NCJ Number
83367
Date Published
1981
Length
24 pages
Annotation
A national evaluation of the delinquency prevention program funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) is summarized.
Abstract
The delinquency prevention program involved 168 private-sector youth agencies in 68 cities across the Nation. About 20,000 youth were served by these programs during the 2-year study period. The evaluation involved a process analysis that described how programs were conceptualized, planned, implemented, administered, and ended, as well as an impact analysis that measured project effects on youth, communities, and youth-serving agencies. Site visits were conducted to collect data. The primary finding from the data on direct services is that grantees, lacking specific Federal guidelines or explicit delinquency prevention theories, delivered the same types of services they had been providing for many years. Although grantees were offered a range of intervention strategies by OJJDP (direct services, community development, and capacity building), grantees chose to reinforce and expand their traditional direct services. The dominant direct service provided was recreation, with more limited resources directed toward other services, such as counseling, employment, and education. For the most part, grantees lacked formal intake screening procedures to decide which youths should receive what type of service. What is most needed in the area of delinquency prevention are policy and administrative procedures to encourage innovations in delinquency control through research and development on a modest scale. Specifically, future prevention efforts should have the goal of reducing rates of official delinquency in clearly defined target populations.