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This paper provides a summary of our report for the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on proactive policing. We find that there is sufficient scientific evidence to support the adoption of many proactive policing practices if the primary goal is to reduce crime, though the evidence base generally does not provide long-term or jurisdictional estimates. In turn, we conclude that crime prevention outcomes can often be obtained without producing negative community reactions. However, the most effective proactive policing strategies do not appear to have strong positive impacts on citizen perceptions of the police. At the same time, some community-based strategies have begun to show evidence of improving the relations between the police and public. We conclude that there are likely to be large racial disparities in the volume and nature of police–citizen encounters when police target high-risk people or high-risk places, as is common in many proactive policing programs. We could not conclude whether such disparities are due to statistical prediction, racial animus, implicit bias, or other causes.

In "Consentability," Nancy Kim tackles an important and current topic—in an age of increasing options about how to live, die, and procreate, what limits, if any, should the law place on those choices? "Consentability" is a valuable resource for scholars and policymakers alike, summarizing the arguments for and against government intrusion on the choices of consenting adults with encyclopedic thoroughness. After weighing the arguments, Kim proposes that “bodily integrity exchanges” be permitted, subject to limitations. Although we agree with the general conclusion that bodily integrity exchanges should be permitted, we disagree with the specific limitations that treat the decisions of the poor as suspect, proposing instead methods of structuring payments and the consent process that would enhance the decision-making quality and reduce the possibility of impulsive decisions for all donors— not just those meeting an arbitrary definition of poverty. In any event, when it comes to a life-saving transaction like kidney donation, it is ethically important to consider the welfare of the recipient as well as the donor.

Intimate partner homicide (IPH) is a critical public health and safety issue in the USA. In this study, we determine the prevalence and correlates of perpetrator suicide and additional homicides following intimate partner homicide (IPH) in a large, diverse state with high quality data. We extract IPHs from the North Carolina Violent Death Reporting System for 2004–2013 and identify suicides and other homicides that were part of the same incidents. We analyze the likelihood (in odds ration form) of perpetrator suicide and additional homicides using logistic regression analysis. Almost all IPH-suicide cases were by men with guns (86.6%). Almost one-half of IPHs committed by men with guns ended with suicide. Male-perpetrated IPH incidents averaged 1.58 deaths if a gun was used, and 1.14 deaths otherwise. It is well-known that gun access increases the chance that a violent domestic relationship will end in death. The current findings demonstrate that gun IPH is often coupled with additional killings. As suicidal batterers will not be deterred from IPH by threat of punishment, the results underline the importance of preemption by limiting batterers’ access to guns.

This paper analyses the 13 business cycles since 1933 to provide evidence on the old question of whether recessions cause crime. Using data from the United States, we find that recessions are consistently associated with an uptick in burglary and robbery, and a reduction in theft of motor vehicles. There is no statistical association with homicide. These patterns are suggestive of the relative importance of the various channels by which economic conditions influence crime.

To reflect on the divergence and overlap between alcohol and illicit drugs with respect to both current policies and policy research.For demand reduction, there is considerable overlap in programs and services for prevention and even more clearly for treatment. For supply controls there is mostly divergence, reflecting the difference in legal status. Research generally follows the same pattern. However, a cross-cutting research agenda on the supply side has merit.Even in a prohibition regime, law-enforcement agencies have considerable discretion. A systematic, pragmatic, 'evidence-based' use of that discretion to reduce harm is possible. It can be accomplished only by a continuing program of policy research that measures the harms of drug use and drug enforcement, assesses the effects of current policies on both these sources of social cost and explores alternative strategies. There is a similarly important project for alcohol and tobacco control policy. The goal for research on alcohol and tobacco is to document the extent to which supply controls can be effective in reducing harm; the additional goal for illicit drugs is to document just how much the current ideologically driven approach is costing the public.

The evidence base for the study of guns and violence begins with data on such fundamental issues as the number and distribution of guns, the number of people shot each year in criminal assaults, and the frequency of gun use in self-defense. It seems that these simple descriptive statistics should be readily available, and in fact the rhetoric of the Great American Gun War routinely includes reference to 300 million guns, or 100,000 people who are shot each year, or 2.5 million defensive gun uses (DGUs). But it turns out that such statistics should be viewed with considerable skepticism. Developing reliable estimates of basic facts in this arena is surprisingly difficult, even with the best of intentions.

