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

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For example, although mental disability and disorder are not uncommon among criminals, the modern insanity defense is available only to defendants with severe cognitive impairment that renders them unable to understand or appreciate the nature and quality of their wrongful conduct.

In short, despite the theoretical commitment to requirements of free will and rational choice, in practice, only a small group of offenders whose choices are extremely compromised are fully excused from criminal liability. When analyzed in this doctrinal framework, developmental differences affecting decision-making are likely to be substantial enough to provide categorical excuse from responsibility only for very young juveniles, who are qualitatively different from adults in moral, cognitive, and social development.

Certainly by mid-adolescence, the differences between adolescent and adult decision-making are more subtle than those that distinguish the adult offenders whose crimes are excused under current law from other adult offenders. A categorical presumption of adolescent nonresponsibility, such as that which was endorsed by the traditional juvenile justice system, is hard to defend on grounds of immaturity alone.

On the other hand, the perspective on adolescent criminal conduct offered by developmental psychology also challenges the retributive arguments of modern advocates of punitive policies. A claim that juvenile offenders deserve equivalent punishment to that imposed on adults presumes that no substantial differences exist that undermine the legitimacy of imposing equal measures of retribution on the two groups. In short, the predispositions and behavioral characteristics that are associated with the developmental stage of adolescence support a policy of reduced culpability for this category of offenders.

The developmental evidence supports the argument of the post-Gault reformers of the s and s that a presumptive diminished responsibility standard be applied to juveniles. Moreover, other dimensions of the developmental picture strengthen the argument for reduced accountability.

Because of inexperience and immature judgment, youths will make many mistakes during this period. Thus, as Franklin Zimring has argued, adolescence can usefully be conceptualized as a probationary period, in which young decision-makers learn to make responsible choices, without bearing the full costs of their mistakes. Not surprisingly perhaps, some of these themes can be discerned in responses to adult offenders whose conduct suggests reduced culpability.

The behavioral traits and inexperience that in general characterize youthful offenders as a group may be relevant for grading purposes at sentencing of individual adult criminals. The "immature" offender, whose acts were influenced by others, who is a first offender, or who "made a mistake" out of inexperience and can be expected to have "learned her lesson," may receive a reduced sentence, based on an official judgment that her crime is less culpable and deserves less punishment than does that of a seasoned criminal.

For utilitarian reasons, however, such leniency will be cautiously exercised, lest the presumption of free will would completely collapse. Most adults are presumed to act on the basis of individual values and preferences. With minors, in contrast, criminal choices are presumed less to express individual preferences and more to reflect the behavioral influences characteristic of a transitory developmental stage that are generally shared with others in the age cohort. This difference supports drawing a line based on age, and subjecting adolescents to a categorical presumption of reduced responsibility.

Contrary to what we have called the "utilitarian assumption" underlying current policies, a developmental perspective suggests that the goal of crime reduction is also served by attending to developmental dimensions of criminal behavior. In the current climate of public anxiety about violent youth, many policymakers are persuaded that society must treat immature youthful offenders as a class more severely because of the magnitude of social harm caused by juvenile offenders.

On purely instrumentalist grounds, effective policy will attend to the developmental character of much youth crime, and to the divergent patterns of offending represented by the two groups described earlier-those youths whose criminal behavior is limited to adolescence, and those whose delinquency is part of a life-course persistent pattern. Political arguments for tough juvenile sanctions combine a retributive claim that juvenile and adult offenders deserve analogous punishment, with a utilitarian argument that such policies will reduce crime.

Even if a strong claim that the criminal choices of adolescents and adults are the same is rejected, as we have suggested it should be, many are ready to discount the extent and relevance of developmental differences in assessing criminal responsibility. In the current climate, any modest developmental claim for leniency seems to be far outweighed by the importance of reducing the social threat of adolescent crime.

In general, the criminal law balances autonomy-based constraints on retribution against the social cost of excusing conduct that inflicts harm.

How the balance is struck depends in part on the magnitude of the perceived harm. From an instrumentalist perspective, the argument against counting youth as a mitigating factor in applying criminal sanctions seems to be even more compelling, because the developmental factors at issue are likely to contribute to the inclination to commit crimes. On this view, if adolescents tend to be riskpreferring actors who discount future consequences in favor of immediate gratification, they present a greater threat than do older offenders, and the social interest in constraint is more compelling.

The assumption underlying the current trend holds that a rigorously punitive approach is the optimal means to accomplish the goal of reducing the social cost of youth crime. At one level the "cure" seems promising, given the objectives. Young offenders who are incarcerated in prison cannot be on the streets committing crimes.

