
  5. john b Avatar
    john b

    Technically no – they show 4 incarcerations per 1000 burglaries. That’s only 4 incarcerated burglars per alleged burglar if you assume a rate of one burglary per burglar, which I’d guess is unlikely.
    The wider point, though, is that in the unlikely event that a policeman can be bothered to actually arrest a burglar and put him in front of a judge, then the judge will merrily send him to chokey – and stereotypes of slaps-on-the-wrist are pretty much entirely false.
    It’s something that’s generally true about our justice system – people who think that sentences are too soft are usually wrong; the problem is that the useless idiots in blue fail to nick the crims in the first place.

    Reply
  6. David Duff Avatar
    David Duff

    According to the two links provided by John Band, over the period 1980 to 1999 both the number of convictions dropped and the number of incarcerations, so how that disproves Dalrymple’s main thrust evades me. As to the number of burglaries dropping off since the massive peak in the mid-1990s I suspect that it had much more to do with members of the public, under the spur of their insurance companies, investing in more and more security devices to keep the scallawags out, rather than ‘nu-Labour or our soppy judiciary pretending to be stern disciplinarians!

    Reply
  7. Thom Avatar
    Thom

    Irrespective of what the true value burglary is not just a crime felt in the loss of stuff but also the invasion of ones own privacy, the heartache and irritance of having to replace stolen items and the long term damage it does to insurance premiums; the higher incidence of burglaries inflates home insurance massively.
    Why not change the law so that the prison sentence is indefinite and based on recuperating the losses associated with the particular crime via low skilled labour? The cost of policing, the judicial system and insurance would plummet as would the incidence of recidivism if you were forced to come to terms with the true cost of a crime.

    Reply
  8. Neil Avatar
    Neil

    So what went so wrong in the 80s and early 90s?

    Reply
  9. john b Avatar
    john b

    “Why not change the law so that the prison sentence is indefinite and based on recuperating the losses associated with the particular crime via low skilled labour?”
    because it wouldn’t make a blind bloody bit of difference for as long as most burglaries don’t result in court appearances. *if* they did, then the current level of prison sentence would be easily enough to deter anyone sane from doing them (sanity being reasonably important for burglars, unlike muggers and shoplifters, since it involves a degree of planning and subtlety).

    Reply
  10. Mark Wadsworth Avatar
    Mark Wadsworth

    Neil “So what went so wrong in the 80s and early 90s?”
    The question is, what went right thereafter. The answer to that is simple; consumer electricals plummeted in price. Who’s going to bother buying a stolen DVD player, when they cost £30 new from Tesco? Who’d trust a fenced computer, you’d get a brand new one for £400-odd with new software?
    Ditto large CRT TV sets, bloody heavy to lift, you can get a new 28″ one for under £200.
    Quite whether these flash LCD TV sets that are not too heavy and bloody expensive will make burglary worthwhile again, I do not know.

    Reply
  11. Matthew Avatar
    Matthew

    John’s right on the facts, btw. The Home Office says 75% of burglary court cases end in Jail, 23% in community sentence and 2% in a fine.
    If, ignoring T.D’s shoddy grasp of the figures, we accept his argument then not just the falling price of consumer goods, but unemployment, and perhaps the minimum wage, would have had an impact too. Mark’s right about the new TVs though, I was surprised how light they were.

    Reply
  12. Neil Avatar
    Neil

    I’m not sure how that would make the conviction or incarceration *rate* change.
    Unless you’re saying someone stupid enough to bother nicking a £15 DVD player is more likely to get caught?
    Just to throw the cat among the pigeons, the graphs show ‘alleged burglars’ – which might suggest there was a lot of insurance fiddling going on, until a clamp-down in the mid 90s?

    Reply
  13. David Duff Avatar
    David Duff

    “because it [long prison sentences] wouldn’t make a blind bloody bit of difference for as long as most burglaries don’t result in court appearances. *if* they did, then the current level of prison sentence would be easily enough to deter anyone sane from doing them”
    So why is it that so many burglars repeat their crimes over and over?

    Reply
  14. john b Avatar
    john b

    because if you’ve done something 100 times and haven’t been caught, you don’t expect to be caught the 101st time either.

    Reply
  15. Unity Avatar
    Unity

    So why is it that so many burglars repeat their crimes over and over?
    Because recidivism is a somewhat more complicated issue and simply that of the deterrent effect of longer sentence.
    Over time people can become attenuated to the prison environment and even, in some cases, institutionalised to the point of being unable to function adequately outside the prison regime.
    To that you have to factor in that having a criminal record reduces your employment prospects and earning potential and that no matter how draconian the sentencing policy you can’t override the basic instinct for survival – faced with a choice of theft or starvation, theft wins every time and if you’re really down on your luck then the bed and 3 square meal on offer in prison could look a much better deal that anything the outside world has to offer.
    Oh, and don’t forget the impact of drug dependency on all this – in fact one of the more revealing patterns in terms of crime and drug use is that minor offences by habitual drug users tend to rise during October/November, especially those carrying sentence of 3-6 months served, netting the offender a nice, warm comfortable cell over the winter months while leaving them free to enjoy the more clement weather over the summer.