This volume contains detailed reports on crime and punishment for six types of crime in each of seven nations. The nations were selected by the criterion that during the period 1981-89 they all had conducted several representative national crime-victimization surveys, which provide the basis for comparison of time trends in survey data with time trends in official recorded data. Sweden, not among the seven nations but also meeting this criterion, was included in an earlier publication stemming from this project (Farrington, Langan, and Tonry 2004); in this essay, we include Sweden in some comparisons. Five of the nations are English-speaking and are, or were at one time, British (England and Wales, Scotland, the United States, Canada, and Australia); the remainder are Western European (the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland). These nations have in common that they are part of the "first world" of wealthy countries with stable governance and similarly advanced technological infrastructure. But they have substantial differences with respect to criminal codes and administrative procedures for recording data on crime and punishment. Considerable effort was devoted by the authors of the studies included in this volume to adjust available data to make them as comparable as possible. Here we use these data to explore crime patterns across the nations and over time, based on both recorded data and survey data, and to take some modest steps toward explaining the observed patterns.

Of the readily computed proxies for the prevalence of gun ownership, one, the percentage of suicides committed with a gun, is most highly correlated with survey-based estimates. It is the best choice for use in cross-section analysis of the effect of gun prevalence on crime patterns across states and larger counties. Analysis of this proxy measure for the period 1979–1997 demonstrates that the geographic structure of gun ownership has been highly stable. That structure is closely linked to rural tradition. There is, however, some tendency toward homogenization over this period, with high-prevalence states trending down and low-prevalence states trending up.

New policy options are emerging in the debate regarding the regulation of firearms in the United States. These options include the treatment of firearms as consumer products, the design of which can be regulated for safety; denial of gun ownership to those convicted of misdemeanors; and strategies to curtail the illegal sale of guns. The public's opinion of these innovative gun-policy options has not been thoroughly assessed.We conducted two telephone surveys of 1200 adults each in the United States in 1996 and 1997-1998. Cognitive interviews and pretests were used in the development of the survey instruments. Potential participants were then contacted by random-digit dialing of telephone numbers.A majority of the respondents favored safety standards for new handguns. These standards included childproofing (favored by 88 percent of respondents), personalization (devices that permit firing only by an authorized person; 71 percent), magazine safeties (devices that prevent firing after the magazine or clip is removed; 82 percent), and loaded-chamber indicators (devices that show whether the handgun is loaded; 73 percent). There was strong support for policies prohibiting persons convicted of specific misdemeanors from purchasing a firearm. Support for such prohibitions was strongest for crimes involving violence or the illegal use of a firearm (83 to 95 percent) or substance abuse (71 to 92 percent). There was also widespread support for policies designed to reduce the illegal sale of guns, such as mandatory tamper-resistant serial numbers (90 percent), a limit of one handgun purchase per customer per month (81 percent), and mandatory registration of handguns (82 percent). Even among the subgroup of respondents who were gun owners, a majority were in favor of stricter gun regulations with regard to 20 of the 22 proposals covered in the poll.Strong public support, even among gun owners, for innovative strategies to regulate firearms suggests that these proposals warrant serious consideration by policy makers.

Economists who bring the tools of economic analysis to bear on the study of crime and crime prevention contribute to current debates a normative framework and sophisticated quantitative methods for evaluating policy, the idea of criminal behavior as rational choice, and the connection of individual choices to aggregate outcomes. The contributors to this volume draw on all three of these approaches in their investigations and discuss the policy implications of their findings. Reporting on research in the United States, Europe, and South America, the chapters discuss such topics as a cost-benefit analysis of additional police hiring, the testing of innovative policy interventions through field experiments, imprisonment and recidivism rates, incentives and disincentives for sports hooliganism ("hooliganomics"), data showing the influence of organized crime on the quality of local politicians, and the (scant) empirical evidence for the effect of immigration on crime. These contributions demonstrate the eclectic approach of economists studying crime as well as their increasing respect for the contributions of other social scientists in this area. ContributorsBrian Bell, Paolo Buonanno, Philip J. Cook, John J. Donohue III, Jeffrey R. Kling, Jens Ludwig, Stephen Machin, Olivier Marie, Giovanni Mastrobuoni, Sendhil Mullainathan, Aurelie Ouss, Emily Greene Owens, Stefan Pichler, Paolo Pinotti, Mikael Priks, Daniel Romer, Rodrigo R. Soares, Igor Viveiros

