January 1996

This Research Report documents the results of a 2-year multidisciplinary research effort to estimate the costs and consequences of personal crime for Americans. Personal crime is estimated to cost $105 billion annually in medical costs, lost earnings, and public program costs related to victim assistance. These tangible losses do not account for the full impact of crime on victims, however, because they ignore pain, suffering, and lost quality of life. Including pain, suffering, and the reduced quality of life increases the cost of crime to victims to an estimated $450 billion annually. Violent crime (including drunk driving and arson) accounts for $426 billion of this total, property crime $24 billion. These estimates exclude several crimes that were not included in this study but that also have large impacts, notably many forms of white collar crime (including personal fraud) and drug crimes.

Below are some yardsticks that put the costs into context.

• Violent crime causes 3 percent of U.S. medical spending and 14 percent of injury-related medical spending.
• Violent crime results in wage losses equivalent to 1 percent of American earnings.
• Violent crime is a significant factor in mental health care usage. As much as 10 to 20 percent of mental health care expenditures in the United States may be attributable to crime, primarily for victims treated as a result of their victimization. About half of these expenditures are for child abuse victims who are receiving treatment for abuse experienced years earlier. These estimates do not include any treatment for perpetrators of violence.
• Personal crime reduces the average American's quality of life by 1.8 percent. Violence alone causes a 1.7 percent loss. These estimates are conservative. They include only costs to victimized households, ignoring the broader impact of crime-induced fear on our society.

This study highlights the importance of explicitly considering crime victims' pain, suffering, and lost quality of life when analyzing public policy. A complete characterization of criminal victimization costs can be an important tool in formulating criminal justice policy. Identifying and quantifying costs and consequences of victimization may be helpful both in characterizing the crime problem and in examining ways to address it. Ignoring the nonmonetary benefits of crime reduction can lead to a misallocation of resources. For example, suppose that an additional year of incarceration for a rape offender would prevent one additional rape incident. Considering only tangible, out-of-pocket costs, the average rape (or attempted rape) costs $5,100--less than the $15,000-$20,000 annual cost of a prison cell. The bulk of these expenses are medical and mental health care costs to victims. However, if rape's effect on the victim's quality of life is quantified, the average rape costs $87,000--many times greater than the cost of prison.

By allowing analysts to combine statistics on disparate crimes into a single, readily understood metric, monetary valuations of crime costs can help guide resource allocations across crimes. For example, is a patrol pattern that prevents a rape better than one that prevents three burglaries? One way to answer such a question is to ask residents of the affected area, through polling or referendums, which they prefer. In many instances, however, policymakers must rely on less direct methods of determining an appropriate choice. In such cases, one would need to have a metric that allows for comparisons between rapes and burglaries.

Although placing a dollar value on the suffering resulting from violent crime may seem cold and impersonal, such information is useful in the public policy arena. Without a common metric to compare various crimes, it is difficult to assess the merits of criminal justice or victim assistance programs. For example, the aggregate out-of-pocket costs of rape are about $7.5 billion, roughly equal to the out-of-pocket costs to burglary victims and less than the approximately $9 billion cost to larceny victims. Yet the crimes of burglary and larceny have much less severe psychological effects on victims. When pain, suffering, and lost quality of life are quantified, the cost of rape--$127 billion--dwarfs the estimated costs of either burglary or larceny.

Violence against children is one of the least well-documented areas of personal crime. This Research Report presents several new estimates of the incidence, costs, and consequences of violence against children. Although this study's results should be viewed as preliminary, they