NCJ Number
132246
Journal
Social Justice Volume: 17 Issue: 4 Dated: (Winter 1990) Pages: 49-75
Date Published
1990
Length
27 pages
Annotation
Edwin Zedlewski's recommendation that prison use should be greatly expanded because it is a highly cost-effective method of reducing crime is dispute.
Abstract
Zedlewski, a staff economist at the National Institute of Justice, has made these recommendations in the wake of public campaigns in which politicians and mass media editorialists have both attacked judges for being too lenient and advocated putting more people in prison. His cost-benefit analysis provides a seemingly scientific rationale for these proposals and must be subjected to especially close scrutiny. When this is done, it quickly becomes apparent that his computations are badly flawed. Once these flaws are corrected, his conclusions no longer follow. The fundamental premise of a cost-benefit analysis of crime is that the resources a society deploys in preventing or coping with crime could, in the absence of crime, be used in other ways. Zedlewski restricts his consideration of the benefits of imprisonment to crime prevention. He estimates the number of crimes prevented by locking people up and takes into account both the incapacitative function of imprisonment and its deterrent effect. He reasons that imprisoning a thousand additional offenders would cost an extra $25 million each year and would lead to 187,000 fewer crimes or an aggregate of $430,000,000. The procedure Zedlewski uses to estimate the costs of more imprisonment is unexceptional. He grossly overestimates the potential benefits of expanded prison construction and greatly underestimates the costs. 31 notes and 105 references