PHILIP J. COOK* & MICHAEL 1. MOORE** INTRODUCTION During the early 1970s 29 states low- ered their drinking age. Eighteen-year- olds had won the right to vote (with the adoption of the 26th Amendment in 1970) and were being drafted to fight in Viet Nam; depriving them of adult status with respect to alcohol became politi- cally untenable. At the time there was little concern that a lower legal age would induce an increase in alcohol abuse, since the minimum age laws ap- peared largely ineffective. Yet as it turned out, lowering the drinking age did lead to an increase in traffic fatali- ties. As the evidence accumulated, a number of state legislatures reversed the earlier reduction, and in 1984, Congress mandated that a// states ban sales of al- coholic beverages to those under 21. This “experiment” with lowering the minimum drinking age taught us that youthful drinking patterns could be modified through legal restrictions on al- cohol availability. This result was a chal

Legislators have formulated a variety of state and federal regulations to make obtaining firearms more difficult for dangerous people. Even though this goal may appear hopeless in the face of the 150—200 million guns currently in circulation, both evidence and economic logic suggest otherwise. Guns are scarce commodities, and policies that would make them scarcer, to reduce violent crimes that involve guns, warrant consideration. Possibilities include state-level regulation of gun dealers, interdiction of black markets where stolen guns are fenced, and an increase in the federal excise tax on guns.

Given the central role of private individuals and firms in determining the effectiveness of the criminal justice system, and the quality and availability of criminal opportunities, private actions arguably deserve a central role in the analysis of crime and crime prevention policy. But the leading scholarly commentaries on the crime drop during the 1990s have largely ignored the role of the private sector, as have policymakers. Among the potentially relevant trends: growing reporting rates (documented in this paper); the growing sophistication and use of alarms, monitoring equipment and locks; the considerable increase in the employment of private security guards; and the decline in the use of cash. Private actions of this sort have the potential to both reduce crime rates and reduce arrests and imprisonment. Well-designed regulations and programs can encourage effective private action. One creative method to harness private action to cost-effective crime control is the creation of business improvement districts (BIDs). Our quasi-experimental analysis of Los Angeles BIDs demonstrates that the social benefits of BID expenditures on security are a large multiple (about 20) of the private expenditures. Creation and operation of effective BIDs requires a legal infrastructure that helps neighborhoods solve the collective action problem.

The "core right" established in D.C. vs. Heller (2008) is to keep an operable handgun in the home for self-defense purposes. If the Court extends this right to cover state and local jurisdictions, the result is likely to include the elimination of the most stringent existing regulations - such as Chicago's handgun ban - and could also possibly ban regulations that place substantial restrictions or costs on handgun ownership. We find evidence in support of four conclusions: The effect of Heller may be to increase the prevalence of handgun ownership in jurisdictions that currently have restrictive laws; Given the best evidence on the consequences of increased prevalence of gun ownership, these jurisdictions will experience a greater burden of crime due to more lethal violence and an increased burglary rate; Nonetheless, a regime with greater scope for gun rights is not necessarily inferior - whether restrictive regulations would pass a cost benefit test may depend on whether we accept the Heller viewpoint that there is a legal entitlement to possess a handgun; In any event, the core right defined by Heller leaves room for some regulation that would reduce the negative externalities of gun ownership.

