The Personal Costs of Crime Are Lasting & Unequal
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September 2024
NORC and its partners updated a landmark 1996 study of crime’s toll on victims and society.
Crime affects more than just the victims. It affects their families, friends, and communities. Understanding the long-term costs and consequences of crime is essential to ensuring that crime-prevention investment matches the scale of the problem and targets the appropriate populations.
“Communities need to know how much criminal victimization is costing them,” said John Roman, the director of NORC’s Center on Public Safety & Justice and a senior fellow in our Economics, Justice & Society department. “For instance, if your community is experiencing $100 million annually in victim’s costs and you’re spending $20 million on prevention, you won’t be able to solve your problem.”
NORC updated one of the NIJ’s most important and oft-cited studies to better understand the impact of crime.
In 2020, with support from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), NORC and Temple University researchers began developing new methods to update NIJ’s 1996 Victim Costs and Consequences: A New Look study. One of the most cited reports in NIJ’s history, it used national and local victimization studies to estimate tangible and intangible costs of crime. For almost 30 years, that first-of-its-kind study was the foundation for studies of the economic impact of crime.
Our new study, Harms After a Victimization: Experience and Needs (HAVEN), created new data, measurement, and analytic tools, including a new taxonomy for measuring harms, a regression-based cost-benefit model, and an integrated data cost methodology to collect self-reporting of violent victimization across multiple dimensions that aren’t usually examined.
“Unlike most surveys, ours asks about losses or expenses accrued by family members or close friends who supported the victim financially, socially, or emotionally after the crime,” said Roman. “It also investigates costs to potential witnesses or co-victims.”
“Communities need to know how much criminal victimization is costing them. If your community is experiencing $100 million annually in victim’s costs and you’re spending $20 million on prevention, you won’t be able to solve your problem.”
We found the recurring costs of crime are greater and last longer than the emergency costs and impact one out of 10 victims in catastrophic ways.
Conventional studies focus on a crime's immediate or acute costs, such as emergency care, inpatient stays, and lost wages. Our research revealed that recurring costs—such as longer-term care, disability, trauma, and lost productivity and quality of life—were substantially larger. We estimated the mean harm per victim of violent crime—including the cost of emergency department visits, lost productivity and property, risk of death, and inpatient, outpatient, mental health, and longer-term or rehabilitative care—to be:
- Robbery: $58,606
- Aggravated assault: $49,491
- Sexual assault: $13,892
- Simple assault: $10,114
While most victims experience relatively small costs, about 10 percent have catastrophic costs of 10 or more times the median.
Lastly, we estimated the total cost of violent crime by category:
- Aggravated assault: $76,221,682,992
- Robbery: $40,722,672,130
- Simple assault: $39,021,612,292
- Sexual assault: $7,387,848,952
These findings point to the need for better-targeted policies that make the most of scarce resources. Researchers hope that interested parties will use HAVEN’s data and tools to reduce criminal justice and related health care, homelessness, and unemployment costs and help guide future research.
This article is from our flagship newsletter, NORC Now. NORC Now keeps you informed of the full breadth of NORC’s work, the questions we help our clients answer, and the issues we help them address.
