• 1: Introduction


• 2: The Centrality of Harm and Its Reduction to Crime and Societal Responses to Crime


• 3: Prior Attempts to Assess Harm and the Challenges They Have Encountered


• 4: A Framework to Assess the Harms of Crime


• 5: Application of the Framework to Cocaine Trafficking in Belgium (with Comparisons to other Applications to Drug and Human Trafficking in Europe)


• 6: Application of the Framework to Coca Cultivation and Processing in Colombia


• 7: The Case for Harm and Harm Assessment

Victoria A. Greenfield, Senior Economist with the RAND Corporation, specializes in national security and international social and economic issues, including transnational crime, with research spanning drug production and trafficking, human smuggling, chemical diversion, and cybersecurity. Greenfield completed the research for this book and chaired the National Academies' committee on reducing the threat of improvised explosive device attacks as a visiting scholar in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University. Previously, she held the Admiral Crowe Chair in the Economics of the Defense Industrial Base at the US Naval Academy and served in senior positions with the President's Council of Economic Advisers and US Department of State.
Letizia Paoli is the Chair of the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at the KU Leuven Faculty of Law and Criminology and a Life Member at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Since the 1990s she has published extensively on organized crime and illegal drugs and on related control policies. More recently, she has also researched the harms of crime, public perceptions of crime seriousness, and corporate and sports-related crime. Paoli is the recipient of the Sellin & Glueck Award of the American Society of Criminology and of the Distinguished Scholar Award of the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime. In 2020 she became a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Science and Arts.

Assessing the Harms of Crime will provide a firm analytical foundation for making normative decisions about criminal and related policy, taking harm-and its reduction-as a conceptual starting point and supplying the means for systematic, empirical analysis in a harm assessment framework.