Acquisitive Crime: Imprisonment, Detection and Social Factors

Civitas is a registered charity (no. 1085494) and a company limited by guarantee, registered in England and Wales (no. 04023541) Independence: Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society is a registered educational charity (No. 1085494) and a company limited by guarantee (No. 04023541). Civitas is financed from a variety of private sources to avoid over-reliance on any single or small group of donors. All publications are independently refereed. All the Institute's publications seek to further its objective of promoting the advancement of learning. The views expressed are those of the authors, not of the Institute. Introduction The analysis of the determinants of crime is always at the forefront of public debate. Effective crime-fighting strategies are widely debated with some commentators in policy circles and the popular press highlighting the role of law enforcement and punishment, and others emphasizing the role of socioeconomic factors. Often one of the two views has been emphasized while neglecting the other. Those who would look for the so-called root cause of crime (the dominant academic view among criminologists at one time) argue that social circumstances lead to criminal behaviour and tend to dismiss policing as an effective crime fighting tool while others have pushed for harsher penalties for crime and neglected the socioeconomic environment. In particular, the role of prisons as an effective crime fighting tool has been much debated, particularly in the UK, while the recent budget cuts for the police have led to worries of lowered detection rates leading to an increase in crime. The present Justice Secretary Ken Clarke recently caused controversy by suggesting that prison was often 'a costly and ineffectual approach that fails to turn criminals into law-abiding citizens.' 1 While this has been criticised (both within his own party as well as by others e.g. Green, 2010), there are few rigorous studies which look at the impact of sentencing on crime. In this report, I review my recent research on how crime rates are affected both by law enforcement variables (viz. sentencing and detection) as well as socioeconomic variables (for example, unemployment and wages) using a detailed dataset for England and Wales. To the best of our knowledge this is the first econometric study of how both detection and sentencing together affect crime in England and Wales.