Prevention Of Crime And Delinquency Research Paper

1. Historical Background In The Prevention Of Delinquency And Crime

Since the rise of delinquency as a social problem during the industrial revolution, the prevention of delinquency and crime has had a history of swinging between two philosophical poles: punishment and rehabilitation (Bernard 1993). Advocates of punishment have relied on the intellectual power of classical theory, whereas advocates of rehabilitation have relied on learning and attachment theories. Classical theory and its criminological offspring, social control and strain theory (Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990), posits that individuals are responsible for their own behavior and are motivated by cognitive appraisals of the potential costs and benefits of delinquent or criminal acts. Attachment and learning theories and their most recent progeny, social interactional or social developmental theory (Patterson et al. 1992), posit that the probability of performing a delinquent or criminal act is highly related to a child’s history of reinforcement for certain behaviors within a family and early associations with negative peers. That is, complex but observable reinforcement contingences are responsible for the initiation and then maintenance of chronic antisocial behavior.

Currently, social control theory appears to be most influential among the public and politicians both in the USA and in other Western countries (Howell 1997, Rutter et al. 1998). However, in the scientific literature social developmental theory appears to have more empirical support. Policy and intervention implications of a reliance on social control theory (i.e., harsher punishments such as training schools, juvenile jails, reprimanding juveniles into adult courts and jails, mandatory sentencing, etc.) have been shown to be neither in the best financial interests of society nor to have reduced rates of juvenile delinquency and crime. Whereas, recent cost–benefit analyses of interventions based on social developmental theories suggest cost effectiveness, particularly in the long run (Howell 1997). Therefore, there has been a re-emergence of social developmental theoretical models of delinquency and crime. These models emphasize the importance of interactional contingencies operating within family, peer groups, schools, neighborhoods, and communities in the development and maintenance of antisocial behavior (e.g., Patterson et al. 1992) versus theoretical models of delinquency and crime based on economic opportunity (e.g., Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990).

2. The Problem Of Chronic Offenders

Recent research has shown that a small percentage of children with antisocial behavior, including those who are arrested as juveniles, account for a large pro-portion (50–75 percent) of juvenile crime (Huizinga et al. 1995). Researchers have also found similar percentages in adult samples. Because this smaller proportion of criminals accounts for a large percentage of crime, it has been suggested that communities often waste their limited resources on noncareer juvenile delinquents who are unlikely to commit further offenses. By the time these noncareer criminals are arrested and/or targeted for intervention, they are often at the end of their short offending span. However, it is also argued that intervention may be easier and more likely to work with the non-chronic group. Some researchers have also suggested that the youth in the chronic group account for a disproportionate share of mental and physical health problems, divorce, domestic violence, and drug and alcohol problems in their age cohorts.

It has become clear that it is rare for a persistently delinquent youth to become a chronic offender with-out moving through an increasingly well-validated developmental sequence (i.e., early childhood non-compliance, antisocial or aggressive behavior in child-hood including covert antisocial behavior, and early arrest, Stoff et al. 1997, Chap. 20). For example, Patterson and his colleagues at the Oregon Social Learning Center have developed two models, an early-onset and a late-onset model, that may account for differences between life-course persistent and transient offenders. In the Oregon Youth Study sample Patterson found that boys with the highest rates of antisocial acts in childhood are at the greatest risk of being arrested before the age of 14. In addition, Huizinga et al. (1995) reported that from 39–62 percent of chronic violent offenders self-report committing their first act of violence at or before age 9. Patterson has also found early arrest (before age 14) is associated with the increased probability of being a chronic offender and, in turn, being a chronic offender is positively correlated with both violent offending and being arrested as an adult (Howell 1997, Rutter et al. 1998).

3. Prediction And Stability Of Antisocial Behavior

Since the early 1970s there has been increasing agreement among researchers that, to a great extent, externalizing conduct disorders in childhood precede chronic delinquency (Patterson et al. 1992), and chronic delinquency precedes serious and violent juvenile crime and adult criminality (Loeber and Farrington 1998). In addition, there is impressive international evidence that antisocial behavior, including criminal behavior, is relatively stable across stages of the life course (Rutter et al. 1998). The stability of delinquent behavior is particularly strong when antisocial behavior begins early in the life course. Researchers have also found that the development of childhood antisocial behavior and juvenile delinquency leading to adult criminality is multiply determined and involves the convergence of many risk factors (Howell 1997, Loeber and Farrington 1998, Patterson et al. 1992, Rutter et al. 1998). However, recent strides have been made in identifying specific risk factors for the initiation and maintenance of antisocial behavior and perhaps most important the developmental sequencing of their influences.