The developmental analysis in Part II, however, suggests that the utilitarian assumption is flawed and that punitive policies may not be the optimal means to limit the costs of juvenile crime. A policy response designed to minimize social cost will recognize the substantial societal interest in facilitating desistance in delinquents whose crimes are adolescence-limited, and in preserving their future prospects.

Most delinquent youths will grow into useful or at least not criminal citizens if they survive this stage without destroying their life chances. When and whether they emerge into productive adulthood is likely to be at least in part a function of the system's response to their adolescent criminal conduct. A modest claim, based on our developmental analysis, is that the broad use of adult criminal penalties against youths may carry social costs that currently are being left out of the calculus, when such penalties are applied to normative adolescent offenders.

The social benefits that proponents of tough penalties promise are not likely to be realized because two assumptions underlying the policies appear to be erroneous: As to the small group of delinquents whose conduct is likely to persist into adulthood, the picture is quite different. The research suggests that many adolescents in this group are likely to offend at an earlier age, and that their criminal conduct is frequent, chronic and more likely to be violent than is that of their delinquent peers.

Although knowledge currently is inadequate to the task, and simple prescriptions seem unlikely, a long-term strategy for dealing with this group that relies only on incarceration is not likely to be effective. This conclusion does not signify that the optimal legal response to youth crime is "benign neglect. First, the prediction on which it is premised is simply wrong as applied to life-course-persistent offenders, the group threatening the greatest harm.

As to the larger group of adolescent offenders, lessons in accountability are important. As Franklin Zimring has argued, adolescents need to learn from their foolish youthful choices so that they can successfully assume adult roles. The analysis to this point suggests that a developmental perspective may be usefully employed in formulating legal responses to juvenile crime.

In this part, we will sketch a few policy lessons that we take from the analysis, and suggest directions for future innovation and research. Our aim is not to provide a detailed policy blueprint, but rather to suggest the contours of a system for responding to juvenile crime that is informed by developmental knowledge. We accept as a starting point that a central objective of any viable contemporary system is to reduce the social cost of youth crime, through means that conform to conventional limits on retribution and notions of procedural fairness.

These goals function as constraints on the generation of policies under a developmental model of juvenile justice. We take three core points from the developmental psychology evidence to be of potential importance to juvenile justice policy. First, on average, adolescents' decision-making abilities, especially related to judgment, have not matured to a level characteristic of adults. This gap is likely to be substantial with younger teens, and, for this group, is likely to include greater differences in understanding and reasoning as well as judgment. These differences are important both to culpability and to competence to stand trial.

Youth Crime: The Impact of Law Enforcement Approaches on the Incidence of

Second, younger adolescent offenders are likely to present a higher risk of becoming career criminals than are teens who initiate criminal conduct in midadolescence. And finally, delinquent behavior itself is shaped by developmental influences, and most adolescents desist as they age. The following sections suggest some ways in which an optimal legal response to youth crime will attend to these developmental considerations. The developmental evidence supports a conclusion that, as a general matter, younger teens are sufficiently different from adults in cognitive and psychosocial development that they should not be tried or punished in the adult criminal justice system.

First, the argument for diminished responsibility is more compelling as applied to younger teens. Subjecting thirteenyear-old offenders to the same criminal punishment that is imposed on adults offends the principles that define the boundaries of criminal responsibility.

Beyond this, the research indicates a substantial risk that many perhaps most younger adolescents may be substantially less competent to stand trial than are their adult counterparts. The procedural fairness issue deserves further comment. The debate about juvenile justice reform has rarely focussed on this dimension of the trend toward trying ever-younger defendants as adults. Upon reflection, it presents formidable problems. The prohibition against trying incompetent defendants historically has been raised in cases involving mentally ill defendants, who, upon a finding of incompetence to stand trial, typically are hospitalized so that they may be restored to competence.

Should the criminal adjudication be suspended for some indefinite period of time until he matures? During the intervening period, should he be confined, even though he has not been convicted of a crime? If not, what is the alternative? The questions posed suggest the difficult issues that will arise if younger adolescents are routinely subject to adult criminal adjudication.

It seems far wiser to minimize the problem by categorically excluding from adult criminal adjudication younger teens, whose immaturity is most likely to impair their competence to function as defendants in criminal courts. The conclusion that younger teens, because of their immaturity, should not be subject to criminal adjudication and punishment does not mean that a minimalist response to their offenses is indicated. As we have indicated, young adolescent offenders are at considerably greater risk of becoming chronic serious offenders than are those whose delinquency begins a few years later, because the criminal conduct of these younger teens is less likely to be part of a typical developmental process that will progress to a stage of natural recovery and desistance.