    Reply
  16. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    Of course, in them olden days they knew how to get convictions and cut burglaries:
    “There was an unfortunate echo of the days of the Sheffield Flying Squad almost forty years later, when it was discovered that a similar squad had been set up in the CID [in the early 1960s], with orders to deal with persistent burglars who were proving difficult to catch by conventional methods. The squad got off to a disastrous start when the first pair of prisoners appeared in court looking much the worse for wear. Their solicitor alleged that they had been beaten up by two detectives in the CID interview room, and that the officers had used a rhino whip to extract admissions. The magistrates ordered the chief constable to investigate the matter . . ”
    http://www.polfed.org/1003zero-effect-zero-tolerance.pdf
    As for the economic motivation of the Sheffield burglars:
    “The 1950s and 1960s saw a very low rate of unemployment (around 3 per cent on average) as a result of the ‘postwar boom’.”
    http://www.politics.co.uk/issue-briefs/economy/employment/unemployment/unemployment-$366619.htm
    http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/nickell/papers/TheBeveridgeCurve.pdf
    “During the golden age of the 1950s and 1960s unemployment in Britain averaged 2 per cent. This was far lower than ever before or since and a number of hypotheses have been put forward to account for this unique period in labour market history.”
    http://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/ereveh/v9y2005i01p35-60_00.html

    Reply
  17. Martin Avatar
    Martin

    “The answer to that is simple; consumer electricals plummeted in price. Who’s going to bother buying a stolen DVD player, when they cost £30 new from Tesco? Who’d trust a fenced computer, you’d get a brand new one for £400-odd with new software?
    Ditto large CRT TV sets, bloody heavy to lift, you can get a new 28″ one for under £200.”
    By this rationale, there should be no market for pirated DVD’s – but there is.
    “So why is it that so many burglars repeat their crimes over and over?”
    They like it. It beats working.
    “To that you have to factor in that having a criminal record reduces your employment prospects and earning potential and that no matter how draconian the sentencing policy you can’t override the basic instinct for survival – faced with a choice of theft or starvation, theft wins every time and if you’re really down on your luck then the bed and 3 square meal on offer in prison could look a much better deal that anything the outside world has to offer.”
    This lady does not seem to have heard of the protections offered by the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974.

    Reply
  18. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    “It beats working.”
    As the health services put the inmates of the mental health hospitals out to Care in the Community, the prisons were obliged to provide alternative accommodation. A HoC Select Committee found:
    “The Prison Reform Trust estimates that around 90% of prisoners can be diagnosed as suffering from at least one of the five main categories of mental disorder: psychosis; neurosis; personality disorder; alcohol misuse; and drug dependency. Seventy-two per cent of male and 70% of female sentenced prisoners suffer from two or more of these mental health disorders. Around 20% of those on remand and 12% to15% of those serving sentences suffer from four of these five mental disorders. A high proportion of prisoners have been treated in psychiatric hospitals : 20% of male and 15% of female sentenced prisoners have previously been admitted for in-patient psychiatric care.”
    http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmhaff/193/19318.htm

    Reply
  19. pogo Avatar
    pogo

    “The Prison Reform Trust estimates that around 90% of prisoners can be diagnosed as suffering from at least one of the five main categories of mental disorder:”
    Could this perhaps indicate that the prison population does not in reality reflect the composition of the “criminal classes”?
    Or, to put it another way, “are we banging-up the wrong people”?

    Reply
  20. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    Pogo: “Or, to put it another way, ‘are we banging-up the wrong people’?”
    Very likely. As the Department of Health put the inmates of the mental hospitals out to “Care in the Community” to cut public spending on healthcare, the prisons were often obliged to provide alternative accommodation. The situation was then exacerbated by prison over-crowding because that often rendered it impracticable to maintain training opportunities and rehabilitation programmes for prisoners. A few years ago a HoC Select Committee reported:
    “26. In our inquiry into the rehabilitation of prisoners we conducted a novel form of direct research. We wished to investigate prisoners’ own experience of rehabilitation regimes. To this end, we asked over 1,000 prisoners to participate in a ‘Prison Diary Project’ in May and June 2004. We wrote to randomly selected individuals in six prison establishments and asked them to complete a 7-day diary of their prison routine. The Prison Service and the Governors of each of the prisons gave their support to the project. A total of 299 prison diaries were completed and returned to us. After allowing for 71 forms that were returned by the prisons because prisoners had been released or transferred, this gave a response rate of 31%.
    “27. Analysis of the diaries gave us a valuable insight into the number of hours prisoners spend in education, vocational training, rehabilitative programmes, work schemes and leisure activities. The statistics obtained from our project presented a picture significantly bleaker than that provided by Home Office statistics. Over 60% of prisoners told us that they spent no time in vocational training or offending behaviour programmes/drug treatment programmes, 47% spent no time in education and 31% no time in prison work. One in six spent no time during the week in sporting or gymnasium activities or in association. We concluded that “disturbingly high proportions of prisoners are engaged in little or no purposeful activity. … The consequences for prisoners are too many hours ‘banged up’ in their cells, with an adverse impact on their mental and physical health, and missed opportunities for rehabilitation.”
    http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmhaff/280/28005.htm
    Prisons in some regions have evolved extraordinary ways of dealing with the internal stresses that result from over-crowding:
    “MORE than 60 per cent of criminals locked up in Yorkshire’s prisons have the keys to their own cells, the Yorkshire Post can reveal. Nine prisons across the region give offenders the means to lock their own ‘rooms’.”
    http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=2146483&sectionid=55

    Reply

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