A new article that evaluated the impact of changes to the scope or generosity of social safety net programs concludes that public welfare policy has measurable benefits for public safety.

Written by Robert Apel, professor of criminology at Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice and published in the Annual Review of Criminology, the article considered dozens of studies conducted over the past decade, many of them outside the field of criminology.

The social safety net includes means-tested public assistance (e.g., cash welfare, food assistance, disability assistance, public health insurance) and contributory social insurance (e.g., unemployment insurance). In his article, Apel examines dozens of studies on the impact of the social safety net on crime and recidivism, concluding that there is little doubt that it can reduce crime and recidivism. Even in the United States, where scholars have long noted a comparatively underdeveloped welfare state, localities that take advantage of opportunities to expand the reach, services, or generosity of social safety net programs often experience a crime prevention dividend. The crime prevention benefits are occasionally large, include impacts on both violent and property crime, and unfold over immediate as well as extended time horizons, he says.

“A common refrain in the domain of crime policy is the futility of alleviating root causes,” according to Apel. “The key to preventing crime, according to that argument, is to focus on its proximate causes, use the levers of the criminal justice system to do so, and avoid wasting public money on antipoverty programs because these programs do not reduce crime.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he continued. “These crime prevention benefits represent pure spillover from public welfare to public safety.”