IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wsi/ijmpcx/v16y2005i11ns0129183105008229.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Dynamics Of Crime And Punishment

Author

Listed:
  • KJELL HAUSKEN

    (Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stavanger, N-4036 Stavanger, Norway)

  • JOHN F. MOXNES

    (Department for Protection, Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, P. O. Box 25, 2007 Kjeller, Norway)

Abstract

This article analyzes crime development which is one of the largest threats in today's world, frequently referred to as the war on crime. The criminal commits crimes in his free time (when not in jail) according to a non-stationary Poisson process which accounts for fluctuations. Expected values and variances for crime development are determined. The deterrent effect of imprisonment follows from the amount of time in imprisonment. Each criminal maximizes expected utility defined as expected benefit (from crime) minus expected cost (imprisonment). A first-order differential equation of the criminal's utility-maximizing response to the given punishment policy is then developed. The analysis shows that if imprisonment is absent, criminal activity grows substantially. All else being equal, any equilibrium is unstable (labile), implying growth of criminal activity, unless imprisonment increases sufficiently as a function of criminal activity. This dynamic approach or perspective is quite interesting and has to our knowledge not been presented earlier. The empirical data material for crime intensity and imprisonment for Norway, England and Wales, and the US supports the model. Future crime development is shown to depend strongly on the societally chosen imprisonment policy. The model is intended as a valuable tool for policy makers who can envision arbitrarily sophisticated imprisonment functions and foresee the impact they have on crime development.

Suggested Citation

  • Kjell Hausken & John F. Moxnes, 2005. "The Dynamics Of Crime And Punishment," International Journal of Modern Physics C (IJMPC), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 16(11), pages 1701-1732.
    • Handle: RePEc:wsi:ijmpcx:v:16:y:2005:i:11:n:s0129183105008229
    DOI: 10.1142/S0129183105008229
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0129183105008229
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1142/S0129183105008229?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Cheng‐Kuang Wu & Yi‐Ming Chen & Dachrahn Wu & Ching‐Lin Chi, 2020. "A Game Theory Approach for Assessment of Risk and Deployment of Police Patrols in Response to Criminal Activity in San Francisco," Risk Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 40(3), pages 534-549, March.
    2. Shuying Li & Jun Zhuang & Shifei Shen, 2017. "Dynamic Forecasting Conditional Probability of Bombing Attacks Based on Time‐Series and Intervention Analysis," Risk Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 37(7), pages 1287-1297, July.
    3. Guizhou Wang & Kjell Hausken, 2021. "Governmental Taxation of Households Choosing between a National Currency and a Cryptocurrency," Games, MDPI, vol. 12(2), pages 1-24, April.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wsi:ijmpcx:v:16:y:2005:i:11:n:s0129183105008229. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tai Tone Lim (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.worldscinet.com/ijmpc/ijmpc.shtml .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.