Description
This book of readings is designed to accompany The Economics of Crime by Daryl A. Hellman and Neil O. Alper. The readings are arranged to follow the organization of that text and are selected to complement the material presented there. The readings represent both theoretical and empirical studies that examine issues which are central to the economic approach to either understanding criminal behavior or to developing effective public policy for dealing with crime. All of the papers, however, are not written by economists, nor do they all appear in the economics literature. In the book, as in the field, much of the important work relevant to the Economics of Crime comes from related disciplines.
The readings selected for the book were published over roughly a 30-year period, from 1964 to 1996. Thus the readings cover the period over which the Economics of Crime was developing as a field, from its beginnings in the mid to late 1960s to the present. An excerpt from Gary Becker's seminal paper which appeared in 1968 and which is often credited as the real beginning of the field is included in the collection, not only because of the subject matter covered, but because of the importance of this particular article to the development of the Economics of Crime as a legitimate area of inquiry.
