Monetary Value of Early Developmental Crime Prevention and Its Policy Significance

• Date: 01 November 2015
• Published date: 01 November 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12167

COMMENTARY

ROLE OF THE COST-OF-CRIME

LITERATURE

Monetary Value of Early Developmental

Crime Prevention and Its Policy Significance

Brandon C. Welsh

Northeastern University

Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement

David P. Farrington

Cambridge University

It does not seem so long ago that, while one of us (Welsh) was working on his

doctoral dissertation at Cambridge University, we were invited to go to London to

brief senior Treasury officials on new research on the benefit–cost analysis (BCA) of

crime-prevention programs. This was 1997 and the doctoral research had only just begun,

amounting to several literature reviews on the costs of crime and the costs and benefits of

some crime-prevention strategies (i.e., developmental and situational).1It seemed that this

was enough to pique their interest. Under the new British government, the Treasury was

spearheading an ambitious plan to review public expenditure across all areas of government

activity (Dhiri, Goldblatt, Brand, and Price, 2001). The Treasury’s involvement was a major

factor in launching the British government’sambitious Crime Reduction Programme, which

had an unprecedented level of funding of £250 million (US$400 million) up to its demise

in 2002 (Maguire, 2004).

Of course, we were neither the first nor the only researchers who were investigating the

costs and benefits of crime prevention at that time. The RAND Corporation was engaged

in pioneering modeling research on the cost-effectiveness of California’s three-strikes law

and alternative approaches (Greenwood, Model, Rydell, and Chiesa, 1996) as well as

research on the monetary value of early childhood intervention programs (Karoly et al.,

1998); Donohue and Siegelman (1998) published their influential thought experiment on

the economics of imprisonment versus social programs; the Dutch Ministry of Justice had

also begun some simulation modeling on the costs of various crime prevention strategies

Direct correspondence to Brandon C. Welsh, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Northeastern

University, Churchill Hall, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115 (e-mail: b.welsh@neu.edu).

1. This initial research was published subsequently as Welsh and Farrington (1998).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12167 C2015 American Society of Criminology 673

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 14 rIssue 4