Cost of crime: a systematic review

Background: Crime imposes significant costs and negative consequences to people and society globally. Understanding the cost of crime is important to conduct economic evaluations of existing crime prevention interventions and to allocate resources by prioritizing crime prevention efforts relative to the severity of the crime category. Aim: The aim of this review is to systematically search the literature to select and review all existing and relevant studies that have estimated the cost of crime. Methods: In December 2013, fifteen databases were systematically searched for published studies and grey literature. We included studies that estimated the costs of crime of adult offenders. Due to high heterogeneity, results were synthesised descriptively. Results: 21 studies met the inclusion criteria, of these 14 studies estimated the societal cost of crime, six studies focused on victim costs, and one study calculated the costs imposed by ‘career’ offenders. There was considerable variance in the estimated total costs of crime and studies from the United States consistently reported the highest total costs. Different crime categories were used to estimate the total cost of crime but all the studies consistently included robbery and burglary in the total cost estimate. Homicide was ranked as the most costly offence, followed by drug offence, fraud, sexual assault, assault, and serious traffic offence. Crime categories that involved any violence to a person were consistently associated with large intangible costs. Conclusions: This systematic review found several studies that estimated the cost of crime spread across different developed countries. However, we found large variance in the total cost estimate between studies. While it is difficult to precisely determine what caused this variance, we think that it could be due to changes in unit costs, underreporting of crime, changes in crime trends, inconsistent definitions of crime categories, and variations in the methods used to estimate costs. The findings from this systematic review highlight the need for more up-to-date studies with better reporting standards.