Law in Failure: Human Suffering Caused by Crime Allowed by the Lawyer Profession: 7 Billlion Days Lost to Suffering

 

The Human Suffering Caused by 2.7 Billion Crimes a Year

Money does not adequately measure crime. A dollar estimate can describe stolen property, medical bills, lost production, criminal-justice spending, or reduced real-estate values. It cannot directly describe terror during an assault, years of PTSD after sexual violence, chronic pain, lost independence, a child’s damaged development, a family’s grief after homicide, or the life opportunities eliminated by addiction, disability, and premature death.

A separate human-suffering ledger is therefore necessary.

Applying such a ledger to the previously developed model of 2.741 billion statutory offenses per year produces a central estimate of approximately:

18.3 million human-suffering-equivalent years caused by one year’s crimes.

That is equivalent to approximately 6.68 billion full-health-and-normal-life days lost across victims, families, and other directly affected people. It does not mean that 18.3 million people each suffer for exactly one year. One person may lose decades of healthy life, while millions of others may experience smaller but still real losses.

Because several crime categories lack reliable national suffering data, a reasonable sensitivity range is:

Scenario	Human-suffering-equivalent years
Low	12.0 million
Central	18.3 million
High	29.0 million

These are modeling scenarios, not statistical confidence intervals.

A unit for measuring suffering

The proposed unit is a human-suffering-equivalent year, or HSEY:

One HSEY equals the loss of one year of full physical health, psychological health, function, autonomy, relationships, and ordinary life opportunity.

This builds on the disability-adjusted life year. The World Health Organization defines one DALY as the equivalent of one full year of health lost. DALYs combine years of life lost through premature death with healthy years lost through disability or illness.

The broader HSEY adds losses that conventional health measures may incompletely capture:

• Grief and trauma suffered by family members and close friends
• Loss of autonomy, safety, stability, relationships, achievement, and enjoyment
• Lost childhood, education, family life, employment identity, and other life opportunities
• Fear and social withdrawal that may occur without a diagnosed disease
• The consequences of coercion, captivity, exploitation, humiliation, and loss of control

An HSEY is not assigned a dollar value in this analysis.

For example:

• One year lived with a 50% reduction in health and normal functioning equals approximately 0.5 HSEY.
• Ten years lived with a 10% reduction equal approximately 1 HSEY.
• Ten family members who each lose 10% of normal psychological well-being for one year collectively lose approximately 1 HSEY.
• A premature death may eliminate several decades of future healthy life and opportunity, although the deceased person does not consciously experience pain after death.

The dimensions that should be measured

1. Physical pain and acute distress

Pain must be measured by both intensity and duration. A brief painful injury and years of chronic neuropathic pain cannot be treated alike. Useful measures include pain intensity, pain interference, sleep disruption, fatigue, and the extent to which pain prevents normal activity.

The PROMIS-29 profile measures physical function, fatigue, pain interference, pain intensity, sleep disturbance, depression, anxiety, and ability to participate in social activities.

2. PTSD and other psychological injury

The psychological category includes:

• PTSD
• Depression
• Anxiety and panic
• Hypervigilance
• Shame and humiliation
• Intrusive memories
• Nightmares
• Emotional numbness
• Fear of recurrence
• Loss of trust
• Suicidal thoughts
• Substance use arising after victimization

The Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale, or CAPS-5, is regarded by the Department of Veterans Affairs as the gold-standard PTSD assessment. It measures symptoms, duration, distress, and effects on social and occupational functioning.

The importance of duration is illustrated by sexual violence. A meta-analysis of 22 prospective samples involving 2,106 sexual-assault survivors estimated that approximately 74.6% met PTSD criteria at the initial one-month assessment and 41.5% still met the criteria at 12 months.

3. Loss of physical, cognitive, and social function

Function is different from pain. A victim may have little pain but be unable to walk, concentrate, sleep, care for children, work, attend school, maintain relationships, or live independently.

The WHO Disability Assessment Schedule measures six major areas:

1. Cognition and communication
2. Mobility
3. Self-care
4. Interactions with other people
5. Household, school, and work activities
6. Participation in community life

WHODAS produces standardized disability scores and can be administered directly or through an appropriate proxy when necessary.

4. Lost life opportunities and autonomy

Crime may alter the course of a life even after physical injuries heal. A victim may abandon education, decline a job, avoid relationships, stop traveling, lose custody of children, become dependent on others, or spend decades organizing life around fear and disability.

The ICECAP-A capability measure provides one framework for measuring this broader loss. It assesses:

• Stability
• Attachment
• Achievement
• Autonomy
• Enjoyment

These dimensions are useful because crime can destroy a person’s ability to live normally even when a conventional medical diagnosis captures only part of the damage.

