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Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
Time: 12:18 am
Time: 12:18 am
Results for drug abuse and crime (u.s.)
1 results foundAuthor: Caulkins, Jonathan P. Title: How Much Crime Is Drug-Related? History, Limitations, and Potential Improvements of Estimation Methods Summary: Drug-related crime imposes an enormous burden on society, but how big is enormous? And how do "we" as citizens, policy analysts, and policy makers develop sound intuitions for the scale of something that directly or indirectly affects hundreds of millions of people? This is the first in a series of articles (see "The Cost of Crime" by Caulkins and Kleiman, 2013, and "Drug Control and Reductions in Drug-Attributable Crime" by Caulkins, 2013) that attempt not so much to answer those questions in the sense of computing specific numerical estimates, but rather to provide guidance on how one should understand and interpret such estimates. After all, we do not lack for estimates of the annual costs of illicit drug use. The 2011 National Drug Intelligence Center report says the answer is $193 billion just for 2007 (NDIC, 2011); Henrick Harwood and his coauthors said that it was $97.7 billion just for 1992 (Harwood et al., 1998) - which would have been $135.5 billion in 2007 dollars. What is lacking is understanding of what such figures mean. Is one right, and the other wrong? Are either right? Is it possible to provide a single "right" number and, even if so, what response would the number imply, in terms of changing public policies? These figures dwarf everyday experience just as surely as do other "facts" that swirl around us. We measure computer memory in Gigabytes, where one Gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes. No one can count that high. If we counted one number per second every second of every day — without pausing to sleep, eat, or go to the bathroom — it would take 34 years to count to Giga. And Giga is by no means the largest scale that informed citizens need to comprehend. After all, it is "only" a billion. Although Senator Everett Dirksen probably never said it takes several billions before one is even talking real money, it is true that the cost of drug-related crime is so enormous that no one can even hope to estimate it to the nearest billion. "A billion here, a billion there" really is just round off error when trying to grapple with the enormity of the costs of drug-related crime. Great mischief blossoms when common sense retreats in awe of such quantities. Buried behind the estimates of the National Drug Intelligence Center and Harwood and his coauthors and others like them are value judgments and crude approximations and tacit assumptions that need to be surfaced. That a calculation produces a big number, and takes two hundred pages to explain, does not imply that the resulting number is accurate. Indeed, depending on a variety of factors, the opposite may be true. To be clear, we mean no disrespect toward the authors of these enormous estimates. The analysis is daunting, having some estimates is clearly better than pure ignorance, and we could do no better. Rather, the goal in these articles is to make consumers of these figures better able to appreciate and use them effectively. Details: Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University; Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles, 2014. 44p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed August 22, 2014 at: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/246404.pdf Year: 2014 Country: United States URL: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/246404.pdf Shelf Number: 133090 Keywords: Costs of CrimeDrug Abuse and AddictionDrug Abuse and Crime (U.S.)Drug EnforcementDrug Offenders |