True Costs of Crime

Criminal justice budgets rarely reflect the true costs of crime. Many costs are rolled into other budget lines or departments.

In my June 21 article on the high cost of crime, I spoke of equpment and human resources costs, but I did not touch on the statistical justifications for criminal justice budgets.

• Crime rates are often a function of incident-reporting frequency and data identification but collection techniques may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
• Criminal activity clearance rates in police departments are routinely inflated when perpetrators plea-bargain. Guilty/Not Guilty ratios are inaccurate because so few cases actually go to trial.
• Probation success rates are suspect because probation officers regularly carry caseloads so enormous they can't possibly provide supervision.
• Right up in the realm of grotesquely fiddled figures are parole success rates from some jurisdictions. Often a parolee who dies while still on parole is counted as a success, which helps, of course, to justify the parole department's budget.
• The dollar value of drug confiscations is routinely over-reported, if only because market values fluctuate constantly and vary widely from locale to locale.
• Consider, too, that financial institutions and retailers routinely under-report many losses due to fraud, identity theft, shoplifting, and employee theft. Accuracy would be bad PR. Anyway, these losses are passed down to the consumer, ensuring business bottom lines stay black.

Many of the pieces I write on the subject of crime may not include statistics or dollar figures. Too much of the data is flawed because of imperfect or self-interested research.

Accuracy is one of the greatest challenges facing the criminal justice system. Without that, assessing value for cost is moot. If anyone cares to discuss these points, I'm open.