4. Developmental Sequencing

Several well-designed prospective longitudinal studies (e.g., Huizinga et al. 1995, Patterson et al. 1992) have shown that levels of common parenting practices starting early in a child’s life and continuing through adolescence are associated with the reduced probability of delinquent behavior. These parenting practices include appropriate discipline (e.g., application of mildly aversive consequences for problem behaviors, structuring, reinforcement of prosocial behaviors, and lack of abusive tactics such as humiliation and hitting), supervision (e.g., monitoring children’s behavior and peer affiliations in school and com-munity environments), and developing a positive relationship with a child (e.g., having reasonable levels of positive reinforcement for prosocial behavior, involvement in positive leisure activities). These longitudinal studies along with other recent research (Dishion et al. 1999) have shown that delinquent peers become a significant factor in the development and maintenance of delinquency, and this effect is most significant during adolescence.

In addition, researchers have found an array of complex individual, psychosocial, and society-wide influences that are related to externalizing behavior problems, offending rates, and a variety of antisocial and delinquent behaviors. These influences include genetic influences, obstetric complications, cognitive abilities, temperament, peer relationships, biased cognitive processing, autonomic reactivity, serotonin metabolism, teenage parenting, large family size, broken homes, abuse and neglect, coercion and hostility, ineffective parenting and supervision, peer groups, poverty and social disadvantage, mass media, school effects, and accessibility of guns and drugs (Rutter et al. 1998, Stoff et al. 1997). Although most of these influences have been shown to have robust associations with delinquent behavior, their individual influences on rates of delinquency are often small (i.e., often accounting for less than 10 percent of the variance in delinquency and crime).

What is significant about the individual influences is that most have been shown to increase in importance as they accumulate for any one child. Longitudinal research also suggests that individual influences are most important if they interact negatively with parent, peer, school, and community relationships. Contingent interactions (many of which have been shown to be bidirectional, Patterson 1982) that occur in these settings have been implicated in the emergence and subsequent maintenance of chronic childhood anti-social behavior, delinquency, and crime. For example, recent research strongly suggests that parent–child interaction patterns starting in early childhood that take place in the context of typical parenting tasks are associated with positive and negative child development outcomes (Patterson et al.1992). It has also been hypothesized that biological and genetic variables play a role in the development of problematic parent–child interaction patterns (Rutter et al. 1998). That is, infants with difficult temperaments and/or hyperactivity are harder to parent, and when matched with low-skilled parents, they have been shown to have more negative developmental outcomes such as higher levels of noncompliance and parental rejection. It is also interesting that, studies by Werner (1989) and others have shown that difficult infants raised by reasonably skilled parents are not at particular risk for negative developmental outcomes.

Many of the individual contextual influences that have been historically associated with rates of delinquency and crime (e.g., poverty, high crime neighborhoods, parental antisocial behavior and psychopathology), in large part, have been shown to be mediated to children through their disruptive effect on parenting practices and family functioning (e.g., parental depressed mood, poor parental discipline, marital conflict) (e.g., Patterson et al. 1992, Sampson and Laub 1994). Some theorists even postulate that economic downturns increase both the number of difficult-to-raise infants (because of increases in infant health problems) and the number of low-skilled parents (through the complex effects of transitions and mobility). These low-skilled parents then drift into disorganized neighborhoods (where rents and costs are lower) and where there are high crime rates and low levels of social support that create further isolation and stress (Sampson 1992). Patterson has suggested that further research on the relationship between economic downturns and density of difficult-to-raise infants and low-skilled parents may solve an embarrassing problem for most current theories of delinquency: that these theories have been unable to account for significant variance in societal rates of juvenile offending.

