A new course on the Economics of Crime is giving Brock students a chance to explore how incentives affect decision-making related to criminal activity.

“Economics isn’t just about the stock market,” says Assistant Professor Taylor Wright, who is teaching ECON 3P41 for the first time this semester. “The economics of crime is a really interesting topic, and the field of economics actually has a lot to offer when we’re talking about how individuals make decisions.”

The course will look at both economic impacts of crime and how economic tools and theories can shed light on issues in the criminal justice system. Wright says that looking at the incentives and disincentives that shape choices helps students explore why crime happens and how it can be addressed.

“To understand how individuals decide whether or not to commit a crime in the first place, we can use economic reasoning to understand how people are going to respond to incentives,” he says. “We can look at what kind of tools governments have at their disposal — sticks, such as the probability of apprehension and conviction or the severity of sanctions, as well as carrots, such as increasing access to stable employment opportunities — to make committing crimes less appealing.”

While economists are able to crunch data and uncover patterns that tell a more complete story when it comes to criminal activity, Wright says it can be tricky to isolate only the variables they want to study when testing the theoretical side of the economics of crime against the existing data.

He says economists are always looking for situations that mimic experiments so they can rule out other explanations and rigorously test their models.

When it comes to the kinds of topics students can expect to examine, Wright offers the example of random case assignment to judges in the criminal justice system.

“If some judges are more strict and some are more lenient, even given the same case characteristics, then essentially being assigned to a strict judge means being randomly assigned a longer sentence,” he says. “We can look downstream and see what happens to labour market outcomes and reoffending to understand the actual deterrent impacts of criminal sentencing. It’s a chance to see the real effects of these policies after stripping away other factors.”

Later in the semester, students will choose a topic related to the economics of crime and write a policy memo based on their findings.

“Students will write policy memos to explain to executives at the Department of Justice or to members of parliament what policy options might be useful if they’re looking to tackle a specific issue,” says Wright. “It will be really exciting to see what topics students pick, whether they’re drawn from the current public discourse or something that might be personal to them, which is also very powerful.”

Wright says the course is ideal for people interested in understanding criminal behaviour and its potential determinants from an economic lens, and that apart from second-year statistics, no extensive background in economics theory or tools is needed.

“This course is for anyone interested in understanding how economic thinking might be able to help in a context that is different from the traditional business applications of economics,” he says.