Their behavior is more likely to reflect a nascent personality disorder, developing over time through the interaction of individual vulnerabilities and environmental factors. Further research is needed to distinguish these youths from young juveniles whose crimes reflect transient developmental influences. It is in responding to these young offenders that a revitalized concept of rehabilitation is important in a contemporary model of juvenile justice.

Rehabilitative interventions with preadolescent and young adolescent offenders should be far more intensive than has been the traditional response. Indeed, in some sense, the traditional dispositional regime has it backwards, in its tendency to intervene minimally with younger of fenders and more assertively with older adolescents. It is fair to say that we have not yet developed effective rehabilitative interventions for these very young offenders, although a few delinquency programs have reported promising results in recent years.

Such an effort requires a serious long-term commitment of societal resources, and until it is undertaken, it cannot be said that "nothing works. In our view, these comprehensive interventions should explicitly be part of the response to juvenile crime, though the interventions may have educational, mental health, and social service components. Investment in intensive rehabilitative interventions that is closely linked to public protection from juvenile crime may be more palatable to legislators and to the public.

Some proposals for juvenile justice reform have combined a "get tough" response to juvenile crime with recommendations for an investment in comprehensive services to younger children who demonstrate problem behaviors. The problem is that, in the political process, the punitive policies survive and proposals for funding comprehensive services for younger children may never be implemented.

A first step is to reinforce the link between social protection through crime reduction and intensive rehabilitation of very young offenders. If comprehensive remediation efforts are unsuccessful, at some point society's interests in protection will dominate in determining the legal response. However, since rehabilitative intervention with persistently antisocial youths is unlikely to result in a "quick fix," this determination of failure should not be made prematurely. A commitment to rehabilitation reinforces the constraints on punishment of young offenders that we have described, making a powerful case against subjecting fourteenyear-old repeat offenders to adult criminal punishment.

An important insight of the developmental analysis is that neither the rehabilitative model with its treatment focus nor the criminal justice model with its single minded focus on punishment provides the conceptual tools to respond effectively to a large category of adolescent offenders: In the contemporary context, the most important practical implication of adopting the developmental framework is the recognition that severe sanctions imposed on adolescents whose crimes reflect transient developmental influences are unlikely to serve the interest of either society or of offenders.

In policy terms, this should translate into a presumption against adult criminal adjudication and sanctions for first offenses by these juveniles, even for serious crimes. Contrary to the assumption of current law, if reducing social cost is important, the case for this more "lenient" response holds as powerfully for older and thus presumably more competent youths as for younger adolescents.

Indeed, as we have demonstrated, the mid-adolescent first offender with no prior history of problem behavior is less likely than his younger counterpart especially with such a history to represent a substantial threat to society later in adulthood. Under a developmental model, delinquency interventions directed at adolescents whose crimes are likely to reflect transient developmental influences serve multiple purposes.

First, a developmental model recognizes the importance of lessons in accountability; slaps on the wrist fail to serve this purpose. Second and linked to the first , the objective of protecting society would not be discounted. The fact that many youthful offenders will desist in their criminal activity as they mature does not justify a license to offend during adolescence.

Third, the systemic response would be tailored to protect rather than to damage the prospects for a productive future of adolescents whose desistance is probable. The future opportunities of juvenile offenders can be protected in several ways, including some that were designed to serve this purpose under the traditional juvenile justice system. Indeed, the methodologies used in these types of surveys tend to produce superficial, incomplete, uniformed and, in some cases, misrepresented information. Second, a desire for harsh punishment does not necessarily signify that respondents do not also support more rehabilitative approaches.

In fact, endorsement of these two criminal justice strategies may coexist within individuals. In other words, there would appear to be openness to alternative approaches, even within more conservative groups. Recognition and divulgation of the limitations of this type of poll may be particularly important in curbing the current political and media support of increased punitiveness. Indeed, perceptions that their communities or country more generally have deteriorated morally may create a need to reassert social values and to re-establish the obligation to obey the law.

As such, broader social interventions that address these wider problems may constitute a more effective albeit a more long-term approach to crime reduction. It would seem that the time is ripe for more rehabilitative or preventive approaches to crime and criminals. On the one hand, crime rates have been falling for more than a decade and budgetary cuts are becoming more widespread. In addition, more repressive strategies are being shown as ineffective and are consequently being reduced or reversed in many places. On the other hand, the general public would appear to be supportive of more moderate approaches — particularly for youth.

Further, preventive programs have been shown to be effective not only in reducing criminal activity, but also in bringing wider social benefits. The challenge — it would seem — resides in creating responses that are both effective and affective; that is, that can offer a combination of meaningful and sensible consequences. In this paper, we have been asked to explore a number of topics related to the impact of the criminal justice system on youth crime.

