Cost of Crime

I have been curious what the cost of crime is in the US and I came across a couple of estimates:

Duke University and CFO Magazine recently surveyed corporate chief financial officers, who reported spending 2.8 percent of total revenue on terrorism-related measures, up from 1.7 percent before 9/11 (with a median firm size of $2.1 billion in annual sales, that would translate to $59 million a year). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention magazine calculated the health-related costs of rape, physical assault, stalking and homicide by intimate partners at $8.8 billion a year. The National Crime Prevention Council estimated the cost of crime at $428 billion a year.

David Anderson, associate professor of economics at Centre College in Danville, Ky., in a 1999 study came up with a figure of $1.7 trillion a year, a figure which includes everything from locks and security systems to decreased property values that occur in high-crime areas and the cost of lost productivity from people engaged in criminal activity or jailed instead of doing useful work.

Hopefully I will have time later to look into these numbers and see how they were calculated.

via Seattle PI