1 Orlando Rodriguez & Richard McGahey, The Dual Labor Market and Property Crime (paper presented at the I979 American Sociological Association meetings, Boston).Google Scholar

2 James Q. Wilson, Thinking About Crime 53 (New York: Vintage Books, 1977) (emphasis in original).Google Scholar

3 I am indebted to David Greenberg for this observation. It is reinforced by considering George Wallace's political popularity in the 1960s which drew several of these strands together: appeals to racism, tough talk on crime, and attacks on “pointy-headed intellectuals.”Google Scholar

4 Gary S. Becker, Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach, 76 J. Pol. Econ. 169,209 (1968).Google Scholar

5 Id. at 207.Google Scholar

6 Id. at 176.Google Scholar

7 Richard Tropp, Suggested Policy Initiatives for Employment and Crime Problems, in Leon Lieberg, ed., Crime and Employment Issues 24 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Advanced Studies in Justice, Washington College of Law, American University, 1978).Google Scholar

8 Becker, supra note 4, at 207.Google Scholar

9 Modern economics has relied extensively on the notion of a value-free approach to social analysis. For a provocative discussion and critique of this vision see Albert O. Hirschman, Morality and the Social Sciences, in Essays in Trespassing 294 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

10 Chapter 6 pursues the question of heroin use and control in some detail. Believing that controlling heroin use is almost impossible at any level of public expenditure, Phillips and Votey repeat their conclusion that society should move to decriminalization. The chapter is a mix of hard analysis and strong advocacy; e.g., they do not address the concern that decriminalization might lead to vast numbers of new addicts, with enormous and irreversible social costs. Cf. John Kaplan, The Hardest Drug: Heroin and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).Google Scholar

11 Recent research suggests that legalized gambling in Atlantic City has enriched casino owners and real estate speculators while harming local taxpayers. George Sternlieb & James W. Hughes, The Atlantic City Gamble (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

12 Feminist authors and others see pornography as contributing to discrimination and violence against women. See Laura Lederer, ed., Take Back the Night (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1980).Google Scholar

13 Barry Krisberg, Crime and Privilege: Toward a New Criminology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975).Google Scholar

14 Jonathan Kwitny, Vicious Circles: The Mafia in the Marketplace (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1979).Google Scholar

15 Fred DuBow, Edward McCabe, & Gail Kaplan, Reactions to Crime: A Critical Review of the Literature (Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, US. Department of Justice, 1979).Google Scholar

16 This problem often confronts economists who study law and public resource distribution. E.g., many economists routinely recommend variable peak-load pricing by electric utilities or control of traffic congestion by applying stiffer tolls during rush hours–-recommendations routinely ignored by policy makers. Ann Witte has suggested that policy makers understand quite well that existing policies may have monetary inefficiencies but higher priorities are placed on perceptions of fairness and equality–-e.g., everyone ought to pay the same toll on a highway, no matter what time of day they travel.Google Scholar

17 Becker's work, and most subsequent analyses of crime by economists, focused on altering the punishment side of the criminal's cost/benefit calculus. The best-known example is the work of Isaac Ehrlich (a student of Becker's), whose claim that capital punishment has measurable deterrent effect on homicide has been largely discredited. See Richard McGahey, Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet: Economic Theory, Econometrics, and the Death Penalty, 26 Crime & Delinq. 485 (1980).Google Scholar

18 Daniel Nagin, General Deterrence: A Review of the Empirical Evidence in Alfred Blumstein, Jacqueline Cohen, & Daniel Nagin, eds., Deterrence and Incapacitation: Estimating the Effects of Criminal Sanctions on Crime Rates 136 (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1978).Google Scholar

19 See Richard McGahey, Labor Market Segmentation, Human Capital, and the Economics of Crime ch. 5 (Ph.D. diss., New School for Social Research, 1982).Google Scholar

20 Mark H. Moore & George Kelling, “To Serve and Protect”: Learning from Police History, Public Interest no. 70 (1983); David F. Greenberg & Ronald C. Kessler, The Effects of Arrests on Crime: A Multivariate Panel Analysis, 60 SOC. Forces 771 (1982); Susan Martin, Catching Career Criminals: Some Preliminary Findings (paper presented at 1984 Law and Society Association meetings, Boston).Google Scholar

21 On harsh drug laws, see Joint Commission on New York Drug Law Evaluation, The Nation's Toughest Drug Law: Evaluating the New York Experience (Albany, N.Y.: Joint Commission on New York Drug Law Evaluation, 1977); on capital punishment, see McGahey, supra note 17.Google Scholar

22 Alfred Blumstein, Comment, In the Prison Overcrowding Crisis, 12 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change 115(1984).Google Scholar

23 An important theoretical paper showed that determinate predictions about the effects of changes in rewards or punishments on criminal behavior could not be made without an extremely limiting set of a priori assumptions. At least three constraining sets of assumptions were required: assuming monetary equivalents for all rewards and punishments; positing a particular attitude toward risk on the part of the individual; and projecting a lack of psychic or moral costs associated with activities like crime. These authors concluded that policy recommendations about criminal justice “do not follow from theory but rather require empirical determination of relative magnitudes.” Michael K. Block & J. M. Heineke, A Labor Theoretical Analysis of the Criminal Choice, 65 Am. Econ. Rev. 315 (1975).Google Scholar

24 But they call for “further development and widening of the models developed by economists” and point out (rather appropriately for economists) that gathering good quality data on individuals and using advanced computer techniques “can be quite an expensive proposition” (p. 381). 1 am currently working with a large data set (N= 903) of felony arrestees that has matched labor market and crime information, gathered by the Employment and Crime Project of the Vera Institute of Justice with the support of the National Institute of Justice. When I consider the econometric and data problems presented by such data sets, 1 can only echo Schmidt and Witte's warning about costs and complexities.Google Scholar

25 Probit and logit models are used with binary variables, such as arrest/no arrest; tobit models are appropriate for censored or truncated variables, such as arrests or incarceration time when much of the sample has a zero value; and survival time can be used in analyzing the time elapsed until some event occurs, such as the time from prison release to recidivism.Google Scholar

26 These issues do not exhaust the problems with the theoretical model of crime. Like most economic models, the individual maximization approach does not adequately consider nonindividualistic social and institutional factors, such as the age-graded nature of unlawful and lawful work opportunities or the historical changes in the urban labor market for young men.Google Scholar

27 Thomas Orsagh, Empirical Criminology: Interpreting Results Derived from Aggregate Data, 25 J. Research in Crime & Delinq. 294 (1979).Google Scholar

28 A lucid and telling arricle presenting the problems with this positivist vision from the standpoint of contemporary philosophy of science is Donald N. McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics, 21 J. Econ. Literature 481 (1983).Google Scholar

29 For an illuminating study of how judicial norms shape criminal sentences without explicit sentencing guidelines, see Douglas McDonald, On Blaming Judges (New York: Citizens' Inquiry on Parole and Criminal Justice, Inc., 1982); on organizational tensions in prisons, see Eric H. Steele & James B. Jacobs, A Theory of Prison Systems, 21 Crime & Delinq. 149 (1975).Google Scholar

30 Kenneth Boulding, Economics as a Moral Science, 62 Am. Econ. Rev. 1 (1972).Google Scholar

31 Lester Thurow, Dangerous Currents: The State of Economics (New York: Random House, 1983).Google Scholar