The new criminal justice: economics

There has been a quiet revolution in criminal justice circles over the last 10 or 15 years: Criminal justice has devolved into the study of crime economics. Let me explain.

For 200 years, criminal justice was dominated by criminology. Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794), one of the founders of the discipline, was interested in developing a rational and proportional philosophy of punishment to replace the harsh and inconsistent practices that characterized Italian justice. Beccaria was influenced by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham and believed the only purpose of punishment was to act as a rational incentive to discourage the choice to commit crime.

Beccaria’s approach, denominated the “classical school,” was succeeded by an array of criminologists who primarily studied crime causation, among other approaches.

Another Italian, Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), conducted early physical studies of criminals, quickly followed by studies of psychological and genetic traits. Early 20th century American sociologists, noting demographic patterns, examined city “zones” and lower class urban environments for the causes of crime. Successive cohorts investigated lower class cultural values, studied how “social bonds” are formed, and attempted to explain the motivational “foreground” of crime based on self reports by those who perpetrated actual crimes.

As the 20th century progressed, however, scholars turned their attention increasingly to society’s responses to crime – focusing their efforts on the question of how to limit, deter or rehabilitate offenders. This was particularly true in the United States where the “medical model” became popular. While the specifics of the medical model often changed, the emphasis on rehabilitation more generally held sway for nearly fifty years. Discussions of behavioral change, specific programs, and offender reform predominated.

Dissatisfaction with failing rehabilitation programs led many in criminal justice to disavow concern with individual change. Some crime analysts turned to examining the politics of crime. Since the 1980s, however, the criminal justice system has alternated between a concern for meting out “just desserts” and a harshly punitive approach consisting of “get tough” policies. Scholars satisfied themselves with investigating the effects of increasing the number of police or of the punitive regime of longer, mandatory sentences.

Most recently, however, the criminal justice community has begun taking a “value investing” approach by calculating the costs associated with our policies. Thus we now glibly recite the annual cost of incarceration ($27,170 per person in Washington) and calculate the social, administrative and personal costs of crimes. The apogee of this orientation may have been achieved in the work of Eric Cadora and Charles Swartz, who direct the Justice Mapping Center in Brooklyn, N.Y.

JMC relies on computer mapping through the use of Geographic Information Systems to graphically illustrate the economic costs of our practices, especially incarceration. While Cadora and Swartz have conducted studies of a dozen jurisdictions – including Phoenix; Wichita, Kan.; New Haven, Conn.; and New Orleans – the center’s work on New York City perhaps best conveys what they do.

In 2003, Cadora and Swartz took the home addresses and minimum length of sentences of those sentenced to imprisonment in New York state and applied them to a map. The result was a graphic illustration of the fact that certain New York City neighborhoods – indeed, certain NYC blocks – are disproportionately the origin of much of New York state’s street crime. Cadora and Swartz then took the average annual cost of incarceration (more than $30,000 in New York), multiplied it for each convicted offender, and applied the totals to the map. The resulting display was a stunning show of boldly colored points – each representing a cumulative million dollar public expenditure: million dollar blocks. They found, for example, there were 35 “million dollar blocks” in Brooklyn. They also found that a concentrated group of blocks in three neighborhoods of Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn were home to 17 percent of NYC’s population but the source of 50 percent of the city’s prison admissions. Other maps show the blocks and neighborhoods of “disconnected youth” – those 16 to 19 years of age who are not high school graduates, not in school and not employed – virtually overlay the same “million dollar blocks.”

What can we do with such data displays? Some jurisdictions have been persuaded by them to recognize there may be intrinsic value in expending money in the million dollar blocks on the “front end,” for preventive programs, rather than exclusively on the “back end,” for incarceration. Yet their most elementary use is to show us how much criminal justice has changed: Economics is now the new criminal justice.

Robert C. Hauhart is associate professor and chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice at Saint Martin’s University, Lacey, W. Va. Hauhart has taught at the University of Maine at Machias beginning in 2002.