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| Publications [#266291] of Philip J. Cook
Chapters in Books
- Cook, PJ, The Economics of Criminal Sanctions,
in Sanctions and Rewards in the Legal System, edited by Friedland, ML
(1987), University of Toronot Press
(last updated on 2024/04/18)
Abstract:
This is an essay on the economists’ theoretical perspective of how rewards and sanctions influence criminal activity. Although I include an occasional reference to the empirical evidence, Franklin Zimring’s essay (elsewhere in this volume) precludes the necessity of a more complete account. In any event, as an economist I run true to form in placing precedence on developing the theory: as the joke has it, an economist is someone who, told that something is true in practice, wonders whether it is true in theory.
Economics is unique among the social sciences in having a well-developed paradigm for guiding theoretical inquiry on any topic that an economist chooses to investigate. This paradigm is well illustrated in the modern literature on the economics of crime, beginning with the seminal articles by Becker and Ehrlich. In essence, the paradigm has five parts:
1. Identify the relevant decision-makers and the objectives that motivate their behavior, usually by assuming self-interest and rationality.
2. Given these objectives, and a characterization of the available options, develop the implications for how behavioral choices will respond to changes in opportunity.
3. Specify the conditions of interaction or exchange among the decision-makers.
4. Derive a characterization of the aggregate consequences of this interaction, with special attention to the characteristics of ‘equilibrium’.
5. Analyze the effects on this equilibrium of changes in contextual variables.
Of course, economists traditionally have applied this approach to the analysis of prices and quantities in the context of a market system of exchange, and efforts to expand the domain of economic inquiry to include topics such as criminal behavior have met with resistance from other social scientists. The bulk of this essay is devoted to an account of the ‘economic’ characterization of the behavior of the potential (or actual) criminal, together with a discussion of the common objections to this characterization.
This account covers only the first two of the five parts that constitute the economic paradigm. The entire paradigm is briefly illustrated in a subsequent section of the essay, with an analysis of the crime of motor vehicle theft. The conclusion discusses research priorities.
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