Gary Becker's Model Of Crime

While teaching at Columbia University, Gary Becker faced a predicament while driving to an exam with Ph.D. students. He asked himself whether he should park in an illegal spot that was closer, or a parking lot that was further away. In this situation, he calculated what the likelihood of getting caught was versus the time and money that would be lost by parking further away. He chose to park on the street. After this situation, Becker was eager to think more about the decisions of criminal behavior. As he began to study crime and punishment he developed a model that would determine how many resources and how much punishment should be used to enforce different kinds of laws. Becker spoke about crime on every level from murder to traffic violations

Beginning with the first category, Becker talks about the effects of crime on society. He says, “Usually a belief that other members of society are harmed is the motivation behind outlawing or otherwise restricting an activity.” Becker explains crime as an activity that creates diseconomies and is measured by the numbers of offenses. Similarly, as the crime level increases the amount of harm to society will increase. In this category, Becker also discusses why crimes are committed. To commit a crime an individual must perceive greater benefits than costs. Benefits are determined by the probability of success and whatever they may gain from the crime they commit. Costs are determined by the probability of getting caught, value of freedom if convicted, and loss of income if convicted. An individual will choose to commit a crime when the benefits are greater than the costs. This will affect society because to offenders the value of gain will increase as the number of offenses increase. The cost of the crime to society is the difference the harm and gain of the offense. Eventually an offender’s marginal gains will decrease, due to diminishing marginal returns, causing more harm than gain for both the offender and

As talked about earlier the expectancy of being caught and punished will reduce the loss from crimes committed, which will increase social welfare. He asks, “What determines the increase in welfare, that is “effectiveness”, of public efforts to discourage offenses?” Social welfare is measured by income in this case. Effectiveness is defined as a ratio of the maximum increase of income to the increase if all offenses causing damages were eradicated. A practical increase is determined by choosing specific values of probability of conviction and the cost of punishment. However, effectiveness will differ between crimes because different crimes have different probabilities of conviction and different costs of