Table 6

Estimates of Crime Reduction Welfare Gains from FSP (1964–1974) among 18–24-Year-Olds

				Discounted Social Benefits ($ Million 2015)
	Cost Estimate ($ Million 2015)	Est. Δ Arrests (1,000s)	Est. Δ Crimes (1,000s)	0%	3%	5%	7%
McCollister, French, and Fang (2010) crime cost estimates
Murder	9.89	−50	−48	477,195	273,092	190,469	134,036
Robbery	0.05	−66	−224	10,423	5,965	4,160	2,928
Assault	0.12	−101	−192	22,598	12,933	9,020	6,347
			Total:	510,216	291,990	203,650	143,311
Low crime cost estimates
Murder	4.56	−50	−48	220,176	126,004	87,882	61,844
Robbery	0.02	−66	−224	4,580	2,621	1,828	1,286
Assault	0.02	−101	−192	4,530	2,592	1,808	1,272
			Total:	229,285	131,217	91,518	64,402

Notes: Table shows back-of-the-envelope calculations of the discounted social benefits of later crime reduction from the 1964–1974 implementation of the FSP. Social cost estimates for each crime type (Column 1) are adopted from the preferred estimates of McCollister, French, and Fang (2010) and the lowest estimates from their literature review, both of which may be underestimates. The former estimates include victimization costs, criminal justice system costs, and the lost value of criminals’ time, but do not include private expenditures on crime prevention. The latter estimates include only victimization costs. The estimates of the change in arrests due to FSP implementation (Column 2) are based on the coefficient estimates from Equation 1 for each offense (contained in Table 5). The change in arrests is converted to a change in offenses (Column 3) using the ratio of offenses to arrests for each offense type. This ratio is operationalized conservatively as the minimum of the annual ratio of the UCR national estimate of offenses known to the UCR national estimate of arrests for 1980–2000 for the given offense. For murder/manslaughter this ratio is less than one due to either the UCR imputation process or a high rate of offenders per murder/manslaughter offense. This results in our estimated changes in murder/manslaughter arrests exceeding our estimated changes in murder/manslaughter offenses, potentially leading us to underestimate the social benefit from reductions in murder/manslaughter. Estimates of the discounted social benefit are produced by multiplying the dollar value of each offense’s social cost by the change in offenses implied by our estimates, discounted using various social discount rates. See Online Appendix C for details.