NCJ Number
206324
Date Published
2004
Length
37 pages
Annotation
This report offers a cost effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis of the Reducing Burglary Initiative (RBI) projects in England and Wales.
Abstract
This analysis relies on the results of three previous assessments of the effectiveness of the RBI projects in reducing burglary. While these three assessments focused on how well the RBI’s achieved their primary goal of reducing burglary, this analysis provides information about the cost effectiveness and costs versus benefits of the RBI projects. Thus, the current analysis relies on the three previous estimates of the effectiveness of the RBI projects to draw conclusions about its cost and cost-benefit effectiveness. Following a summary of the project data and reports, a standard cost-benefit approach following the guidelines of Dhiri and Brand (1999) is applied to the RBI projects. The results suggest that, in aggregate, the benefits generated from the projects exceeded their costs. The projects that implemented location specific situational crime prevention, stakeholding, enforcement, and offender interventions all produced a benefit:cost ratios greater than one. By contrast, projects that implemented area-wide situational crime prevention as their primary intervention produced a benefit:cost ratios of less than one. Lessons emerging from the analysis include providing future project evaluators with guidelines to prevent the methodological limitations encountered in this study and designing future crime reduction programs in such a way as to allow for more conclusive inferences about the cost effectiveness of such interventions. Figures, tables, references