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One of the most astonishing aspects of juvenile crime is how little is known about the impact of the policies and programs put in place to fight it. As a result of this almost complete absence of evaluation, the most commonly used strategies and programs for combating juvenile delinquency problems primarily rely on intuition and fads. Fortunately, as a result of the promising new research documented in "Changing Lives," these deficiencies in our juvenile justice system might quickly be remedied.Peter W. Greenwood here demonstrates that as crimes rates have fallen, researchers have identified more connections between specific risk factors and criminal behavior, while program developers have discovered a wide array of innovative interventions. The result of all this activity, he reveals, has been the revelation of a few prevention models that reduce crime much more cost-effectively than popular approaches such as tougher sentencing, D.A.R.E., boot camps, and "scared straight" programs. "Changing Lives "expertly presents the most promising of these prevention programs, their histories, the quality of evidence to support their effectiveness, the public policy programs involved in bringing them into wider use, and the potential for investments and developmental research to increase the range and quality of programs. Combining compassion with common sense and clear prose with the most cutting-edge research available on the efficiency of delinquency prevention programs, "Changing Lives" should be read by any policymaker, attorney, criminologist, social worker, psychologist, or other worker faced with the task of trying to help rehabilitate young offenders.

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Changing Lives

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

List of Illustrations............................................................................................viiForeword.........................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments..................................................................................................xiPart 1 The Nature and Effectiveness of Crime PreventionChapter 1 Delinquency Prevention as Crime Control................................................................3Chapter 2 The Evolution of an Idea...............................................................................10Chapter 3 Strategies for Measuring Program Impact................................................................28Chapter 4 What Works.............................................................................................49Chapter 5 What Doesn't Work......................................................................................84Part 2 Prevention and PolicyChapter 6 The Uses and Limits of Cost Effectiveness in Allocating Crime-Prevention Resources.....................119Chapter 7 Politics, Government, and Prevention...................................................................155Chapter 8 Programming in the Modern Juvenile Court...............................................................183References.......................................................................................................195Index............................................................................................................215

Chapter One

One of the most robust and consistent findings in criminological research is the connection between juvenile and adult crime. Almost all serious or chronic adult offenders have extensive juvenile records. The seriousness and extent of the juvenile record is one of the strongest risk factors for future criminality. So is arrest at an early age. A very high proportion of incarcerated felons were earlier in their lives placed by a juvenile court in what were meant to be therapeutic programs charged with the responsibility of looking out for their welfare, as well the safety of the community.

Each year more than 150,000 juvenile offenders are ordered into out-of-home placements at costs sometimes exceeding $300 per day. Several times that number are being "supervised" and provided with services in the community by agents of the juvenile court. Over the past decade state and local governments have also expended hundreds of millions of dollars on delinquency-prevention programs that promised to decrease the likelihood of its participants engaging in serious crime.

What have these expenditures bought us? Are we significantly safer than we would have been had they never been made? Is the juvenile-crime-prevention sector focused on improved results and driven by research findings, so that its improved performance is rewarded with increased funding? Or is it part of the local "pork barrel" system that rewards political connections more than merit?

For the past few decades the issue of violent street crime and what to do about it has been a dominant factor in national, state, and local politics. When concerns about the rising tide of violent crime first surfaced in the mid-1980s there were not any scientifically validated strategies or programs for dealing with it. Politicians almost universally fell back on the old tried and true approaches of passing tougher sentencing laws, for both juveniles and adults; building more prisons; and hiring more police. The Federal Crime Bill of 1994 supported all three of these approaches while the funding for prevention that was proposed in early drafts of the bill was completely cut out.

In recent years both the violent and property crime rates have dropped to historic lows. Although many public officials have tried to make the case that their tougher sentencing policies were responsible for the decline, comparisons across states and specifically targeted populations have shown that tougher sentencing was not the primary cause of the decline and accounted for only about one-fourth of the decline (Zimring et al., 2001; Greenwood & Hawken, 2001; Spellman, 2000).

As crime rates fell, researchers made considerable progress in identifying the connections between specific risk factors and criminal behavior. At the same time, program developers were busy developing and testing a wide array of intervention approaches, some more empirically grounded than others. The result at long last has been the demonstrated effectiveness of a small number of prevention models that appear to reduce crime much more cost effectively than any of the other approaches that have been tried-including tougher sentencing. The goal of this book is to describe the most promising of these prevention approaches, how they were developed, the quality of the evidence in support of their claimed effectiveness, the public policy problems involved in bringing them into wider use, and the potential for investments in developmental research to increase the range and quality of effective programs.

In theory, the adoption of any public policy or program for the purpose of reducing crime can be thought of as prevention. In practice, however, most discussions of crime-reduction strategies distinguish prevention from what are thought to be more direct means of crime control such as deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and increased security efforts. Delinquency prevention is generally characterized as a collection of theories and intervention techniques that attempt to redirect the life course of youth away from crime and toward more socially accepted behavioral norms.

Delinquency-prevention efforts in the United States date back more than 150 years, since the founding of the first reformatories and the New York House of Refuge in the 1820s. Over the years, new concepts and strategies have regularly emerged in this field and continue to do so today, though often without either a sound theoretical base or strong empirical evidence of their effectiveness. The conceptual bases for delinquency-prevention efforts have shifted over time. Starting with the cultural- and class-based theories of the early nineteenth century, they moved on to the more economically and psychologically based opportunity and control theories in the 1960s and 1970s. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the designs for delinquency-prevention programs sometimes reflect recent findings from social learning and developmental sciences, but they are also heavily influenced by the politically trendy concepts of the day.

Today, there is a growing disjunction between delinquency-prevention practice and the rapidly accumulating knowledge about patterns of delinquent behavior. Rarely have prevention efforts been framed in our understanding of the life-course trajectory of antisocial behavior and of the stages of child and adolescent development that contribute to the onset and persistence of delinquent behavior. The prevention field has also failed to integrate accumulating knowledge about the processes of desistance from antisocial behavior at each stage of development, which might be utilized in prevention programs to hasten the termination of delinquent careers. Instead, current prevention theory...