Media Clipping — April 15, 1999, The Daily News, Halifax

Group says crime costs N.S. taxpayers $1.2b

By Andrea MacDonald

Crime costs Nova Scotians $1.2 billion a year, says a group that wants to change the way we measure our wealth.

GPI Atlantic, a nonprofit economic research group based in Halifax, released a study yesterday that concludes the true cost of criminal activity is largely misunderstood.

The $44,000 a year it takes to keep an inmate in jail for a year, for example, more than pays for a high school teacher's salary.

The group spent two years looking at the money we spend on such things as court, theft insurance, police, and burglar alarms.

"The (aim) is to explicitly value a peaceful and secure society as an indicator of progress," said GPI director Ron Colman.

Traditional measures have counted high crime rates as good for the economy because they trigger more spending on prisons, police, and other security measures.

Colman's group sees crime as a liability to economic progress and is floating its Genuine Progress Index as a new model.

Colman pointed to a Wall Street Journal article that said the O.J. Simpson trial added $250 million to the American gross domestic product. The Oklahoma City bombing four years ago supposedly added billions.

"There's a real problem here when wars, accidents, and sickness, which are not signs of progress, actually make the economy grow and are misinterpreted as being signs of prosperity"

The $1.2 billion, which works out to about $3,500 per household annually, is "somewhat" conservative, but the good news is the cost of crime is going down.

The figures included some medical costs but not the cost of hospitalisation.

Also omitted were such things as the costs associated with impaired driving.

Statistics Canada is using the study as a pilot project.

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