We decided, as an organizing principle, to break down the questions we thought would be useful to answer into sixteen separate questions. What we have done, instead, is to try to give the reader a conclusion that the three of us, as criminologists, believe is a reasonable answer to the question and that describes the inference that is most plausibly drawn from the available data.

In many instances, there are studies that come to somewhat different conclusions. Some of these different findings can easily be reconciled with our conclusions when one looks at the relative quality of the studies or when one realizes that certain variables are not controlled for, artifacts are not eliminated, or other problems have not been addressed. In other instances, we do not have simple methodological explanations.

Nevertheless, in an uncertain world, one often has to make definite judgments. That is what we were asked to do in this summary of what is known. We benefitted enormously, and drew extensively from, an information service — Criminological Highlights — that the three of us have been involved with since With financial support from the Department of Justice, Canada, we have been scanning what is now a list of over academic journals in criminology and related fields, as well as all of the new books received by the Library of the Centre of Criminology.

A group of about a dozen faculty and doctoral students at the Centre of Criminology choose eight of these papers for each issue of Criminological Highlights and one-page summaries of these papers are written. In order for a paper to be chosen, it must be seen as being methodologically sound as well as being relevant for policy-makers. Hence the papers that have been summarized in Criminological Highlights and that, in turn, are summarized here, have already been through a very rigorous selection process. Not only have these papers largely been published in refereed journals, but they have also been considered and discussed carefully by the group that puts together this information service.

In many cases, therefore, we have used portions of the actual summaries that were produced for Criminological Highlights , in part because these summaries have been checked by most of the Criminological Highlights group. Measuring youth crime is a non-trivial problem. An important thing to keep in mind whenever one talks about self-report data, however, is that studies differ dramatically in the specificity of questions that are asked. Doob and Cesaroni note that:. All available self-report data indicate that a majority of adolescents will, at some point, engage in some minor offending.

Unfortunately, we do not have good measures or, obviously, good measures across time from the youths themselves on rates of offending provincially or nationally. Thus, is it not possible to examine trends using self-report data. For high-volume offences, Statistics Canada carries out, every five to six years, a victimization survey of now about 25 thousand respondents. Although people sometimes, in these surveys, are able to estimate the age of the offenders who victimized them, often this information is not known.

More generally, however, people have to perceive something as an offence in order to report it. In some cases this may be obvious, but in others it may not be. If, for example, one comes home and notices some plant pots have been broken, it could be perceived as an accident, as the result of weather, or as an act of vandalism by the neighbourhood kids. Sometimes perception is everything. Official measures of youth crime e. It goes without saying, then, that an incident cannot become a crime unless someone decides that the police should get involved.

If the incident were to be reported to the police, the police must make a decision: Is the incident a crime, and is there any value in officially recording it as such? Many rather insignificant offences, like a fight, minor vandalism, or a minor theft, may be dealt with completely informally and not recorded. Depending on the type of crime e. In many cases the police are unable to find a suspect. Victimization data suggest that only about 54 percent of break-ins to houses are reported to the police in Canada Gannon and Mihorean, Taking these two figures together, it would seem that of the household burglaries identified by victims, only about 7 percent end up with a suspect being identified by the police.

Furthermore, it is well known that the police screen out many cases. Thus, there are many youths who may be identified by the police but not officially charged for a variety of reasons e. However, depending on the jurisdiction, at this stage the case may be screened out of the system and instead go into Extrajudicial Sanctions. Cases referred to some sort of extrajudicial sanctions program may or may not remain in our youth court statistics. If the youth successfully completes the program there is no finding of guilt.

If, however, the case stays in youth court, the youth may or may not be found guilty. Clearly, then, one could argue that arrest and court data are more measures of the policy decisions of adults than of the offending behaviour of young people. Snyder demonstrated that inferences about who commits crime based on who is arrested for it are likely to be wrong. There are reasons to believe that juveniles are more likely to be caught than adults: Law enforcement personnel may also be more motivated to locate and arrest juveniles. Compared with incidents apparently involving adult offenders, those involving juvenile offenders were:.

If these biases reflect the attitudes of the public at large, not only are juveniles more likely than adults to be arrested for similar crimes, but juvenile crimes may be reported to law enforcement [agencies] at a higher rate. Sprott and Doob have been working on the various pictures of youth crime that come from different measures. These findings suggest, more generally, that we have to be careful in assuming that police apprehensions of youths represent a good proxy for offending more generally.

