The main purpose of Becker’s (1968) article on “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach” was to answer the normative questions of “how many resources and how much punishment should be used to enforce different kinds of legislation?” The social loss of crime was defined as the sum of the costs of crime, costs of arrests and convictions, and the costs of sanctions (imprisonment, parole, fines etc.). The probability and severity of punishment was determined in order to minimize this sum.