What will happen after Heller? We know that the Supreme Court will no longer tolerate comprehensive federal prohibitions on home handgun possession by some class of trustworthy homeowners for the purpose of, and perhaps only at the time of, self-defense. But the judiciary could push further, if nothing else by incorporating Heller's holding into the Fourteenth Amendment and enforcing it against states and municipalities. In fact, the majority opinion offered little guidance for future cases. It presented neither a purely originalist method of constitutional interpretation nor a constraining doctrinal framework for evaluating other regulation - even while it gratuitously suggested that much existing gun control is acceptable. In the absence of more information from the Court, we identify plausible legal arguments for the next few rounds of litigation and assess the stakes for social welfare. We conclude that some of the most salient legal arguments after Heller have little or no likely consequence for social welfare based on available data. For example, the looming fight over local handgun bans - an issue on which we present original empirical data - seems largely inconsequential. The same can be said for a right to carry a firearm in public with a permit. On the other hand, less prominent legal arguments could be quite threatening. Taxation and regulation targeted especially at firearms might be presumptively disfavored by judges in the future, along the lines of free speech doctrine. This could have serious consequences. In addition, Second Amendment doctrine might generally dampen enthusiasm for innovative regulatory responses to the problem of gun violence. The threat of litigation may inhibit policy experimentation ranging from micro-stamping on shell casings, to pre-market review of gun design, to so-called personalized firearms, and beyond.

Urban crime rates in the United States fell markedly during the 1990s and remain at historically low levels. The statistical evidence presented here indicates that that decline, like the crime surge that preceded it, has been largely uncorrelated with changes in socioeconomic conditions across cities. The ups and downs of crime have a considerable effect on residential location and property values. The police represent the largest public expenditure in city-level crime control efforts, and they are increasingly held accountable for reducing crime rates. Indeed, there is considerable evidence that an increase in police expenditures does pay off in the form of lower crime rates. This is an incomplete story, however. Assessments of police effectiveness typically neglect the considerable role of private and community-level protection and control efforts, not to mention the vital importance of (uncompensated) private inputs into police investigations. In areas with endemically high violence rates, the reluctance of witnesses to cooperate remains a serious problem.

S tate lotteries can be evaluated from either of two perspectives familiar to economists: as a consumer commodity or as a source of public revenue. L As a commodity, the lottery is notable for its broad market penetration and rapid growth. Sixty percent of the adults in lottery states play at least once in a year. The annual growth in real per capita sales in lottery states has averaged 12 percent, rising in 1989 dollars from $22 in 1975 to $108 in 1989. As a source of public revenue, lotteries account for a rather modest fraction of revenue in states that run them (3.3 percent in 1986), but they are nonetheless one of the most visible state government activities. Lottery sales exceed those of all other products sold directly by state governments to the public and are larger than all but three major activities of state government: education, public welfare and highways (Clotfelter and Cook, 1989, Table 2.5). Moreover, lotteries are a qualitatively new activity for state governments, in that they are a business operated, in effect, for profit. State liquor stores are perhaps the closest analog, but they were created to encourage temperate drinking practices and do not engage in the sales promotion and marketing activities that are characteristic of the lotteries. Lotteries enjoy an honored place in American history as a device for raising funds for public purposes. Funding for such institutions as the Jamestown settlement, Harvard College, and the Continental Army, as well as hundreds of bridges, fire houses and schools came from lotteries. But after the

Smoking initiation by adolescents has been analyzed by economists as a choice reflecting prices, tastes, and subjective evaluation of the long-term risks of addiction and disease. What is missing from this account is the fact that smoking is a social activity and is subject to peer influence. Peers may serve as a source of information about why and how to smoke, and how to obtain cigarettes. Peers also serve as an audience, observing and evaluating others’ behavior. This evaluation is mediated by the long association in popular culture between smoking and a variety of attributes prized by adolescents. Like choice of fashion in hair and clothing, body piercing, comportment, and so forth, smoking by adolescents connotes information about identity. Knowing this, the decision of whether to smoke is partly a decision of what identity to project.

Excess drinking is associated with lost productivity, accidents, disability, early death, crime, neglect of family responsibilities, and personality deterioration. These and related concerns have justified special restrictions on alcoholic-beverage commerce and consumption. The nature and extent of government involvement in this arena vary widely over time and place, and are often controversial. Economists have contributed to the evaluation of alcohol policy through empirical work on the effects of alcohol-control measures on consumption and its consequences. Economics has also provided an accounting framework for defining and comparing costs and benefits of interventions, including excise taxes. Outside of the policy arena, economists have analyzed alcohol consumption in the context of stretching the standard model of consumer choice to include intertemporal effects and social influence. Nonetheless, perhaps the most important contribution by economists has been the repeated demonstration that there is nothing unusual about alcohol in at least one essential respect: consumers drink less ethanol (and have fewer alcohol-related problems) when alcohol-beverage prices are increased. Important econometric challenges remain, including the search for a satisfactory resolution to the conflicting results on the effect of price changes on consumption by consumers who tend to drink heavily. There are also unresolved puzzles about the relationship between drinking and productivity; even after controlling for a variety of other characteristics, drinkers tend to have higher earnings than abstainers, and women's earnings (but not men's) tend to increase with alcohol consumption.