One also cannot assume to have accurate knowledge of crime trends by reading the paper or watching the news. For example, in other countries, it has been shown that press coverage of teenage gangs and estimates of juvenile offending are fairly unconnected. For example, the period from to was, for many parts of the US, a period when juvenile arrests went up considerably.

However, in Hawaii, the increase was modest and, when status offences were excluded, there was, in fact, a decrease in juvenile crime. Perrone and Chesney-Lind examined newspaper coverage of juvenile delinquency and juvenile gangs during this ten-year period. There was evidence of an explosion of coverage of these topics. In the second five years of the period studied —6 , there were almost twice as many stories about gangs as there were in the first period —91 and over seven times as many stories focusing on juvenile delinquency.

However, juvenile arrests other than for status offences were not increasing during this time, and survey data of young people suggest that gang membership was not increasing. Most of these people thought that the increase was large.

Review of the Roots of Youth Violence: Research Papers

Crime in newspapers, then, does not necessarily give a reasonable picture of what is happening. Crime and the coverage of crime appear to be driven by different forces. McCorkle and Miethe investigated how a moral panic over gangs occurred in Las Vegas, Nevada in the late s. They found that before the mids in Las Vegas, Nevada, there was no gang problem.

In , however, two police officers were assigned to gather evidence on gangs. These officers announced in that there were 4, gang members in the city involved in crime. Media coverage of gangs skyrocketed from fewer than twenty-five stories about gangs per year from —7 to approximately — per year in — Police sweeps were authorized and patrols often by undercover police of schools began. However, even prosecutors were not comfortable with the labelling of gang members, suggesting that the statistics of gang membership might be vastly exaggerated.

Stories of gangs came, not surprisingly, at a time when there was a budget crunch and when the legitimacy and fairness of the police were being questioned because of allegations of brutality. In the end, the panic disappeared: But the police got their resources and their laws, and attention was diverted from ongoing police scandals.

Likewise, the relatively substantial decreases in the use of court seen in are not the result of crime decreasing, but rather the result of the implementation the Youth Criminal Justice Act , which focused on dealing with minor offences outside of court. Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics. Canadian Crime Statistics, Criminal Victimization in Canada, Juristat, 25 7 , 1— The political and organizational response to gangs: Justice Quarterly, 15 1 , 41— Representations of gangs and delinquency: Wild in the streets?

Social Justice, Volume 24 4. Self-reported delinquency, Toronto Juristat , 27 6 , 1— The overrepresentation of juvenile crime proportions in robbery clearance statistics. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 15 , — In Understanding Youth Justice in Canada. As discussed in Question 1, there are complexities around any data used to assess the level of crime or violence in society. Official measures like police and court data are not good proxies for the amount of crime in society because they can be influenced by policy decisions, which can obviously vary across jurisdictions.

For example, Carrington investigated trends in police charging of youths from to , in particular looking to see if there was any basis for the widely held perception that the Young Offenders Act YOA caused an increase in youth crime. This overall increase from the s to the s could not, therefore, be attributed to the YOA, since most of the increase took place either before the YOA was implemented or some years after.

However, there were drops in rates in Quebec and Ontario, and no evidence of change in the other five provinces and two territories. Rates at which youth were charged were, however, quite a different matter. Quebec was the only province that showed a decrease in charge rates. What happened in the other provinces is that the YOA clearly changed police charging practice — though the extent of the change varied across jurisdictions. These findings remind us that we should be careful not to attribute changes in the behaviour of adults charging practices to youth crime.

More recently, Sprott and Doob compared differences in self-reported delinquency across provinces to the differences in police and court data. Generally, the level of self-report offending was quite similar across jurisdictions. The rate of police apprehension for those same selected violent offences ranged from a low of forty-nine per 10, in Quebec to a high of per 10, in Saskatchewan. Ontario was between those two extremes at seventy-four per 10, Similar trends were found when looking at selected property offences. Over all, then, there is considerably more provincial variation in police apprehensions than there is in self-reported offending.

This once again illustrates that official data are not good proxies for the amount of crime in society. It is a jurisdictional decision to rely more or less heavily on official responses to youth crime, and thus it appears that the rate at which the youth justice system in a province or region is used has relatively little to do with the rate of underlying problematic behaviour by youth. Given that the level of self-reported delinquency is relatively similar across the provinces, the next question is how much Ontario, compared with other jurisdictions, decides to use the youth justice system in order to respond to offending.

The following are trends, from to in the rate of finding cases guilty Figure 1 and sentencing cases to custody Figure 2 for Canada and the four largest provinces Quebec, Ontario, Alberta and BC. The YCJA was implemented in , and thus one notices a relatively large one-year decrease from to in both the rate of guilty findings and sentencing to custody because of the new legislation.

