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WHY DO INCREASED ARREST RATES APPEAR TO REDUCE CRIME: DETERRENCE, INCAPACITATION, OR MEASUREMENT ERROR?
Open accessAbstract
This paper attempts to discriminate between deterrence, incapacitation, and measurement error as explanations for the negative empirical relationship between arrest rates and crime. Measurement error cannot explain the observed patterns in the data. Incapacitation suggests that an increase in the arrest rate for one crime will reduces all crime rates; deterrence predicts that an increase in the arrest rate for one crime will lead to a rise in other crimes as criminals substitute away from the first crime. Empirically, deterrence appears to be the more important factor, particularly for property crimes. (JEL K42)
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Citations
Cited by
The Economic Theory of Public Enforcement of Law
Polinsky, A. M., & Shavell, S. (2000) · Journal of Economic Literature · doi:10.1257/jel.38.1.45 · Cited by 1,159
Crime Rates and Local Labor Market Opportunities in the United States: 1979–1997
Gould, E. D., Weinberg, B. A., & Mustard, D. B. (2002) · Review of Economics and Statistics · doi:10.1162/003465302317331919 · Cited by 891
TESTING ENFORCEMENT STRATEGIES IN THE FIELD: THREAT, MORAL APPEAL AND SOCIAL INFORMATION
Fellner, G., Sausgruber, R., & Traxler, C. (2013) · Journal of the European Economic Association · doi:10.1111/jeea.12013 · Cited by 370
Individual Perceptions of the Criminal Justice System
Lochner, L. (2007) · The American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/000282807780323505 · Cited by 362
A Time-Series Analysis of Crime, Deterrence, and Drug Abuse in New York City
Corman, H., & Mocan, H. N. (2000) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.90.3.584 · Cited by 353
Metadata
- Authors
- LEVITT, S. D.
- Venue
- Economic Inquiry
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 1998-07
- Volume
- 36
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 353-372
- ISSN
- 0043-3640 (ISSN-L)
- 0095-2583
- 1465-7295
- OpenAlex
- W2892030650
- Cited by
- 318
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 48.83
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: WHY DO INCREASED ARREST RATES APPEAR TO REDUCE CRIME: DETERRENCE, INCAPACITATION, OR MEASUREMENT ERROR? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/j.1465-7295.1998.tb01720.x
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- LEVITT, S. D. (1998). WHY DO INCREASED ARREST RATES APPEAR TO REDUCE CRIME: DETERRENCE, INCAPACITATION, OR MEASUREMENT ERROR? Economic Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-7295.1998.tb01720.x
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