5. Prevention And Intervention

The outcome of three decades of intense research has been a general agreement that prevention of delinquency and crime needs to involve multiple components that target multiple risk factors, and that no single-component intervention will have enough strength to alter the course of seriously antisocial or delinquent behavior. Because many of the early risk factors directly or indirectly involve parent–child interactions, early prevention efforts are increasingly targeting parenting and other contextual variables that indirectly or directly affect parenting. As the children age, their interactions with adults and peers in schools, neighborhoods, and the larger community also become important in the further development and maintenance of antisocial and delinquent behavior (Stoff et al. 1997, Chap. 20). Therefore, all serious current prevention and intervention models for anti-social and delinquent behavior target multiple variables (e.g., family interactions, school success, peer group affiliations, social support, graduated sanctions) in multiple settings (e.g., home, school, neighbor-hoods, and communities) (Loeber and Farrington 1998).

5.1 Gender

International research has shown that young males commit a higher proportion (up to 80 percent) of officially reported juvenile crime. This ratio is some-what lower when self-report data is used to document criminal acts. It is also known that these ratios are falling at the end of the twentieth century and the disparity between male and female delinquency was less than a third of what it was even 40 years before (Rutter et al. 1998). There is argument about why there is an increase in officially reported and self-reported female antisocial behavior (see Stoff et al. 1997). Regardless of why increases in female antisocial behavior are being reported, the long-term detrimental effects of such behaviors are well-documented (Sampson and Laub 1994). In particular, female antisocial behavior, especially delinquency, has been linked to the development of later psychiatric, educational, and employment occupational problems, substance abuse, early pregnancy, the selection of antisocial partners, early marriage, and early death.

However, because developmental research in the area of delinquency and crime has primarily involved boys (particularly prospective longitudinal studies), very little is currently known about the development of juvenile offending and criminality in female populations. The existing literature, however, does suggest that there are different effects for parenting, sibling, and peer relations on antisocial behavior in boys and girls. It also shows that the developmental histories of delinquent boys and girls differ in other respects such as levels of abuse, neglect, and trauma (Stoff et al. 1997, Chap. 46). Researchers also have proposed that the same predictors and mechanisms may not explain these gender variations. Further, even though females contribute proportionally less than males to delinquency and crime rates, some theorists believe it is critically important to increase the study of girls. Not only are antisocial or delinquent young women at grave risk for a plethora of negative developmental outcomes, they also may play a key role in the intergenerational transmission of criminality through pairing with antisocial boys, early pregnancy, and low parenting skills (Rutter et al. 1998).

6. Future Directions

Continued use of multiple measures and multiple methods within passive and experimental longitudinal studies will further identify malleable variables and validated intervention technologies at all levels of delinquency and crime prevention (i.e., primary, secondary, and tertiary) (Loeber and Farrington 1998). Studies will also focus on the further development and validation of gender-specific predictive and prevention models. These models will likely lead to the development of screening criteria that can identify the small percentage of youths who account for the most delinquency and crime and those youths most likely to be involved in the transgenerational transfer of delinquency and crime. These improved screening measures will reduce to acceptable levels the current high false-positive rates associated with previous attempts to develop screening tools for early identification of children at risk of persistent delinquency and crime. However, until this scientific task is accomplished, results from programmatic longitudinal research using causal modeling suggests that targeting children and families who have both biological and socioenvironmental risk factors will be most cost effective. Al-though the Gluecks and their colleagues argued for this approach many years ago (Glueck and Glueck 1972), accomplishing it appears possible at the be-ginning of the twenty-first century, given recent improvements in measurement theory, research design and analysis, and intervention technology.

In addition, future theoretical and methodological advances will include an increase in research on the interaction between biological genetic variables and social environments (both naturally occurring and therapeutically designed) and the results of this interaction on antisocial developmental trajectories and rates of delinquency and crime (Stoff et al. 1997). Also, empirically validated prevention interventions targeting delinquency and crime will be developed for all ages and levels of seriousness. Furthermore, any intervention used by society will be seen as potentially a preventive intervention if it has a positive effect on the developmental trajectory of antisocial behavior once it has begun (Stoff et al. 1997, Chap. 32). Finally, long-term solutions to the problem of delinquency and crime will lie in the scientifically informed cost–benefit balance between prevention, rehabilitation, and graduated sanctions (Howell 1997, Loeber and Farrington 1998, Rutter et al. 1998).

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