NCJ Number
232925
Date Published
2010
Length
38 pages
Annotation
This chapter reviews progress in the development and testing of effective strategies for preventing youth crime, identifies opportunities that remain seriously underused for preventing crime, and presents recent evidence concerning an effective operating system that guides community-wide efforts to prevent youth crime.
Abstract
One of the most important challenges facing the implementation of preventive interventions concerns the scaling-up or rolling-out of tested and effective prevention programs for wider public use. Prevention represents a sustainable solution to youth crime. As the evidence reviewed demonstrates, there are many preventive interventions effective in reducing youth crime that, at the same time, produce favorable and robust impacts on other life-course outcomes, including educational attainment and employment. The growing availability of promising, robustly evaluated interventions, and evidences operating systems for applying prevention science, notably Communities That Care, is a heartening development of the past 20 years. It is now possible for communities to become self-correcting environments that prevent youth crime, before it happens. Note and references