Changing Lives: Delinquency Prevention as Crime-Control Policy (Adolescent Development and Legal Policy) (2007)

238 Pages·2007·0.9 MB·English

by  Peter W. Greenwood

Changing Lives
A volume in the series
Adolescent Development and Legal Policy
edited by franklin e. zimring
Also in the series:
Double Jeopardy: Adolescent Offenders with Mental Disorders
by Thomas Grisso
An American Travesty: Legal Responses to Adolescent Sexual Offending
by Franklin E. Zimring
Changing Lives
Delinquency Prevention
as Crime-Control Policy
Peter W. Greenwood
Foreword by Franklin E. Zimring
The University of Chicago Press | Chicago & London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2006 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2006
Paperback edition 2006
Printed in the United States of America
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 2 3 4 5
isbn: 0-226-30719-0 (cloth)
isbn-13: 978-0-226-30720-6 (paper)
isbn-10: 0-226-30720-4 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Greenwood, Peter W.
Changing lives : delinquency prevention as crime-control policy / Peter W. Green-
wood ; foreword by Franklin E. Zimring.
p. cm. — (Adolescent development and legal policy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn0-226-30719-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Juvenile delinquency—United States—Prevention. 2. Juvenile delinquents—
Rehabilitation—United States. 3. Crime prevention—United States. I. Title.
II. Series.
hv9104 . g685 2006
364.4—dc22 2005011954
(cid:2)(cid:2)The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of the American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ansi z39.48-1992.
Contents
List of Illustrations | vii
Foreword | ix
Acknowledgments | xi
Part 1 The Nature and Effectiveness of Crime Prevention
Chapter 1 Delinquency Prevention as Crime Control | 3
Chapter 2 The Evolution of an Idea | 10
Chapter 3 Strategies for Measuring Program Impact | 28
Chapter 4 What Works | 49
Chapter 5 What Doesn’t Work | 84
Part 2 Prevention and Policy
Chapter 6 The Uses and Limits of Cost Effectiveness in Allocating
Crime-Prevention Resources | 119
Chapter 7 Politics, Government, and Prevention | 155
Chapter 8 Programming in the Modern Juvenile Court | 183
References | 195
Index | 215

Illustrations
Tables
2.1 Types of response to crime | 11
2.2 Factors that distinguish between prevention and control | 15
3.1 Potential outcome measures for delinquency-prevention
programs | 30
3.2 Victim costs by crime type | 38
4.1 Promising prevention programs for early childhood | 53
4.2 Promising prevention programs for elementary school
children | 57
4.3 Promising prevention programs for adolescents | 63
4.4 Promising prevention programs for delinquent youth | 71
4.5 Costs and benefits of selected promising and proven
programs | 80
5.1 Characteristics and outcomes of experimental boot camps | 99
6.1 Lower and upper range of net program benefits estimated by
WSIPP | 143
6.2 Comparison of estimated cost of individual crimes | 145
6.3 Proven and promising programs ranked by effect size | 150
Figures
4.1 Program cost per youth | 74
4.2 Number of convictions prevented for typical participant | 75
4.3 Cost per conviction prevented | 76
4.4 Criminal justice compared with other savings | 78
viii | Illustrations
4.5 Program costs and taxpayer benefits | 78
6.1 Distribution of annual expenditures on cocaine control in
1992 | 125
6.2 Comparative costs of decreasing cocaine consumption by
1 percent | 126
6.3 Structure of RAND three-strikes model | 131
6.4 Serious and violent crimes prevented by year | 133
6.5 Three Strikes vs. previous law: Projected prison populations | 133
6.6 Three Strikes vs. alternatives: Percent reduction in serious
crime | 135
6.7 Three Strikes vs. alternatives: Percent increase in cost | 135
6.8 Three Strikes vs. alternatives: Cost per serious crime
prevented | 136
6.9 Serious crimes prevented per $million invested | 139
7.1 Comparison of initial authorization and final funding for
programs in the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1994 | 166
8.1 Trends in incarceration rates for juveniles and young adults | 185
8.2 Trends in juvenile arrests | 186
8.3 Disposition of juvenile arrests in 1999 | 186
Foreword
Changing Lives is the third in a series of books commissioned by the
MacArthur Research Network to fill important gaps in our knowledge of
the legal environment of adolescent development. The topic of Peter
Greenwood’s study, programs designed to prevent delinquency in children
and adolescents, had earlier been pursued by a much larger body of litera-
ture and had greater involvement of government agencies than the previous
topics in this series—analyses of mental health problems in juvenile justice
and of adolescent sex offenders. But all the earlier enthusiasm generated
about prevention as a goal in programming failed to produce clearnotions
of what constituted effective prevention in practice, how quality control
could be integrated into the public investment in prevention programs,
and where in government the administration and funding of government
prevention programming should be located.
Part of the difficulty is the huge variety of programs that can properly
be called “preventive” and the hybrid quality of the prevention enterprise
itself. Programs that seek to change the life course of youth are a mix of
education and pathology avoidance. Effective programs typically influence
not simply one specific problem—criminal offending, educational attain-
ment, job stability—but create a wide variety of different benefits that are
usually the concern of different components within executive government.
Where in government should these efforts be located? Many prevention
programs can only be evaluated in the long term while most other types of
crime control work much faster because they operate more closely to the
immediate environment of offending.
The editorial board of this venture wanted to commission a book
thatwould provide a rigorous structure for thinking about the prevention