Alberta has the highest rate of finding cases guilty Figure 1 , followed by Ontario both of which are higher than the overall rate for all of Canada. BC and Quebec have the lowest rate of finding cases guilty. When looking at sentencing cases to custody Figure 2 , Ontario has the highest rate, followed by Alberta, BC and Quebec. While one may think that Ontario has a relatively high use of court and custody compared with the other jurisdictions because it has higher rates of serious violence, this appears not to be the case.

First, Ontario had similar levels of self-reported violence compared with other jurisdictions. Second, looking at the cases in court and custody, one notices differences among the provinces in what they choose to bring into youth court and sentence to custody. Table 1a shows the breakdown of cases in youth court that have been found guilty. Quebec and Ontario have similar proportions of violence about a third of the cases ; however, Ontario tends to bring in more minor assaults than Quebec.

Violent Crime Involving Youth and Matters Related to Understanding the

Table 1b shows the breakdown of violence cases found guilty. Of all violence cases found guilty in youth court, In Quebec, only a quarter of violence cases involve minor assualts as the most serious charge in the case. In both provinces, serious violence is a very small proportion of the overall youth court caseload found guilty and of the overall violence caseload found guilty.

The majority of violence cases found guilty in Alberta and BC also involve minor assaults Table 2b. Looking next at custody Tables 2a and 2b , similar trends emerge. When looking at all cases sentenced to custody, Quebec and Ontario again have higher proportions of violence Again, however, the majority of violence sentenced to custody involves minor assaults in Ontario Indeed, of the cases sentenced to custody, Ontario has the largest proportion of minor assaults compared with the other three jurisdictions and with Canada as a whole.

Given that minor assaults involve any pushing and shoving, there is a limitless supply to bring into youth court and sentence to custody. Ontario, it appears, is more willing than other provinces to use expensive resourses court and custody to respond to these types of behaviours. While the self-reported delinquency across provinces appears relatively similar, it would not be too surprising to find some differences across jurisdictions.

And there may indeed be differences, but the self-report questions available to us were too general to reveal them. There is some research on understanding differences in cross-national crime rates. Six high-and six low-violent-crime countries two each from Africa, South America and Asia were compared. Five dimensions appeared to differentiate between high-and low-crime countries:. Countries that are likely to be low in violence tend to:. Other research has investigated the role of the community in explaining levels of violence among different groups. McNulty and Bellair examined factors that might explain those group differences.

Independent of all other dimensions, it was shown that the youths most likely to be involved in fighting were male, those who thought that fighting was OK, those reporting that they had recently used drugs or alcohol, and those with low school grades. If one statistically removes the impact of living in a community with a high concentration of disadvantaged families, the difference in levels of fighting between Black and White youths disappears.

In other words, it seems that the different level of involvement in fighting by Black and White youths is accounted for by the fact that Black youths are considerably more likely to live in poor communities. Said differently, the lower levels of education of parents of Latino youths explain the difference between Latino and White youths in their involvement in fighting.

Clearly then, policies that affect communities and families can also affect the level of violence in society. To the extent that the Canadian provinces control such policies, they can affect the level of violence in society by endorsing various types of policies. In a similar theme, Simons, Chen, Stewart and Brody investigated the effect that discrimination had on delinquency. They found that discrimination predicted delinquent behaviour in a sample of African American children, even after they controlled for other factors e. These findings do not challenge other well-established explanations for group differences in offending.

Instead, they highlight another factor that helps explain high rates of offending among certain Black youths. The results of this study clearly suggest that societies that systematically expose their most vulnerable members to discriminatory rhetoric and practices are likely to pay the price in increased crime.

Specifically, community contexts and state policies e. Trends in youth crime in Canada, Canadian Journal of Criminology, 41 , 1— Responding to Youth Crime in Canada. University of Toronto Press. Justice Quarterly, 20 , 1— A comparative analysis of nations with low and high levels of violent crime.

Journal of Criminal Justice, 27 , — Stewart, and Gene H. Incidents of Discrimination and Risk for Delinquency: Justice Quarterly, 20 , — Transitions from Prison to Community: Annual Review of Sociology, 29 , 89— The impact of criminal justice practices on crime will largely be answered in other questions. Generally though, harsh criminal justice approaches appear to do little to reduce crime. The results showed that those youth who thought that there was a reasonable likelihood that they would be caught by the police for property crime, and those who said that being caught for property crime would be a problem in their lives, were less likely to commit these crimes.

