Is There an Economic Theory to Crime?
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Professor Klevorick's interesting and instructive chapter directs our attention to two important questions. First, is the vast economic literature on criminal justice matters grounded in a coherent economic theory of crime? Second, does its value depend on its being so grounded? Klevorick concludes that an economic theory of crime is inherently incomplete. Such a theory must draw upon political concepts that in the nature of things cannot be derived from an economic source. Klevorick goes on to suggest that economists should enlarge their models to allow for a noneconomic concept of the social loss from crime. Klevorick's suggestion may save the economists from what is, by their own criteria, a mistake, but will it suffice to render their work more interesting or more helpful to criminal justice scholars who are not economists? His analysis seems to imply that although an economic analysis of crime can be helpful in certain ways, that kind of analysis cannot in the very nature of things speak to the most fundamental concerns of students of criminal justice. Can this really be so? Or can economic analysis be of genuine interest to criminal justice scholars? The first point to be made is that in wondering about the failure of economists to engage the main interests of criminal law scholars, Klevorick has devoted nearly all of his attention to only one side of the potential intellectual exchange. As perhaps befits an economist who is both rigorous and tactful, Klevorick has carefully probed the work of his own colleagues in economics, but has abstained from questioning whether the fundamental concerns of criminal justice scholars ought to be defined and confined in the way that they are. Criminal law scholarship is, of course, very much preoccupied with working out notions of culpability and fairness (I will have more to say about this later), but this body of scholarship is by and large not particularly concerned with questions of optimal resource allocation. Very few law teachers, I am sure, spend any time in their criminal law course talking about the relative effectiveness of automobile patrol versus foot patrol or of one officer in the car versus two. Precisely because this is perceived as “only” a question of resource allocation, it is not on their agenda. For the same reason, the relative effectiveness of increasing the certainty or increasing the severity of punishment would not normally be considered an “interesting” question; it would become interesting to the mainstream criminal justice scholar only when it involved questions of proportionality, distributive justice, and the like. But is the criminal law scholar really justified in his or her disinterest in matters of resource allocation as such? I cannot help but think that the myopia of many criminal law teachers is at least partially responsible for the failure of communication that Klevorick describes. Without ignoring the grand issues of moral culpability, legal scholars must also accept that the problem of protecting society from crime while protecting offenders from unnecessarily stringent sanctions, that is, the problem of optimal resource allocation, is central to the work they should be doing. Thus, the work and interests of many criminal justice scholars is seriously incomplete. Though I will not try to pursue this point any further here, this incompleteness needs to be borne in mind if Klevorick's criticisms of the economists are to be kept in perspective. For now I will return to the incompleteness that Klevorick finds on the economists' side and attempt to assess to what extent it impairs the value of the economic approach. This question will lead me to others because of its implication that criminal justice may differ from other areas of law, where economic analysis has engaged the interests of many legal scholars. In concluding that there cannot be a purely economic theory of crime, Klevorick has left us with a dilemma that I will formulate as I proceed.
Source Publication
Criminal Justice
Source Editors/Authors
J. Roland Pennock, John W. Chapman
Publication Date
1985
Recommended Citation
Schulhofer, Stephen J., "Is There an Economic Theory to Crime?" (1985). Faculty Chapters. 1401.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1401
