NCJ Number
198648
Editor(s)
Lawrence W. Sherman,
David P. Farrington,
Brandon C. Welsh,
Doris L. MacKenzie
Date Published
2002
Length
454 pages
Annotation
Addressing the effectiveness of crime prevention programs internationally, this book reviews over 600 scientific evaluations of programs intended to prevent crime in families, schools, labor markets, places, and communities.
Abstract
Following a discussion detailing the scope of this work as addressing what works, what does not work, and what is promising in the field of crime prevention, this book begins with a chapter on “Preventing Crime.” The first chapter presents a history of the National Institute of Justice’s project to understand an evidence-based approach to preventing crime through discussing institutional settings of crime prevention programs, the science of crime prevention, and research methods used in guiding a scientific approach to crime prevention. The second chapter, “The Maryland Scientific Methods Scale,” educates crime prevention scholars, policymakers, and practitioners that the effects of criminological interventions differ in methodological quality by discussing the testing of causal hypotheses, scales of methodological quality, and the Scientific Methods Scale. In the third chapter, “Family-Based Crime Prevention,” the authors present a discussion and evaluation of home visitation, parent education plus day care, clinic-based parent training, school-based child training, home/community parent training, and multisystemic therapy family-based crime prevention programs. Focusing on school-based crime prevention programs is the crux of the next chapter. Discussing the nature of school-based crime prevention and the methods used for evaluating such programs, the authors present a thorough, detailed discussion of what works and what does not in regards to school-based crime prevention programming. The fifth chapter, “Communities and Crime Prevention,” summarizes crime prevention theory, community mobilization tactics, and gang prevention interventions in order to discuss the community-based mentoring, after school recreation, and gun buy-back programs that serve as effective community crime prevention program measures. The sixth chapter, “Labor Markets and Crime Risk Factors,” and seventh chapter, “Preventing Crime at Places,” detail the relationships between crime and employment and crime and physical locations, respectively. The chapters “Policing for Crime Prevention” and “Reducing the Criminal Activities of Known Offenders and Delinquents,” addressing community policing programs and crime prevention in the courts, respectively, are followed by a conclusion to this book maintaining that most evidence-based crime prevention programs are effective at reducing and preventing crime in a variety of different communities. Index