ContextThe cost of treating gunshot injuries imposes a financial burden on society. Estimates of such costs are relevant to evaluation of gun violence reduction programs and may help guide reimbursement policies.ObjectivesTo develop reliable US estimates of the medical costs of treating gunshot injuries and to present national estimates for the sources of payment for treating these injuries.Design and SettingCost analysis using E-coded discharge data from hospitals in Maryland for 1994-1995 and New York for 1994 and from emergency departments in South Carolina for 1997. Other sources of data included the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System for 1994 incidence of nonfatal gun injuries, the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center database for 1988-1992 estimates of lifetime medical costs of gun injuries, and the 1994 Vital Statistics census for incidence of fatal gun injuries.Main Outcome MeasuresEstimated national acute-care and follow-up treatment costs and payment sources for gunshot injuries.ResultsAt a mean medical cost per injury of about $17,000, the 134,445 (95% confidence interval [CI], 109,465-159,425) gunshot injuries in the United States in 1994 produced $2.3 billion (95% CI, $2.1 billion–$2.5 billion) in lifetime medical costs (in 1994 dollars, using a 3% real discount rate), of which $1.1 billion (49%) was paid by US taxpayers. Gunshot injuries due to assaults accounted for 74% of total costs.ConclusionsGunshot injury costs represent a substantial burden to the medical care system. Nearly half this cost is borne by US taxpayers.

In 1978 North Carolina created a special fund to pay for abortions for indigent women. The appropriations for that fund have proven inadequate during five of the years in which it has been in operation, with the result in each case that no state funding was available for several months. This on-again, off-again funding pattern provides a natural experiment for" estimating the short-run effect of changes in the cost of abortions on the number of abortions (and births) to indigent women. We utilize a unique dataset obtained from the State, which includes individual records for all pregnancies terminated in the State since 1978. We estimate the effects of funding termination on the abortion rate per month, the birth rate per month (adjusted to take account of variations in gestation periods), and the probability that a pregnancy will end in abortion, for various demographic groups. The results suggest that the decisions of poor black women aged 18-29 are particularly sensitive to the availability of abortion funding. Overall, approximately 3 in every 10 pregnancies that would have resulted in an abortion, had state funds been available, are instead carried to term.

Observed patterns of youthful drinking indicate substantial persistence. This paper analyzes how much of that persistence reflects the actual development of a habit, and how much is due to unobserved aspects of the individual and the environment. The role of restrictions on alcohol availability, both in the current period and in adolescence, is also explored. We find that much of the observed persistence represents habit formation, and not unobserved characteristics. Consequently, restrictions on availability, particularly at an early age, alter subsequent patterns of alcohol consumption and abuse.

The emergence of winner-take-all-markets, with few winners and many losers, has transformed the US economy. The authors of this book conclude that this has resulted in income inequality, overcrowding in some areas and increased cultural conformity, and suggest policies for reversing this trend.

In his 1991 book The Rhetoric of Reaction, Albert O. Hirschman identified three arguments that are commonly mustered against proposed "progressive" reforms.1 One argument contends that the proposed reform will have results exactly the opposite of those intended by the reform's proponents; the second is that the reform will have no effect at all; and the third is that the reform will come at the cost of degrading fundamental rights or values-freedom itself, for instance.2 The labels for these three arguments form the subtitle of Hirschman's book: "Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy."3 Gun control has long been a contentious issue in the United States. A wide spectrum of laws regulating the manufacture, import, sale, possession, and use of guns, with the ultimate purpose of reducing gun violence, can be deemed "gun control laws." Such laws have attracted a good deal of opposition. Given his argument, Hirschman should be pleased to learn that the "rhetoric of reaction" has indeed been brought to bear on the issue of gun control: Gun-control laws don't work. What is worse, they act perversely. While legitimate users of firearms encounter intense regulation, scrutiny, and bureaucratic control, illicit markets easily adapt to whatever difficulties a free society throws in their way. Also, efforts to curtail the supply of firearms inflict collateral damage on freedom and privacy interests that have long been considered central to American public life. Thanks to the seemingly never-ending war on drugs and long experience attempting to suppress prostitution and pornography, we know a great deal about how illicit markets function and how costly to the public attempts to control them can be.4

