Harms After a Victimization: Experience & Needs (HAVEN)

A woman sitting cross-legged on a couch with her head in her hands

Problem

Official estimates of economic harms from criminal victimization are out of date and based on limited data.

A standard goal of criminal justice policy is to invest in responses to crime at a scale that is at least equal to the harms from victimization. Because crime harms not only the direct victim of a crime but also their family, friends, and community—and because there is harm to the victim(s) today and in the future—measurement of harms is challenging. Standard harms estimates are more than 25 years old and need an update. And, because of historical data limitations, those estimates exclude many important consequences of victimization, leading to underestimates of victims' harms and underinvestment in crime prevention.

Solution

NORC and Temple University used a new methodology to create more accurate, up-to-date harms estimates.

NORC partnered with Temple University to develop a new methodology for calculating the cost of crime victimization, linking statistical modeling of program effects with costs and benefits to jointly estimate harms. We also developed new measures of harms that include the costs of physical harms and the costs of mental and behavioral health harm, trauma, disability, and repeat victimization. Our study also explored whether victim services were under-resourced and under-utilized as a response to victimization. Integrated data, augmented by household survey data, were used to develop a new estimation model for the costs of crime victimization and the benefits of intervention(s).

Result

Catastrophic harms drive total victim costs.

Two critical findings emerged from our study:

Conventional studies of harms focus on acute care costs of emergency department and inpatient stays immediately following victimization, along with lost wages. However, HAVEN finds that post-release costs—including outpatient and long-term care, trauma, morbidity, disability, and lost quality of life—cause harms to victims that are larger than the acute harms.
Harms from victimizations are not normally distributed in the population. A relatively small proportion of cases (about 10 percent) have costs at least 10 times greater than the median. This “power law” distribution suggests that catastrophic costs in this subpopulation explain a disproportionate part of total victimization harms.

Given the critical policy implications of these harms estimates, HAVEN’s utility may increase over time with regular updates to data and methodology.