Research On Crime Prevention And Control In The Perspective Of Economics

With the great social transformation of our country, the daily increasing crime problem has gotten more and more experts'and scholars'attention. And it's a new idea to study the crime causes, to prevent and control crime by the method of economic analysis.Economists hold that crime is caused by the continuous expansion of people's demand; however, the resources used to meet people's demand are limited. Since the dominant class in the society dreams to maximize their benefits, they often set down rules to prohibit other social members from satisfying their demand. If others breach these rules, they could commit a crime for they satisfy themselves without ruling class's allowance. Meanwhile, economists consider that the human is a kind of rational creature and all his behaviors follow a principle- toward benefits and away dangers. He pursues the maximization of his own benefits with a minimum of costs. Therefore, economists insist that the most effective way to prevent and control crime is to upgrade the crime cost as far as possible and degrade crime gains. When analyzing the causes of crime and formulating strategies of crime prevention and control, this thesis adopts the bounded rationality and stable preference theory of economics. And these theories are important tools to explain some crime phenomenonIn addition, the author thinks that since everyone lives in a particular environment, people's behaviors will inevitably be affected by the environment. It's also true for crime. Therefore, when analyzing the causes of crime and formulating crime strategies, we can't ignore the influence of environment on people.Precisely based on the theories above, this thesis regards the rational choice and cost-benefit theory as main line, and combines the features of bounded rationality and stable preferences of the"economic man". Furthermore, it analyzes the causes of crime and put forward strategies and suggestions for crime prevention and control after summarizing some existing factors that are likely to trigger crime in our country.This thesis consists of four parts. The first part analyzes the essence of crime behavior with economic theory, and proposes that the contradictory between the lack of resources and the great desire of people gives rise to the crime activities. Then, this part defines the"crime"economically.The second part analyzes a few economic theories which are used to explain the crime, including the stable personal preference, the bounded rationality when people make decisions, and the cost-benefit theory. The cost mainly contains the direct cost of crime, the cost of time and the risk cost. Since the crime gains do not limit in money, it includes some non-money reward, such as, personal service, goods, social status, power etc.The third part discusses the influence of external environment on people's behavior, as well as some potential factors in our country which can people commit a crime at present. These factors include poverty, unfairness, weak control ability of the society caused by migration of people in the macro aspect, stimulations given by a victim to a criminal in micro aspect and so on.According to the discussions above, the fourth part elaborates the main purpose of this thesis. It puts forward strategies of crime prevention and control, including eliminating and limiting potential crime factors, reducing crime income, increasing crime cost, guiding the preference of the social members etc.