Three to five million handguns change hands each year. Almost half the states—including 64 percent of the population—require that buyers be screened by the police, with the objective of preventing certain groups of po tentially dangerous people—felons, fugitives, ex-mental pa tients, drug addicts, and so forth—from obtaining handguns. These state systems operate within the federal framework created by the Gun Control Act of 1968, which requires that most all interstate transactions in firearms be handled by federally licensed dealers or manufacturers. The states' main problems are (1) weak federal regulation of licensees, (2) incomplete state criminal history files, and (3) the difficulty of regulating hand-to-hand transactions in used handguns. States that wish to increase the effectiveness of their screen ing systems will probably have to assume responsibility for regulating retail dealers and will have to institute civil liability for dealers and individual gun owners, together with a more comprehensive registration system, to make the screening system more difficult to circumvent.

Social scientists have started to find answers to some of the questions raised in the ongoing debate over gun control. The basic factual issue in this debate concerns the effect of gun availability on the distribution, seriousness, and number of violent crimes. Some evidence is available on each of these dimensions of the violent crime problem. The distribution of violent crimes among different types of victims is governed in part by the "vulnerability pattern" in weapon choice. The seriousness of robbery and assault incidents is influenced by weapon type, as indicated by the objective dangerousness and instrumental violence pattern. A reduc tion in gun availability would cause some weapon substitution and probably little change in overall robbery and assault rates—but the homicide rate would be reduced.

THE business cycle has a pervasive effect on the structure of economic opportunity and hence on behavior. The effect is reflected in social indicators as diverse as school enrollments, birthrates, and labor force participation.' It would be surprising indeed if crime rates were immune to general business conditions, and certainly the conventional wisdom asserts that "street" crime is countercyclical. A recession always provides police chiefs with a comfortable explanation for their failure to prevent increases in the crime rate.

M. Harvey Brenner has produced two influential studies of the social costs of unemployment, economic inequality, and economic growth, both sponsored by the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress. This paper reports the results of an effort to reproduce Brenner's findings for homicide from his more recent (1984) study. Our conclusions are as follows. (1) Although not obvious from his write-up, Brenner's 1984 results differ substantively from his earlier results. (2) We are unable to reproduce his reported findings. (3) There are serious methodological problems with his procedure for choosing a regression specification.

Despite the profound demographic and socioeconomic changes characterizing family life in recent years, youth crime rates have remained more or less constant since 1971. This finding is of interest given the intense public concern regarding the welfare of children. It also serves as a convenient basis for projecting the future volume of youth crime.

MALCOLM WHEELER has presented a persuasive brief against the use of criminal sanctions for corporations in defective product cases. He argues that criminal proceedings in such cases are (a) redundant, given the effectiveness of civil and administrative alternatives; (b) costly to taxpayers; (c) error prone; and (d) heavy handed, with no capacity for "fine tuning." His argument is effective but not entirely satisfying intellectually; we are left with a sense that he has marshaled more arguments than necessary to make his case, without identifying that which is essential. If we were able to rebut each of his points successfully, one by one, at which point would he change his conclusion? In short, what are the principles that define the proper domain of the criminal law? My discussion identifies and discusses two such principles in the list of arguments presented by Wheeler. First, however, is a brief digression on the distinction between criminal liability for corporations and for natural persons. When an employee (or group of employees) allegedly violates a general criminal statute (reckless homicide) or a regulatory statute that includes criminal sentencing provisions (price fixing), then that employee is of course subject to criminal prosecution. If the alleged crime arises from a job-related action that is intended to benefit the corporate employer, then the corporation may be subject to criminal sanctions, at least if the decision is authorized by senior corporate officials, even if only by implication.' It of course remains true that the corporation remains civilly liable by the same strict doctrine of vicarious liability that is applicable to natural persons who are also employers. It should be emphasized that