However, the most reliable predictor of property crime appeared to be whether a youth believed that his friends were involved in such a crime. For violent crime, the pattern was somewhat different. The policy question, then, is, what can be done outside of the justice system in order to reduce offending? Although it is relatively well established that children of adolescent mothers are at risk on a number of different dimensions including crime , it is less well understood why this might be the case.

They found that the reason that the sons born of adolescent mothers were more likely to commit criminal acts than were the sons born of older mothers was a combination of two factors: The policy question that needs to be addressed, then, is a simple one: These women were randomly assigned to three different groups a control group or one of two experimental groups , and thus the groups can be considered to be equivalent for all practical purposes.

For some of the mothers the control group , the program simply provided assessment and referrals for treatment. The nurse promoted positive health-related behaviours during pregnancy and the early years of the child, as well as general help to the mother e. For the second experimental group, this monthly support visitation program continued until the child was two years old. The results are simple to summarize.

Generally, the earlier in life an intervention is provided, the more likely it will have an effect. But even programs administered to children just starting school have been found to reduce problem behaviours. It started with a formal screening of kindergarten children to identify problem children. On each of these days, there were two twenty-to thirty-minute sessions in school.

Essentially, it was a program where the child earned negotiated school and home privileges for appropriate behaviour.

Changing Lives: Delinquency Prevention as Crime-Control Policy, Greenwood, Zimring

Quite large and statistically significant changes were found in the treatment group that were not found in the wait-list control group. Although the experiment was carried out when the children were in kindergarten, one group was followed through grade two. That is, comprehensive early interventions, especially those involving parents, appear to a teach relationships between choices and their resulting consequences, b develop the social-behavioural and academically related competencies that allow children to cope effectively with the demands of friendship-making Furthermore, it would appear to be a program that parents and teachers approve of and that can be implemented with rather minimal costs.

This cost estimate, of course, ignores the other beneficial effects of the program and the harmful impact of criminal justice contact. Findings such as these suggest that social programs designed to promote healthy children can reduce crime. Once children are older, and perhaps already engaging in delinquency and receiving legal sanctions, there is evidence that there could be further detrimental effects that are felt into adulthood. And, of course, there are costs to society — in particular, all of the problems associated with low SES due to the lower educational and occupational attainment e.

Generally, then, focusing early in the life-course to prevent delinquency from occurring is likely to achieve the most beneficial results across a range of domains e. As Tanner et al. Criminal justice responses may also affect another factor that is related to delinquency: Delinquency, legal sanctions and bad parenting all increase the occurrence of one another. It is noted that legal sanctions disrupt the quality of family life by embarrassing the parents, thus increasing conflict and subsequent stress levels in the family.

Poor parenting was assessed using self-reports by parents, as well as systematic observations by survey interviewers. Delinquency of the youth was assessed by way of a self-report questionnaire. Youths also reported whether they had come into contact with the justice system, as well as the type of contact that had occurred.

Delinquency and parenting were examined at ages The statistical model that was used looked at changes in delinquency and parenting from age The findings demonstrated that poor parenting at age However, about half of this effect was due to the impact of legal sanctions occurring between these two ages. Not surprisingly, those youths who were most involved in delinquency and most subject to poor parenting practices at age However, the impact of poor parenting practices at age Similarly, poor parenting at age This effect was almost completely due to the impact of legal sanctions that took place between age Legal sanctions were a result of delinquency and poor parenting at age Clearly, there are negative effects of increased contact with the criminal justice system.

Thus, in addition to early interventions like the kind Olds et al. These include the following:. At the same time, it should be pointed out that not everything works. Among the interventions that appear to be unsuccessful are the following:. There are also programs that can reduce offending among youths who are already involved in the justice system. A US government report coming from a blue-ribbon panel of experts from at least three countries including Canadian Marc LeBlanc at the University of Montreal draws on knowledge from the social sciences on how best to deal with serious and violent juvenile offenders.

The administration of multimodal programs requires integration of services of the juvenile justice system, mental health, schools, and child welfare agencies. Aftercare programs are essential One challenge for a country like Canada, then, is to integrate services that are often fragmented across ministries and levels of government. Aside from family and early school interventions, there are also broad community interventions that have reduced crime. Typically, these community interventions involve changing the physical environment, and one classic example is the redesign of the Port Authority Bus Terminal in NYC Felson et al.

The Port Authority bus terminal is the biggest bus station in the world, handling about thousand passengers a day.

Delinquency Prevention as Crime-Control Policy

The homeless had taken over most public areas in the building, such that facilities designed for bus travellers were no longer available for them. The goal was to reduce crime largely robbery, assaults and thefts and to deal effectively with the problems of the homeless, drugs, prostitution, etc. Although the PA police force is large it is the twenty-eighth largest police force in the US , with officers assigned permanently to the bus terminal, they, alone, could do little.

