The Truth about Crime Prevention

The Truth about Crime Prevention

The truth about crime prevention is more complicated –less utopian than some liberals would like, but far more promising than conservatives will admit. Prevention can work and that it can be far less costly, in every sense, than continuing to rely on incarceration as out first defense against violent crimes. Instead of simply insisting that prevention is better than incarceration, then, we need to pinpoint more clearly what kinds of prevention work—and why some programs work and others do not, the most encouraging efforts share important characteristics; there are reasons why they work, whether the ‘target’ population is abusive families, vulnerable teens, or serious juvenile offenders who’ve already broken the law. Likewise, there are reasons why other programs fail, no matter how fashionable or popular they may be. Given what we’ve learned about crime prevention in recent years, four priorities seem especially critical: preventing child abuse and neglect, enhancing children’s intellectual and social development, providing support and guidance to vulnerable adolescents and working intensively with juvenile offenders. These aren’t the preventive strategies that can make a difference, but they are the ones that offer the strongest evidence of effectiveness. And they also fit our growing understanding of the roots delinquency and violent crime.

The first priority is to invest serious resources in the prevention of child abuse and neglect. The evidence is compelling that this is where much of the violent crime that plagues us begins, especially the kinds of violence we fear the most. It is known that most abused children never go on to injure others. But the correlation between later violent crime and childhood abuse is strong and consistent, especially for the most serious kinds of violence. It turned out that being abused or neglected had little effect, if any, on minor forms of delinquency. But for serious delinquency—and violent crime in particular it mattered a great deal. The youths who had been abused were arrested almost twice as often, and reported almost twice as many violent offenses. The ideology is that if we prevent these tragedies, we can reduce violent crime.

The Elmira program is amongst one of the programs that have been developed. This program served vulnerable—mostly white, poor, young, and m...

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...programs. The last priority in crime prevention is to invest time and attention in youths who have already begun a serious delinquent ‘career’. All of the programs we’ve considered up to now were designed to keep young people out of trouble in the first place. But it is also critically important to halt the downward slide of youths who are already in trouble. Hence, keeping troubled youth from becoming ‘chronic’ offenders by addressing, early on, whatever got them into trouble in the first place should be crucial part of any serious preventive strategy against crime.

The above is by no means an exhaustive list. The author have focused on these programs because they not only offer encouraging evidence of success but also provide glimpses into the more complicated question of what it is that makes succeed likely. They reveal some themes that can help can help us design programs that work even better—and avoid wasting resources o ones that probably cannot work at all. It is nowadays often said that either we don’t know how to do this or that it would make little difference to the crime create even if we did. But nowhere does the conservative depart more sharply from reality.