Prevention or Pork?
A Hard-Headed Look at Youth-Oriented Anti-Crime Programs
Prevention or pork barrel? That is the question. Do midnight basketball, conflict resolution, and other youth-oriented delinquency prevention programs actually work? Do they reduce crime? Do they deserve a prominent place in America's anti-crime strategy? Or are critics correct to deride prevention programs as "social pork," a collection of "gauzy social spending schemes straight out of the failed Great Society of the 1960s?"
PREVENTION OR PORK? A HARD-HEADED LOOK AT YOUTH-ORIENTED ANTI-CRIME PROGRAMS, a new report commissioned by the American Youth Policy Forum, provides a wealth of information, cogently written, to inform that debate. Authored by independent writer Richard A. Mendel and co-published by the National Crime Prevention Council and four other national organizations, the report summarizes the objective evidence about the effectiveness of crime prevention programs.
PREVENTION OR PORK? details a wide variety of programs and strategies that do indeed reduce criminality. Among the promising models are several geared to positive youth development, such as Head Start and home visiting for young children, safe and structured recreational for older children and adolescents, and opportunities for youth service and leadership development. Another set of promising interventions target youth already engaged in delinquent behavior. These include family interventions, plus carefully designed cognitive skill training to help troubled youth improve their capacity for moral reasoning and social problem solving. The most promising initiatives offer not one strategy but a comprehensive, community-driven continuum of programs and services.
PREVENTION OR PORK? finds that a handful of crime prevention programs have proven ineffective in repeated studies, while a number of other strategies have not yet been subject to rigorous evaluation.
Finally, the report examines the likelihood that longer sentences and more prison construction -- the law and order approach -- will reduce crime significantly in the absence of effective prevention, and it finds that likelihood very low. "For the most part, young people do not avoid crime from fear of punishment," the report finds. "They avoid crime out of respect for themselves, concern for others, a belief in their future prospects, and an internal sense of personal and public morality."
America has been attempting to solve its crime problems "with one arm tied behind its back," Mendel concludes. "The time has come for America to use its second arm in the struggle for safety, to provide the criminal justice system the support it needs to combat crime effectively. Prevention is that other arm."
To order the 64-page report, please see our Order Form. The cost of the report is $5. For information on additional AYPF publications, please go back to our Publications List.