The Costs and Benefits of Agricultural Crime Prevention

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Abstract

Agricultural crime, including theft of farming-related commodities, supplies, and equipment, causes billions of dollars of losses each year to farmers, insurers, and consumers. Drawing on analyses of law enforcement, farm survey, site visit, and interview data, the Urban Institute and Florida State University evaluated the theory and impacts of a promising initiative in California—the Agricultural Crime, Technology, Information, and Operations Network (ACTION) project (www.agcrime.net)—aimed at addressing this problem. ACTION collects and analyzes agricultural crime data; encourages and enables information-sharing among law enforcement agencies and prosecutors within and across counties; educates the public and farmers about agricultural crime and how to combat it; marks equipment with owner applied numbers (OANs); and promotes aggressive law enforcement and prosecution. This policy brief describes the application of cost-benefit analysis to agricultural crime prevention programs, and shows that ACTION contributed to farmers investing more to protect their property.

Introduction

Offenders and potential offenders modify their criminal behavior in response both to changes in their risk of detection and capture and to the expected severity of punishment. Crime prevention programs seek to reduce crime either by reducing the benefits from offending or by increasing the costs of offending by raising the likelihood of detection. The Agricultural Crime Technology Information and Operations Network (ACTION) is a crime prevention initiative that applies both strategies through intensive policing and prosecution, surveillance equipment, information dissemination, and marking of equipment, supplies, and livestock to reduce agricultural crime in California’s Central Valley. The key question for policymakers interested in crime prevention initiatives such as ACTION is whether the costs of the program are offset by the gains (benefits) from any crime reductions that result.

Crime in the agricultural sector is significant, totaling an estimated five billion in annual losses (Swanson et al. 2002:628). Agricultural crimes include theft of livestock, crops, equipment, chemicals, and pesticides, as well as vandalism and other forms of property crime (Mears et al. 2007). Costs of crime are passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices or are absorbed by farmers in the form of lower profits. Despite the magnitude of crime in this sector, agricultural crime has received very little attention from criminologists and criminal justice policymakers (Barclay 2001; Weisheit and Donnermeyer 2000).

This policy brief provides an introduction to cost-benefit analysis (CBA) as a means of measuring the effectiveness of ACTION and other such initiatives. The first section describes how CBA—a methodology that compares the costs and benefits of policies and programs to assess their economic efficiency—can be used to measure the economic impact of agricultural crime prevention initiatives. Next, the challenges and opportunities particular to using CBA to evaluate crime prevention programs are developed. The final section describes the costbenefit analysis of ACTION.

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The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

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