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Eur J Crim Policy Res (2012) 18:235237
DOI 10.1007/s10610-011-9159-6
Cost-Benefit Analysis and Crime Control
The Urban Institute Press, Washington DC, Edited by John K. Roman, Terence Dunworth and Kevin Marsh 2010
Michele Riccardi
Published online: 21 October 2011# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
The book Cost-Benefit Analysis and Crime Control, edited by Roman, Dunworth and Marsh, constitutes a useful guide for researchers and policymakers in the assessment of costs and benefits of crime prevention policies and criminal justice (CJ) programs.
Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) techniques aim at valuing the expected costs, effects and benefits of projects, programmes and policies into a single metric, so as to allow the comparison between different policy options.
CBA has been widely adopted for a long time in many domains of public policy, in particular for evaluating tax programmes, transportation policies, environmental issues and healthcare programmes (Kentaro et al. 2004 for a review).
However in recent years an increasing need for this kind of evaluation instrument has been asked also in the field of criminal justice and crime prevention, as criminal justice researchers and policymakers will increasingly be confronted with cost effectiveness and benefit-cost analysis whether they like it or not (Cohen 2000, 266).
Despite the increasing importance of CBA in this domain, however, a lack of reliable guides for CBA applications to crime control policies must be acknowledged. The book Cost-Benefit Analysis and Crime Control aims to fill this gap, intending to provide a toolkit for researchers, LEA officers and policymakers who are asked to evaluate and compare crime prevention and criminal justice programmes.
The book addresses all the most important issues and criticalities related to CBA applications in this field. Chapter 1, written by Kevin Marsh, provides a review of the most recent economic evaluations of CJ interventions, with the aim, on the one hand, to update Welsh and Farrington 2000 and, on the other, to compare UK...