Other approaches had to be used. The police then induced transients to cooperate with the agency by providing the alternatives of accepting help, leaving, or going to jail. The transient problem was made manageable. Physical modifications were also important. Entrances and exits were made more accessible.

Niches and dark corners were eliminated. Areas where people could hide or sleep without being observed were made into public spaces by turning brick walls into glass walls. Benches where people had slept were removed and replaced with single seats that were made purposefully uncomfortable to sleep on. Information kiosks were set up to make it easy for visitors to get legitimate information rather than being victimized by various types of hustlers. Stores — particularly chain stores that people felt comfortable patronizing — were brought in.

Video games that attracted young toughs were replaced with games that problematic folk were uninterested in. The result of these changes was fewer complaints. Also, ratings of various aspects of the terminal went up. Public order complaints were reduced dramatically, as were the numbers of most offences. People felt more safe and saw the police as doing a better job. Only about a third as many people said that they felt insecure or very insecure in the PA terminal after the changes had been implemented as compared with before.

Declines in crime had been occurring in New York as well as other parts of the United States and in Canada at the time that the PA bus station was being cleaned up beginning in , but decreases were larger in the PA bus station than in the surrounding areas. Some of the design changes were rather mundane: Perhaps what is most interesting is that crime, disorder and unpleasantness were reduced dramatically without resorting to hard-line police tactics.

Crime was designed and managed away. We can be either optimistic or extremely pessimistic about findings such as those presented here. The reasons for optimism are clear: We know that the lives of young people are shaped early, and thus early interventions are crucial. At the same time, we know that interventions in mid-to-late adolescence can have positive effects. Moreover, there are environmental changes that can reduce offending in a community. The pessimism comes from the fact that knowing what should be done and actually doing something about it are different. None of the effective approaches discussed here are interventions that can be announced, implemented and shown to have a measurable effect on crime within a single political mandate.

As already highlighted, Graham identified programs that were found to reduce delinquency and that were generally cost effective. However, additional research has been conducted which explored the costs of various programs aimed predominately at adolescents who were already involved in the criminal justice system. For example, one study, carried out by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy, examined programs for youth where there was sound research to examine their costs and outcomes Aos et al.

This is important to keep in mind, because it means that the graduates from the best-known programs will often reoffend. But these modest impacts — e. The question, from a public policy perspective, is simple: Some programs do not show a savings on criminal justice costs alone, but do show savings if the costs to victims of crimes are included. Also, for some programs e. But for many of the sixteen programs that were examined by Aos et al. Cost-effective programs also exist for reducing recidivism among more serious juvenile offenders. They are not necessarily cheap to implement, but when considered as investments, they are sensible.

A program for chronic juvenile offenders including a home placement with trained foster parents and other treatment and probation services was quite expensive, but showed benefits to victims and for criminal justice budgets. Evaluated solely in terms of changes in recidivism rates, these programs might be seen as having only modest benefits.

However, as investments to achieve victim and criminal justice savings, they were very effective. In this light, a case study by Fass and Pi is interesting, not so much because of its conclusions, but rather because it helps to identify some of the variables that need to be assessed when evaluating the utility of youth justice policies. More specifically, their research examines: The principal data for their study came from the records of 13, youths referred to the Texas Youth Commission in Dallas County.

The results of any estimation exercise such as this one have to be considered with caution. In some instances, tough penalties may even increase estimated costs to victims. Indeed, harsh policies appear to augment crime and criminal justice processing in the long term, despite temporarily deferring criminal activity as a result of the sentence that is handed down. Preventive programs for young offenders: Effective and Cost effective. Overcrowded Times , April , 9 2 , 1,7— Attributions, affect, and crime: Criminology, 35 3 , — Peter Rydell, William L.

Schwabe, and James Chiesa. Mandatory minimum drug sentences: Getting Tough on Juvenile Crime: An Analysis of Costs and Benefits. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency , 39, — Felson, Marcus and eleven others. Preventing crime and disorder at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Crime Prevention Studies, Volume 6. What works in preventing criminality. An assessment of research evidence on ways of dealing with offending behaviour.

Goldblatt, Peter and Chris Lewis editors. In Youth Violence Crime and Justice: A Review of the Research , Volume University of Chicago Press. Strategies for Measuring Program Impact 4. Politics, Government, and Prevention 8. Barry Krisberg Barry Krisberg. Greenwood also offers a sophisticated discussion about calculating the economic advantages of various programs. In the course of this study, he never shies away from making candid assessments about why policymakers have continued to support ineffective programs.

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