Premature death belongs primarily in this category. Death eliminates future health, relationships, projects, choices, parenthood, accomplishments, pleasure, and contribution. This is lost life opportunity, not post-death experienced pain.

5. Suffering of families and close associates

Victimization often produces several concentric circles of suffering:

• The direct victim
• Spouse, parents, children, siblings, and close friends
• Caregivers
• Witnesses
• Coworkers, classmates, or neighbors
• People repeatedly exposed to the continuing danger

Family members may experience PTSD, prolonged grief, depression, guilt, financial insecurity, caregiver exhaustion, disrupted schooling, family conflict, and fear that the crime will recur.

Research on homicide bereavement illustrates the effect. One nationally representative study found that 23.3% of immediate family survivors developed homicide-related PTSD during their lifetime. Another review estimated that each homicide affects approximately three to ten loved ones and reported prolonged or complicated grief in about 23% of affected adults two years afterward.

Family suffering must be measured directly rather than presumed to equal the victim’s suffering.

The calculation

For every affected person, the basic calculation is:

$$\text{HSEY}= \text{years of future life lost} + \int \bigl(1-\text{health-and-capability level over time}\bigr)\,dt$$

The calculation is performed separately for:

1. The direct victim
2. Family members and close associates
3. Other people with demonstrated exposure and measurable harm

Pain, PTSD, disability, and loss of opportunity frequently overlap. They therefore cannot simply be added as though they were independent diseases. A person with chronic pain, PTSD, insomnia, and unemployment should receive one integrated health-and-capability decrement, with that decrement allocated among the causal dimensions for reporting purposes.

Repeated offenses against the same person also require adjustment. Ten threatening messages during a single stalking course should not automatically be treated as ten independent lifetime cases of PTSD.

Application to the 2.741-billion-offense model

The underlying crime model contains 2.491 billion modeled events, plus 250 million additional attempts, conspiracies, solicitations, facilitation, and accessory offenses, producing a total of 2.741 billion statutory offenses. It is an annual scenario model rather than an official observed crime count.

The model assigns each underlying victimization, transaction, unlawful trip, attack, disappearance, or criminal scheme to one primary category.

For the suffering calculation:

• The burden is measured over the victim’s and family’s remaining lives, even though the offenses occurred during one year.
• High-frequency transactions receive small expected weights.
• Drug suffering is estimated from addiction, overdose, disability, and family burden and then allocated across the transaction count. It is not assumed that each drug purchase independently causes a day of suffering.
• Impaired-driving burden is an expected average across all unlawful trips; most do not produce a crash, while a small number produce death or catastrophic disability.
• The 250 million additional statutory offenses receive no separate central suffering allocation because their human harm is generally attached to the underlying victimization or criminal enterprise. A failed attempt that independently terrorizes or injures a victim should instead be counted under assault, threats, sexual offenses, or the appropriate substantive category.

The model’s existing overlap rules similarly place contact sexual abuse in the sexual-offense category, later CSAM possession or distribution in the CSAM category, and cyber-enabled financial loss in one primary category rather than several.

Human suffering by dimension

Dimension of suffering	Central HSEY estimate	Share
Physical pain and acute distress	2,430,320	13.3%
PTSD, depression, fear, and other psychological injury	5,883,500	32.1%
Loss of physical, cognitive, and social function	2,488,545	13.6%
Premature death and lost life opportunities	4,593,485	25.1%
Suffering of family members and close associates	2,910,750	15.9%
Total	18,306,600	100%

Psychological injury is the largest dimension. However, combining loss of function and loss of life opportunity produces more than 7 million lost years, demonstrating that the greatest injury is often not temporary pain. It is the permanent alteration or destruction of a person’s life.

Estimated suffering by crime category

The unit weights below are central modeling assumptions. They represent the combined average effect across direct victims, affected families, and lost future life. They do not claim that every event in a category causes identical suffering.

Violent, personal, property, and drug offenses

Crime category	Annual events	Average HSEY per event	Total HSEY
Concealed killings and crime-linked disappearances	5,000	37.500	187,500
Unreported assault and battery	2,750,000	0.105	288,750
Sexual offenses	8,000,000	0.750	6,000,000
Child, elder, and dependent-person abuse or neglect	8,000,000	0.300	2,400,000
Threats, stalking, harassment, and intimidation	8,000,000	0.060	480,000
Trafficking, kidnapping, and unlawful confinement	100,000	3.500	350,000
Unreported personal and household-property crime	8,890,000	0.005	44,450
Theft and property crime against businesses and organizations	73,000,000	0.0005	36,500
Fraud, scams, and identity crime	50,000,000	0.012	600,000
Unauthorized computer access and other cybercrime	15,000,000	0.002	30,000
Child sexual-abuse material and related exploitation	1,900,000	0.050	95,000
Illegal drug-market transactions	1,880,000,000	0.00266 allocated	5,000,000
Weapons and explosives offenses	1,000,000	0.005	5,000

The event counts reproduce the first part of the central crime model.

