Assessing the Costs and Benefits of Crime Control Strategies (From Computerization in the Management of the Criminal Justice System: Proceedings of the Workshop and the Symposium on Computerization of Criminal Justice Information at the Ninth United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and th

• NCJ Number: 167628
• Author(s): J J M van Dijk
• Date Published: 1996
• Length: 18 pages
• Sale Source: Criminal Justice Press/Willow Tree Press
• Publication Type: Survey
• Language: English
• Country: Finland

Annotation

A study of the impacts of four different crime control strategies on police and other criminal justice agencies in the Netherlands was conducted in 1994 using computer models.

Abstract

The research was conducted by Berghuis, Meijer, and Huijbregts of the Netherlands Ministry of Justice. The four scenarios included (1) the continuation of recent trends, (2) a 2- to 3-percent increase in police personnel with no change in their allocation, (3) a 30-percent increase in situational crime prevention, and (4) a focus on youth at risk with a success rate in 10 percent. The analysis revealed that a reversal of the crime trend can be expected only if certain very specific conditions are fulfilled, and even then it would not happen in the short term. A reduction in crime would be possible in a number of years' time only if substantial amounts are invested in situational crime prevention and youth crime prevention. The police and criminal justice authorities will still have to expend more energy each year to keep pace with their increasing workload even if no extra measures were planned to reverse the crime trends. Thus, findings indicate that budgets for crime control must be expanded in response to the increases in serious crime and that expansion of existing criminal justice activities do not seem efficient. The study's findings resulted in 1994 in a budget increase for more police personnel and construction of new prisons. Figures and footnotes