International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 139

International Journal on Criminology
identifying levels of violence in relation to certain social policies, dividing resources
optimally between social policies and public safety, and helping to direct these
public resources toward the social programs that will have the best public safety
outcomes. These authors also divide the costs of violence and criminality in Brazil
into three main categories: those related to crime-production (the cost of resources
used for criminal acts, the public costs of crime prevention and punishment,
including legal and incarceration costs), collateral costs for victims, and various
associated social costs, such as lower investment rates and higher unemployment.
To fully grasp the scale of crime in Brazil, we should recall that, according to
the Atlas da Violência 2017 (2017 Atlas of Violence), 2 the total number of terrorist
attacks in 2017 was lower than the number of homicides in Brazil during any given
three-week period: 3,314 terrorism-related deaths annually, compared to 3,400
murders every three weeks in Brazil.
From a strictly economic standpoint, every murder removes someone from
the workforce. In particular, when a young person is killed, they are prematurely
and permanently removed from the workforce, and the market loses around
550,000 reais (around $127,000) of production annually. This figure is even more
striking when we recall that around 70 percent of homicide victims are under thirty-four
years old. Taking into account the rise in murder rates since the 1990s, the
annual value of production losses due to homicides went from around eighteen
billion reais in 1996 to twenty-six billion reais in 2015, with cumulative losses exceeding
450 billion reais (around $104 billion). Temporary inabilities to work due
to injuries also cost around 2.6 billion reais annually. The medical and therapeutic
costs related to crime make up around 0.05 percent of Brazil's GDP.
Economic recession and violence in Brazil therefore form a vicious cycle:
recession leads to violence, and violence exacerbates the effects of the recession.
According to the newspaper O Globo, corporate spending on security reached 1
billion reais ($230 million) in the state of Rio de Janeiro alone in 2017. Unsurprisingly,
the greater the crime rate in a given geographic area, the more shops and
factories will shut down, a pattern that is especially evident in Rio. In the first half
of 2017, around 8,000 companies closed their doors in the region due to unsafe
conditions, a 38 percent increase compared to the same period the year before.
When Luiza, a retail group, announced that it was opening sixty new stores around
the country, it decided not to open any in Rio de Janeiro for this very reason.
L’Oréal stopped work at its plant in the Pavuna neighborhood, which has
the highest cargo theft rate in Rio, and transferred all activities to the state of São
Paulo. Sadly, a single street in Pavuna accounts for a full 1 percent of all incidents
of cargo theft reported in Brazil. During the first seven months of 2017, Rio de
2 Daniel Cerqueira, et al. Atlas da Violência 2017 (Rio de Janeiro: Institute of Applied Economic
Research, 2017). Available at: http://www.ipea.gov.br/portal/images/170602_atlas_da_violencia_
2017.pdf
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