Economic Impact
In 1993, the UK prison population was 44,000. In 2007, it was over 83,000. This trend is set to continue; the government has recently announced an extra £3.8 billion to create 20,000 more prison places. In the UK, it is estimated that each new prison place costs £119,000 and the annual average cost for each prisoner exceeds £40,000 (Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, 2007). The total burden of costs of crime against individuals and households in England and Wales during 2003-2004 (the most up-to-date figures we could find on record) was estimated by the British Home Office to be around £36.2 billion.
The unit costs for various common crimes are shown below:
Crime |
Average unit cost (2003) |
Violence Against the person |
£10,407 |
Homicide - Serious wounding - Other wounding |
£1,458,975 - £21,422 - £8,056 |
Sexual offences |
£31,438 |
Common assault |
£1,440 |
Robbery |
£7,282 |
Burglary in a dwelling |
£3,268 |
Theft - Not vehicle - Of a vehicle - From a vehicle - Attempted vehicle theft |
£844 - £634 - £4,138 - £858 - £510 |
Criminal damage |
£866 |
The economic impact of crime is not just experienced by victims but also by wider society through consumption of public funds. These costs might be reduced or avoided if crime is anticipated and designed against. Social and service design may contribute to reductions in drug dependency or lead to increased opportunities for those that might otherwise be socially or economically excluded, another contributing factor to increased likelihood of offending.
Similarly, research relating to the cost of alternatives to prison indicates that they seem to deliver a better return on public money. Residential drug treatment programmes, for example, offer a £200,000 net benefit over prison over the lifetime on an offender. This is largely due to drug treatment programmes being cheaper to run than incarceration systems and because they deliver lower re-offending rates. Similarly, using surveillance and tagging instead of prison cells saves £125,000 per convict (Matrix Knowledge Group, 2007).