Centro de Documentação da PJ
Monografia
 CD258 |
How much crime is drug-related? [Documento electrónico] : history, limitations, and potential improvements of estimation methods / Jonathan P. Caulkins, Mark A.R. Kleiman.- [Rockville, MD] : National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS), 2014.- 1 CD-ROM ; 12 cm
Research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice, Award Number: 2011-IJ-CX-K059. Ficheiro de 1,01 MB em formato PDF (44 p.).
TRÁFICO DE DROGA, COMBATE À DROGA, CONTROLO DE DROGA, ANÁLISE DA INFORMAÇÃO
Estimating the total societal burden or “cost” of drug-related crime entails two tasks: measuring the total cost of all crime and determining the portion of crime that is “drug-related.” This article and “The Cost of Crime” delve into these tasks, but in the opposite order. For reasons of exposition that will only become apparent as we proceed, it is useful to start by investigating the relationship between drugs and crime, and then in “The Cost of Crime” (Caulkins and Kleiman, 2013) to examine the relationship between crime and its costs. The literature on drugs-crime connections is vast. For reviews, see Chaiken and Chaiken, 1990; Roth, 1994; Boyum and Kleiman, 2001; Boyum and Reuter 2005; Bennett and Holloway 2005, 2009; Boyum et al., 2011; and Caulkins and Kleiman, 2011. We seek to draw on but in no way summarize the wisdom of that universe. Our target is much narrower: improving our understanding of the proportion of street crime in the U.S. that should be thought of as caused directly or indirectly by drug use. There is a literature that attempts to answer this narrower question by estimating so-called drug attribution factors (DAFs). The history and calculation of DAFs are discussed more thoroughly below, but initially they can be thought of as estimates of the proportion of crime attributable to illicit drug use. Our thesis is that DAFs are flawed in two respects. First, they suffer from a variety of correctable technical limitations, such as being based on interviews with current inmates, which over-samples those with long sentences relative to interviewing an intake cohort of new prisoners. Second, they overlook important indirect causal pathways through which drug use causes crime. Because we do not believe it is possible to quantify all of these indirect pathways, we recommend a two-layer approach to thinking about the amount of drug-related crime: a quantified estimate of the amount of crime that is directly and contemporaneously caused by drug-related activity plus a qualitative framework describing previously neglected indirect effects to remind us of the limits of the quantification. Causality here should be understood in the standard sense. How much less crime would there have been had the drug use never existed? Or, equivalently, how much less crime would there be in a hypothetical universe that is identical to our own but for that drug use? A few definitional notes are in order. We interpret our scope as including crimes committed by drug dealers, such as violence perpetrated to acquire or defend drug selling “turf.” The logic model is that drug use, or perhaps more properly the demand underpinning that drug use, is a necessary precondition for drug production and distribution. Without the demand for drugs, there is no drug supply industry, and thus no related crimes. In that sense, drug users are responsible for the sins of the sellers, not the other way around. While there was once a notion that drug dealers hook unsuspecting and helpless naïfs to drum up business (hence, the term “drug pusher”), that myth has long since been dispelled (Kaplan, 1983). Arguably, attempts to quantify the crime and violence caused by drug production and distribution are too ambitious, even with regard to crimes generated directly by those supply-side activities. However, while narrowing the scope to crimes committed by users might improve precision, it would also strip the estimates of all meaning. It would be akin to the public health community estimating only the tobacco-related deaths due to heart disease because the lung cancer deaths are too hard to quantify.