Prison - Toward a Social Accounting (From Costs and Benefits in Planning Crime Prevention - Proceedings of a Seminar, April 28, 1982, P 46-57 See NCJ-86712)

• NCJ Number: 86715
• Author(s): J Sutton
• Date Published: 1982
• Length: 12 pages
• Sale Source: New South Wales
• Publication Type: Statistics
• Language: English
• Country: Australia

Annotation

This paper describes the benefits of social accounting in evaluating policy as compared to pure cost benefit analysis and then demonstrates how this approach can clarify prison priorities by relating expenditures to social objectives.

Abstract

Planners and evaluators have enthusiastically endorsed the use of social indicators. While such indicators can reveal differences between regions and districts, they rarely uncover the dynamics of relationships within a region. Cost-benefit analysis has been advocated as a more dynamic approach to policy evaluation, but it cannot quantify many significant factors in social programs. A more modest method is social accounting or social audits, as detailed by R. H. Anderson in 1978, whereby an evaluator takes the normal balance sheet that any organization must produce and adds expenditures for social purposes. The author analyzes the revenue and expenditure tables from the 1978-79 Annual Report of the New South Wales Department of Corrective Services, emphasizing that the statement fails to show what the departments do for the benefit of the community in a program-oriented way. Benefits that could be quantified are public safety, deterrence, rehabilitation, and employment. Costs would include not only the expenses of accommodating prisoners, but also the encouragement of crime by prison and the loss of productivity.