Criminal opportunity theory provides a framework for examining the interaction between potential offenders and potential victims. Criminals' behavior influences the nature and amount of self-protective measures taken by potential victims, and changes in self-protection make criminal opportunities more or less attractive. Criminal opportunity theory has precursors in criminological theory, preeminently in the work of Cloward and Ohlin, but in these theories opportunities are mediated through social learning. Criminal opportunity theory employs the economic theory of markets to describe and predict how criminals and victims interact. Evidence is available that potential victims take more self-protection measures when the perceived risk of victimization is greater and that prospective criminals are likelier to attack relatively more vulnerable targets. Little research is available on whether increases in self-protection reduce the total volume of crime or merely displace crime to more vulnerable targets; the extent of displacement probably differs among offenses. The market perspective has several benefits to the investigation of interaction between potential victims and offenders: it assembles different topics encompassed by criminal opportunity theory into a coherent whole, it is expressed in a form that facilitates borrowing from economic theory, and it generates new and important insights for policy evaluation and criminological theory. One central insight is that law enforcement strategies may alter the quality of opportunities and thereby precipitate additional crime. Effective incapacitation or rehabilitation policies, for example, may reduce the number of offenders in circulation and thereby reduce the perceived risk of victimization. This may cause individuals to reduce their self-protection efforts, making them more attractive targets than before and thereby stimulating increased crime rates on the part of those criminals who remain active.

The validity of the clearance rate as a measure of either criminal justice system (CJS) effectiveness or of the probability of punishment for crime can be questioned on the grounds that the relationship between CJS effectiveness and observed clearance rates is mediated by the choice behavior of criminals. If the clearance rate is endogenous in that sense, then recent econometric results concerning the deterrence effect of punishment are fundamentally flawed. A model of criminal adaptation to changes in CJS effectiveness illustrates the basic problem.

In general, the public’s impression of the performance of the juvenile correctional system or Youth Authority (YA) is based on a collection of unrepresentative incidents that are deemed newsworthy by the media: spectacular crimes committed by inmates of the YA, or evidence of corruption within the agency, or reports of violence or abuse against inmates of YA institutions. The attempts of juvenile corrections managers to minimize adverse publicity may result in excessive caution or other distortions in programmatic decisions. A partial antidote to this problem would be a good systematic account of YA performance which could serve as a basis for educating the public about the overall context in which the isolated headline stories arise.

State lotteries as they are operated in the United States today involve four distinct aspects: legalization of lottery games, monopolistic provision by the state, marketing of lottery products, and...

Summary Prices of alcoholic beverages in the U.S. have declined sharply over the last two decades relative to the overall rate of price inflation, in part because federal alcohol excise taxes have not been increased since 1951. There is strong evidence that an increase in alcohol taxes would reduce the prevalence of chronic heavy drinking; this evidence, summarized here, is based on an analysis of the effect of changes in state liquor taxes rates on cirrhosis mortality. Thus alcohol taxation is an effective public health policy investment. Alcohol taxes are also fairly well targeted, in the sense that a large fraction of tax revenues are collected from those whose alcohol consumption level places them at risk for health problems and other alcohol-related problems.

Lotteries constitute one of the fastest-growing categories of consumer expenditure in the United States. Not only have an increasing number of states legalized state lotteries, but the per capita expenditures on lotteries in lottery states have increased at an annual rate of 13 percent after inflation between 1975 and 1988. This article examines the demand for lottery products. A majority of the adult public in lottery states play in any one year, but relatively few of these players account for most of the action". Socioeconomic patterns of play, measured from both sales data and household surveys, offer some surprises -- for example, that the Engle curve of lottery expenditures decline with income. There is some evidence that lottery sales increase with the payout rate, although it is not clear that it would be profitable for the states to increase payout rates. The addition of a new game, such as lotto, does not undercut sales of existing games, and the oft-heard claim that interest (and sales) will "inevitably" decline is contradicted by the data. The organizational form of the lottery is evolving in response to the quest for higher revenues: in particular, smaller states are forming multistate game. This article is a chapter from Selling Hope: State Lotteries in America, an NBER monograph to be published by Harvard University Press in November, 1989.