The Cost of Pain Suffering from Crime in Canada

6. Concluding Remarks

The major goal of this study is to estimate the cost of the pain and suffering borne by crime victims for different types of crime, including homicide, assault, sexual offences, robbery, breaking and entering, motor vehicle theft, non-vehicle theft, vandalism, drug offences, and Criminal Code traffic offences. The methodology developed in this study proposed that an estimation of the cost of pain and suffering requires information on the number of incidents for each type of crime, the proportion of victims feeling worried about safety, and the value of perceived and actual mental distress as a result of the crime experience.

For the purpose of the present study, information on the number of crime incidents was obtained from police statistics recorded in the UCR and from the GSS on victimization. There were limitations with both of these data sources. While police statistics tend to underestimate the actual number of crime incidents due to underreporting and police resource constraints, information obtained from victimization surveys such as the GSS may present sample selection problems which can bias the estimation. For the proportion of victims feeling worried about safety, information from the GSS about victims' perceptions regarding personal safety was used. With regard to the average cost of pain and suffering, estimates from previous literature were used as the guideline. The implicit average value of human life based on non-fatal injuries was estimated to be $72,000. For fatal injuries, it was estimated to be between $4.1 million to $9.6 million.

The estimated costs of pain and suffering for crime victims were shown to be much higher when the calculation was based on information from the GSS on victimization than when it was based on police statistics. The more conservative estimates were obtained based on the assumption that the fear experienced by crime victims did not entail life threatening injuries. The estimated cost of pain and suffering from all crimes, based on non-fatal injuries, was $35.83 billion using the GSS data, compared to $9.83 billion using police-reported statistics. The estimated cost of pain and suffering from violent crimes, based on non-fatal injuries, was $20.43 billion using the GSS data and $5.84 billion using police-reported statistics. For property crimes, based on non-fatal injuries, it was $15.04 billion using the GSS data and $3.63 billion using police-reported statistics.

This study provides preliminary estimates of the cost of pain and suffering from different types of crime. Lack of available data, however, continues to be a major constraint encountered in this kind of analysis. The questions on safety in the GSS, for example, did not ask survey participants whether their worries about personal safety included worries about the loss of life. Logically, victims of violent crimes are more likely to be worried about life-threatening injuries than victims of other crimes. Victimization surveys with more carefully designed survey questions could lead to more precise estimations of the cost of pain and suffering.

The present study provides estimates of the cost of the pain and suffering of crime victims. The existence of crime, especially violent crime, is likely to instill fear in the general population as a whole. This implies that the total crime bill would be much larger if the fear of the general population were taken into account. Information from the GSS does not provide precise enough details to allow such additional costs to be estimated. To include an estimation of the cost of the pain and suffering resulting from each type of crime and borne by individuals who are not crime victims, specific questions would have to be included in the survey on whether an individual finds their personal safety at risk from a specific type of crime. Such information is not made available by the GSS on victimization.

In general, an estimation of the cost of the pain and suffering of crime victims requires precise information from a carefully designed victimization survey. Now that a methodology to estimate such cost has been developed, more effort should be devoted to designing better surveys that will lead to more precise cost estimates for various types of crime.