Book Description

This book is about how public funds and human resources can be allocated to optimize the control of crime in a modern democratic society. The authors build a model of crime generation, and control - through the imposition of sanctions - that provides insight into alternatives for social policy-makers. Econometric techniques are used to analyze policy issues such as: establishing control policies; determining monetary measures of the seriousness of crime; discerning community priorities for fighting crime; choosing between alternative drug-control programs; and extracting useful information from crime data. These techniques are also used to determine: the effect of economic opportunities for youth on crime rates; the influence of rising crime rates on police effectiveness; the cost of police effectiveness; and the possibility for deterring violence. Additional issues examined are: the effect of handgun control on homicide rates; the relative merits of jail and probation; the rate of police manpower growth needed to keep pace with crime rates; and the necessary data needed for planning an optimum level of public safety. The analysis starts with single-equation estimations and builds to system and multi-equation models. The statistical results are based on several data sets with the earlier studies using time series from the 1950's and 1960's. The estimation of the more complex model is based on cross-sectional data from the 1960 and 1970 census for the counties of California.