The drug estimate is an aggregate allocation rather than a literal effect per purchase. As one empirical anchor, CDC data identified 2.129 million people with opioid-use disorder and 47,600 fatal opioid overdoses in 2017. The human burden includes diminished quality of life, premature death, and effects on spouses and families, apart from monetary costs.

Organized, institutional, regulatory, and transportation offenses

Crime category	Annual events	Average HSEY per event	Total HSEY
Other illicit markets and organized crime	250,000,000	0.002	500,000
Financial, professional, and corporate crime	2,000,000	0.600	1,200,000
Criminal tax and revenue offenses	2,300,000	0.003	6,900
Criminal wage, labor, and workplace violations	3,000,000	0.030	90,000
Public corruption and criminal abuse of authority	25,000	0.500	12,500
Perjury, evidence offenses, obstruction, and witness intimidation	500,000	0.100	50,000
Environmental, wildlife, natural-resource, and animal crime	500,000	0.020	10,000
Healthcare, pharmaceutical, food, and consumer-safety crime	5,000,000	0.050	250,000
Impaired driving and other serious transportation crimes	150,000,000	0.004 expected	600,000
Criminal smuggling, document, customs, immigration, and border offenses	1,000,000	0.050	50,000
National-security and transnational offenses	20,000	0.500	10,000
Minor local and public-order crimes omitted from major totals	20,000,000	0.0005	10,000
Additional attempts, conspiracies, solicitation, facilitation, and accessory offenses	250,000,000	0 additional	0
Total, all categories	2,740,990,000	—	18,306,600

The second set of event counts and the separate statutory-offense allowance come from the remaining portion of the central model.

Where most suffering occurs

Leading source	HSEY	Share of total
Sexual offenses	6.00 million	32.8%
Illegal drug markets, addiction, and overdose	5.00 million	27.3%
Child, elder, and dependent-person abuse or neglect	2.40 million	13.1%
Financial, professional, and corporate crime	1.20 million	6.6%
Fraud, scams, and identity crime	600,000	3.3%
Impaired driving and serious transportation crime	600,000	3.3%

The four largest categories account for approximately 14.6 million HSEYs, or almost 80% of the central total.

This result shows why crime counts alone are inadequate. Drug transactions dominate the number of offenses, but sexual violence, abuse, addiction, death, and disabling institutional crimes dominate the suffering.

Calibration against published research

A peer-reviewed national study estimated that personal and property crimes occurring in the United States during 2017 caused 10.9 million quality-adjusted life years to be lost. Sexual violence, physical assault and robbery, and child maltreatment were the principal contributors. The study excluded crimes against businesses and most white-collar and corporate offenses.

That 10.9-million-QALY result is not directly interchangeable with the present model because the studies use different categories, years, counts, and assumptions. It nevertheless provides an important calibration check. A broader model that includes drug-market harm, family spillovers, corporate crime, cybercrime, trafficking, workplace offenses, and loss of capability would reasonably produce a result above 10.9 million.

The central 18.3-million-HSEY result is therefore plausible as a broad scenario, but it should not be presented as an observed national statistic.

What is deliberately excluded

The suffering total does not include:

• Stolen money or property
• Criminal-justice expenditures
• Medical bills
• Lost tax revenue
• Reduced real-estate values
• Lost wages or GDP merely as money
• Foregone investment returns
• Punishment or imprisonment costs
• The suffering of offenders arising solely from arrest or punishment
• Animal suffering, because this calculation is limited to human suffering

Loss of employment can still be included when it destroys a person’s identity, autonomy, relationships, security, or life plans. The income loss itself remains in the economic ledger.

Real-estate decline is also excluded. Fear, displacement, and loss of community attachment may be included as human suffering, but the property-price reduction cannot be counted again as suffering.

Conclusion

The human cost of crime should be reported separately from its financial cost. Under a transparent central model, one year containing approximately 2.741 billion statutory offenses causes an estimated:

• 2.43 million years of pain and acute distress
• 5.88 million years of PTSD and other psychological suffering
• 2.49 million years of lost function
• 4.59 million years of lost life and opportunity
• 2.91 million years of suffering among families and close associates

The total is:

Approximately 18.3 million human-suffering-equivalent years, or 6.68 billion full-health-and-normal-life days, caused by one annual cohort of crimes.

A defensible sensitivity range is approximately 12 million to 29 million years. The central figure is separate from the previously calculated economic burden: it expresses the destruction of health, peace of mind, independence, relationships, future life, and normal human opportunity without converting that suffering into dollars.