NCJ Number
134681
Date Published
1991
Length
400 pages
Annotation
This review of what is known about crime prevention at the beginning of the 1990's discusses the concept of prevention, prevention strategies that work, policy, what lies behind the strategies, and personal health promotion.
Abstract
Information for the book comes from the author's personal experience, a review of crime-prevention research, and interviews with top crime prevention experts in Vermont who reflect prevention work being conducted across the Nation. The conceptual framework for primary crime prevention encompasses cultural expectations, stressors in the social environment, organic factors that contribute to behavioral problems, and perceived opportunity or the lack of it. Descriptions of community prevention strategies that work are distinguished by orientations toward intervention in the early years, parent education, school-based programs, adolescent peer-focused prevention, community-focused prevention, and work-based prevention. Overall, the book concludes that to be effective, primary prevention programs should affect multiple systems, target all youth, change environmental conditions that contribute to social problems, collaborate with other social-problem fields, emerge from a community development process, focus on desired results and behavioral change, and affect people at all development levels and across the life span. They should also be of sufficient quality and quantity, be integrated throughout daily life, adapt program content to participant needs, have appeal to youth, prove the cost-effectiveness of prevention, and offer long-term commitment to a new vision of social change. A 400-item bibliography and an index of programs, projects, and organizations