Garoupa, Nuno --- "The economics of harmonizing law enforcement" [2002] ELECD 13; in Marciano, Alain; Josselin, Jean-Michel (eds), "The Economics of Harmonizing European Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2002)

Book Title: The Economics of Harmonizing European Law

Editor(s): Marciano, Alain; Josselin, Jean-Michel

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781840646085

Section: Chapter 6

Section Title: The economics of harmonizing law enforcement

Author(s): Garoupa, Nuno

Number of pages: 12

Extract:

6. The economics of harmonizing
law enforcement
Nuno Garoupa

6.1 INTRODUCTION
The economic analysis of crime and criminal law is now a well-established
field within the economic analysis of law. If the large body of literature
surveyed by Garoupa (1997a) and Polinsky and Shavell (2000b) is not suffi-
cient demonstration, a quick look at the current textbooks of law and econom-
ics justifies the observation.
The proposition that crime rates respond to risks and benefits is called the
deterrence hypothesis. It is an application of the theory of demand to one of
the most important issues in criminal justice. The hypothesis asserts that
people respond significantly to the incentives created by the criminal justice
system. If so, increasing the resources that society devotes to the arrest,
conviction and punishment of criminals will reduce the amount, and social
costs, of crime. As many scholars note, there is a competing hypothesis that
holds that criminals are not deterred by variations in the certainty and severity
of punishment. Rather, this hypothesis holds that crime is caused by a complex
set of socio-economic and biological factors, and that the appropriate way to
reduce the amount of crime and thus lower the costs of crime is to divert
resources into channels that attack these root causes of crime.
Although recent public debate has tended to frame these two hypotheses as
mutually exclusive, we argue that it is more sensible to view them as comple-
mentary in which case the optimal public policy ...