Crime Policy Needs More Cost-Benefit Analysis, Including Harms to Victims
December 2024
Over the last generation, governments have increasingly embraced data and evidence to improve communities.
This shift from decisions based purely on political calculus or good intentions has made government more effective—but it’s not enough. As the evidence base grows and budgets remain tight, policymakers face tough choices. They must not only prove programs work but demonstrate they deliver better outcomes per dollar than alternatives.
The criminal justice system has been particularly resistant to this evidence-based evolution. As monopolies, law enforcement, courts, corrections, and community supervision face little pressure to prove their effectiveness. This can lead to inefficiencies and profound societal costs—mass incarceration’s devastation of poor, predominantly Black and Brown communities being a stark example.
We need more cost-benefit analysis in criminal justice.
Cost-benefit analysis helps inform these difficult decisions by measuring all effects of a policy or program, intended or not. This is particularly challenging in criminal justice, where prevention costs are straightforward, but the benefits are complex. Understanding victim harm is crucial—not just for determining appropriate investment in crime prevention, but for allocating victim support resources and recognizing that each crime has unique consequences requiring different responses.
“Understanding and quantifying victim harm isn't just an academic exercise—it’s essential for creating effective policies that both prevent crime and support victims.”
Improving how we measure victim harm should be part of that analysis.
Researchers have explored various ways to measure victim harm. Early approaches compared property values in high- and low-crime areas or surveyed people’s willingness to pay for crime reduction. While these methods acknowledged crime’s broader societal impact, they produced broad, inexact estimates.
The “cost of illness” approach offers more precision by directly observing harm through administrative data but has historically faced two key challenges. First, researchers lacked a comprehensive framework cataloging all potential types of victim harm. Second, some harms—particularly trauma, behavioral health, and quality of life impacts—can only be measured by asking victims about their experiences. Previous researchers often labeled these as “indirect” or “intangible” harms, implying they were less important. They’re not—they’re simply more difficult to measure.
NORC’s Harms Against Victimization: Experience and Needs (HAVEN) project tackles these challenges head-on. As part of the project, we and our Temple University partners created a taxonomy that identified 11 unique types of victim harm. We also conducted household surveys in Camden, New Jersey, neighborhoods, where victimization rates are higher than the national average. We then linked justice system data with health records to track victimization consequences—including outpatient care, mental health services, and long-term impacts.
HAVEN’s detailed victim harm estimates give policymakers powerful new tools for evidence-based decision-making. They help answer fundamental questions: Are we investing enough in preventing crime? What resources do victims need, and how does this vary by crime type?
We should allow cities to learn from each other.
While comparing crime across cities has long been discouraged, these comparisons can help cities identify peers and mentors, understand broader trends, and determine whether local interventions are needed.
Crime is highly variable over short periods, making overall trends difficult to discern when some types increase while others decrease. By converting diverse crime categories into monetized harm estimates, cities can better understand their trajectory. NORC’s Live Crime Tracker applies these insights by scraping open data from nearly 60 cities across eight crime categories and now includes harm estimates to help facilitate sophisticated trends analysis and truly evidence-based policymaking.
Better evidence can make an immediate difference.
The time for better measurement is now. As cities grapple with shifting crime patterns, we need evidence-based approaches more than ever. Understanding and quantifying victim harm isn’t just an academic exercise—it’s essential for creating effective policies that both prevent crime and support victims. By adopting these more sophisticated measures of harm, policymakers can make more informed decisions about resource allocation, program effectiveness, and community needs.
Suggested Citation
Roman, J., (2024, December 2). Crime Policy Needs More Cost-Benefit Analysis, Including Harms to Victims. [Web blog post]. NORC at the University of Chicago. Retrieved from https://www.norc.org.
