Free Markets and the Costs of Crime: An Audit of England and Wales

Abstract

Elliott Currie, one of the foremost critics of conservative penal policies in the United States, warned a British audience of the continuing rapid acceleration of crime rates that were to be expected in this country, particularly if government attitudes and policies did not change with respect to the ‘freeing of market forces’ (Currie, this volume). The United States was itself a laboratory, he argued, in which there could be identified a series of unmitigated disasters that would follow, in respect of rising poverty and homelessness, increases in preventable diseases, ‘galloping’ innercity drug use and rapid increases in crimes of violence and crimes against property, if the forces of the free market being unleashed in Britain were not quickly harnessed in the social interest. Whilst a ‘market economy’ may be the most efficient known instrument for organising the allocation of goods and services in a modern society, what was at issue were the consequences of allowing ‘the pursuit of private gain’ per se to become ‘the organizing principle for all areas of social life’ (ibid.). In the last years of the Bush administration the United States was being transformed into what Currie has termed ‘a market society’, where ‘all other principles of social or institutional organization become eroded or subordinated to the overarching one of private gain’ (ibid.).