Crime and punishment: Does it pay to punish?

Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Systems - Series S, 2010

Criminals are common to all societies. To fight against them the community takes different security measures as, for example, to bring about a police. Thus, crime causes a depletion of the common wealth not only by criminal acts but also because the cost of hiring a police force. In this paper, we present a mathematical model of a criminal-prone self-protected society that is divided into socio-economical classes. We study the effect of a non-null crime rate on a free-of-criminals society which is taken as a reference system. As a consequence, we define a criminal-prone society as one whose free-ofcriminals steady state is unstable under small perturbations of a certain socioeconomical context. Finally, we compare two alternative strategies to control crime: (i) enhancing police efficiency, either by enlarging its size or by updating its technology, against (ii) either reducing criminal appealing or promoting social classes at risk. 1. Introduction. The techniques of population dynamics and compartment models have been extensively used to study the influence of sociological and economical factors on the evolution of criminality [17], [3], [18], [1], [10]

SSRN Electronic Journal

In the economic literature on law enforcement, the distinction between the probability of arrest and the probability of conviction is not explicit. However, detection does not necessarily imply punishment. This paper focuses on proving that punishment cannot be applied without preceding detection. In this context, in the case of non-apprehension, the offender expects a double gain: monetary and non-monetary gains. The result shows that if the probability of arrest is high, the reputation evaporates, which means the arrest has a deterrent effect on crime insofar as it generates a bad reputation for the offender. The monetary sanction has a deterrent effect on the monetary benefit from crime in the sense that this variable is less elastic than punishment cost. The low probability of punishment can be compensated by a maximum punishment.

Law and economics scholars have traditionally modeled criminal deterrence as a function two factors: (i) severity of punishment, and (ii) probability of punishment. Gary Becker’s (1968) seminal essay suggested that optimizing on the benefits of crime reduction and the cost of punishment and policing should be the policy objective of the criminal law (at least with respect to deterrence). However, this model has been attacked on two fronts. First, criminological data on crime rates fails to show a strong correlation between the predictions of economic models and crime rates in the real world. Second, developments in behavioral economics suggest that individuals (criminals in this case) often fail to respond rationally to incentives. This paper seeks to reconcile the tension between the results of economic theory, criminological data, and behavioral psychology, offering a more realistic goal for the criminal law: inducing second-order biases not to commit crime.

2000

This essay provides an analytic synthesis of the contribution by economists to the study of crime and the criminal justice system. We begin by summarizing the distinctive features of the economic approach, namely a focus on rational self-seeking behavior and analysis of the consequences of interactions among groups of actors that create equilibria in a system. We then use a

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2006

An intertemporal general equilibrium model of criminal behavior is used to analyze the effect on crime of changing policy parameters. The policy parameters are the length of the prison term, the severity of punishment, and the amount of police resources. The number of crimes in society can be decomposed into an incentive part, an incarceration part, and a crime competition part. The magnitudes of these three components are studied by means of empirical data from England and the US.

International Journal of Basic and Applied Sciences, 2017

Poverty and crime are two major problem areas. The economic theory of crime shows a direct correlation between poverty and crime. In this study, we propose a model that shows the correlation between poverty and crime. Then we obtain the dynamic system of the proposed model. In the next step, we will compute the reproductive number by finding the maximum eigenvalue of Jacobian matrix to study of stability and un-stability of the presented model.

Social Research, 2007

Journal of Economic Issues, 1977

In the folklore of criminal justice a popular belief is that the accused will have his case decided in a trial. Empirical evidence does not support this belief. Table 1 indicates that most cases are disposed of before trial by either a guilty plea or a dismissal of the charges. What factors determine the choice between a pretrial settlement and a trial? What accounts for the large proportion of settlements compared to trials? How are certain aspects of the criminal justice process such as the bail system and court delay related to the decision to settle or to go to trial? The main

J. Legal Stud., 2001

A higher expected sanction lowers the crime rate. This intuitive cornerstone of deterrence theory has garnered extensive theoretical and empirical research. The present study focuses on the opposite effects-the effects of the crime rate on the expected sanction. It turns out that these effects are versatile and rich in both the direction and the magnitude of their influence on the expected sanction. After analyzing these countereffects of the crime rate on the expected sanction, we present a new model of deterrence that explicitly incorporates the crime rate as one of the determinants of the expected sanction. The adjusted model is then used to study the effects of the crime rate on deterrence and on optimal law enforcement policy.