What crime has to do with Economics?

Answer 1

Some economist have theories about how criminal respond to incentives or disincentives for criminal behavior. They treat it as if criminals were rational agents, balancing possible costs and rewards for committing crimes. Other economist have used their training in statistic to analyze the effect of varies public policies on the crime rate and the how unemployment, income inequality poverty etc effect crime. One or the interesting results is that local income inequality (relative poverty) is a strong statistical predictor of crime, but absolute amount of poverty is not. That is there are many poor areas with low crime rates as well as ones with high crime rates.

Answer 2

Well, crime does tend to increase when unemployment or inflation increases (ie, bad economic situations make people more likely to turn to crime). And the way the US criminal justice system works, people of lower economic status are more likely than a wealthy person to be arrested, charged and convicted of any crime they are accused of.

Many, if not most crimes have underlying economic motives.

Answer 3

- Some consider it to be a free market, considering there's no government involvement in crime(besides stopping crime).

- Some have used the argument that crime promotes economic development. Example being a man committing vandalism by spray-painting a building. Some argue that this act of vandalism created a job for the man who has to clean up the building, the police officer who has to arrest him(find him), and others involved of the process of punishing this man(lawyer, judge,...).
But this is not true, considering that those same men would be utilized for some additional benefit in society, if it was not required for our society to combat crime. Less crime leads to greater society development, as well as economic development(the guy in jail could be contributing to society).

This is extended to how some argue that Poverty leads to Crime. Does it really, or is this simply an illusion? This argument of 'Poverty leading to Crime' is circular(petitio principii), considering that Crime leads to Poverty(less economic and societal development).

Answer 4

crime rates and unemployment rates are highly correlated. so if a society has more unemployed people, there is more crime. unemployment is basically resources that are not being used. this could be because of low demand in the economy or workers not being trained in the adequate field- it could be a supply-side problem. this all falls in the realm of economics.