Changing Lives A volume in the series Adolescent Development and Legal Policy edited by franklin e. zimring Also in the series: Double Jeopardy: Adolescent Offenders with Mental Disorders by Thomas Grisso An American Travesty: Legal Responses to Adolescent Sexual Offending by Franklin E. Zimring Changing Lives Delinquency Prevention as Crime-Control Policy Peter W. Greenwood Foreword by Franklin E. Zimring The University of Chicago Press | Chicago & London The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2006 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2006 Paperback edition 2006 Printed in the United States of America 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 2 3 4 5 isbn: 0-226-30719-0 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-30720-6 (paper) isbn-10: 0-226-30720-4 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Greenwood, Peter W. Changing lives : delinquency prevention as crime-control policy / Peter W. Green- wood ; foreword by Franklin E. Zimring. p. cm. — (Adolescent development and legal policy) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn0-226-30719-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Juvenile delinquency—United States—Prevention. 2. Juvenile delinquents— Rehabilitation—United States. 3. Crime prevention—United States. I. Title. II. Series. hv9104 . g685 2006 364.4—dc22 2005011954 (cid:2)(cid:2)The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992. Contents List of Illustrations | vii Foreword | ix Acknowledgments | xi Part 1 The Nature and Effectiveness of Crime Prevention Chapter 1 Delinquency Prevention as Crime Control | 3 Chapter 2 The Evolution of an Idea | 10 Chapter 3 Strategies for Measuring Program Impact | 28 Chapter 4 What Works | 49 Chapter 5 What Doesn’t Work | 84 Part 2 Prevention and Policy Chapter 6 The Uses and Limits of Cost Effectiveness in Allocating Crime-Prevention Resources | 119 Chapter 7 Politics, Government, and Prevention | 155 Chapter 8 Programming in the Modern Juvenile Court | 183 References | 195 Index | 215 Illustrations Tables 2.1 Types of response to crime | 11 2.2 Factors that distinguish between prevention and control | 15 3.1 Potential outcome measures for delinquency-prevention programs | 30 3.2 Victim costs by crime type | 38 4.1 Promising prevention programs for early childhood | 53 4.2 Promising prevention programs for elementary school children | 57 4.3 Promising prevention programs for adolescents | 63 4.4 Promising prevention programs for delinquent youth | 71 4.5 Costs and benefits of selected promising and proven programs | 80 5.1 Characteristics and outcomes of experimental boot camps | 99 6.1 Lower and upper range of net program benefits estimated by WSIPP | 143 6.2 Comparison of estimated cost of individual crimes | 145 6.3 Proven and promising programs ranked by effect size | 150 Figures 4.1 Program cost per youth | 74 4.2 Number of convictions prevented for typical participant | 75 4.3 Cost per conviction prevented | 76 4.4 Criminal justice compared with other savings | 78 viii | Illustrations 4.5 Program costs and taxpayer benefits | 78 6.1 Distribution of annual expenditures on cocaine control in 1992 | 125 6.2 Comparative costs of decreasing cocaine consumption by 1 percent | 126 6.3 Structure of RAND three-strikes model | 131 6.4 Serious and violent crimes prevented by year | 133 6.5 Three Strikes vs. previous law: Projected prison populations | 133 6.6 Three Strikes vs. alternatives: Percent reduction in serious crime | 135 6.7 Three Strikes vs. alternatives: Percent increase in cost | 135 6.8 Three Strikes vs. alternatives: Cost per serious crime prevented | 136 6.9 Serious crimes prevented per $million invested | 139 7.1 Comparison of initial authorization and final funding for programs in the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1994 | 166 8.1 Trends in incarceration rates for juveniles and young adults | 185 8.2 Trends in juvenile arrests | 186 8.3 Disposition of juvenile arrests in 1999 | 186 Foreword Changing Lives is the third in a series of books commissioned by the MacArthur Research Network to fill important gaps in our knowledge of the legal environment of adolescent development. The topic of Peter Greenwood’s study, programs designed to prevent delinquency in children and adolescents, had earlier been pursued by a much larger body of litera- ture and had greater involvement of government agencies than the previous topics in this series—analyses of mental health problems in juvenile justice and of adolescent sex offenders. But all the earlier enthusiasm generated about prevention as a goal in programming failed to produce clearnotions of what constituted effective prevention in practice, how quality control could be integrated into the public investment in prevention programs, and where in government the administration and funding of government prevention programming should be located. Part of the difficulty is the huge variety of programs that can properly be called “preventive” and the hybrid quality of the prevention enterprise itself. Programs that seek to change the life course of youth are a mix of education and pathology avoidance. Effective programs typically influence not simply one specific problem—criminal offending, educational attain- ment, job stability—but create a wide variety of different benefits that are usually the concern of different components within executive government. Where in government should these efforts be located? Many prevention programs can only be evaluated in the long term while most other types of crime control work much faster because they operate more closely to the immediate environment of offending. The editorial board of this venture wanted to commission a book thatwould provide a rigorous structure for thinking about the prevention