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Drug Treatment as a Crime Fighting Tool

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  • Mireia Jofre-Bonet
  • Jody L. Sindelar

Abstract

Drugs and crime are known to be correlated, but the direction of causality and the magnitude of the relationship have not been well established. We take a new approach to estimating this relationship and examine a little used, multi-site dataset of 3,500 inner-city drug users entering treatment. We analyze the change in crime and in drug use pre and post treatment, controlling for other covariates. We take first differences to address omitted variable problems. For our sample, we find that treatment reduces drug use which, in turn, reduced drug decreases crime. Reduced drug use due to treatment is associated with 54% fewer days of crime for profit, ceteris paribus. Our evidence suggests that, reduced drug use is causally related to reduced crime. This finding is robust to different specifications and subsamples. Our findings broadly suggest that drug treatment may be an effective crime-fighting tool. Given the huge and growing expense of the criminal justice system, drug treatment might be cost-effective relative to incarceration.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 9038.

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Date of creation: Jul 2002
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:9038

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  1. Hope Corman & H. Naci Mocan, 1996. "A Time-Series Analysis of Crime and Drug Use in New York City," NBER Working Papers 5463, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  2. Desimone, Jeff, 2001. "The Effect of Cocaine Prices on Crime," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 39(4), pages 627-43, October.
  3. Jeff Grogger & Mike Willis, 1998. "The Introduction of Crack Cocaine and the Rise in Urban Crime Rates," NBER Working Papers 6353, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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Blog mentions

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  1. Review: Drugs – Without the Hot Air (David Nutt)
    by Sam Watson in The Academic Health Economists' Blog on 2013-02-14 12:53:56
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Cited by:
  1. Paresh Kumar Narayan & Ingrid Nielsen & Russell Smyth, 2005. "Is there a Natural Rate of Crime?," Monash Economics Working Papers 18/05, Monash University, Department of Economics.
  2. Scott Cunningham & Keith Finlay, 2013. "Parental Substance Use And Foster Care: Evidence From Two Methamphetamine Supply Shocks," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 51(1), pages 764-782, 01.
  3. Araujo, Ricardo Azevedo & Moreira, Tito Belchior S., 2004. "A dynamic model of production and traffic of drugs," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 82(3), pages 371-376, March.
  4. Mocan, Naci & Tekin, Erdal, 2003. "Guns, Drugs and Juvenile Crime: Evidence from a Panel of Siblings and Twins," IZA Discussion Papers 932, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
  5. Bishai, D. & Sindelar, J. & Ricketts, E.P. & Huettner, S. & Cornelius, L. & Lloyd, J.J. & Havens, J.R. & Latkin, C.A. & Strathdee, S.A., 2008. "Willingness to pay for drug rehabilitation: Implications for cost recovery," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 27(4), pages 959-972, July.

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