Criminal System

Criminal System

Question #1

If I were Director of the FBI, I will try to amend the gun control law. In the past few months, the issue of gun control has been increased. The issue of enforcement of gun laws is really a cover for opposing new gun laws. Those on one side of the issue argue that “we need to make a law restricting guns” while those on the other side say “we don't need new laws—we need enforcement of existing gun laws.” Though there is always, of course, some enforcement of existing laws; it is a relevant issue whether the amount of enforcement is optimal. The rate of arrests by both state and federal agencies for weapons offenses is shown in the accompanying figure (Bell, 1975).

The rate of arrests per 1,000 people increased substantially from the mid-1980s through about 1993 and decreased thereafter. The number of arrests ranged from about 150,000 to 200,000 per year. There are two competing explanations for the later decline in the number of arrests. First, enforcement was first increased and then decreased. Second, because of increased enforcement earlier, the criminal activity that leads to arrests decreased since it no longer paid off for the offenders. Either of these explanations may be correct. Note that the federal arrests are a small fraction of the state arrests, so the decline had nothing to do with policies made in Washington (Ferarri, 2000).

An optimal amount of gun law enforcement would be at a level at which the marginal cost of reducing a crime by enforcement equaled the marginal social cost of the crime prevented by that enforcement. Generally, that means, in effect, deterring crime. In order to know whether the level of enforcement is optimal, we need to know the costs of enforcement and the effect of enforcement on crime as well as the social cost of that crime. None of these issues are usually very well analyzed, however, because the production relations have not been agreed upon generally or estimated acceptably (Rubinovitz, 1994).

We have some idea of the costs of police, courts, and corrections, but we do not know with any accuracy the degree to which crimes are deterred by these factors. This is unlike the private sector, where we can generally calculate how much it costs to produce an additional unit of a product, given the labor, capital, materials, and so forth that go into that product.

It is difficult to obtain a valid measure of the costs of a crime. There is the value placed on the goods stolen by a thief or robber, presuming we do not count the value to the criminal as a gain, but what about the psychic costs to the victim or the reduced feeling of safety among other potential victims? In business, we have a good idea of the value of an additional unit of the product; it is the price at which it can be sold (Thuraisingham, 1989).

Presumably, the purpose of the laws and their enforcement is to ...