Brandon C. Welsh

Delinquency Prevention Using Family-Based Interventions.

This paper reviews 24 evaluations of prevention programmes including some kind of family-based intervention (usually parent training or parent education), an outcome measure of offending or disruptive child behaviour, a high quality experimental design and a minimum sample size of 100. Programmes are divided into seven categories according to the context of the intervention: home visiting, day care, pre-school, school, clinic, community or multi-systemic therapy. Most interventions were effective in reducing childhood antisocial behaviour and later delinquency, and in some cases their monetary benefits exceeded their monetary costs. General parent education and more formal parent training are both effective prevention techniques. Research is needed to identify the active ingredients of successful programmes, and to establish why some large-scale programmes were not successful. Copyright

Correctional Intervention Programs and Cost-Benefit Analysis

A program is economically efficient if its monetary benefits outweigh its monetary costs. Discussions of the economic efficiency of correctional intervention and other crime and offender prevention programs can be very persuasive and have gained wide appeal in political, policy, and academic settings. However, little is known about the economic efficiency of crime prevention strategies. This article examines the contribution, both methodological and empirical, of cost-benefit analyses of correctional intervention programs designed to reduce reoffending in the community. A review of the literature revealed only seven published studies that have presented information on monetary costs and benefits. Future cost-benefit research on correctional intervention should be concerned with standardizing the measurement of costs and benefits, especially in well-designed studies comparing experimental and control groups with before and after measures of offending. A standard list of monetary costs and benefits that should be measured in all studies is needed.

Experimental Criminology: Randomized Experiments in Criminology

LONGITUDINAL-EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES Farrington (1983) and Farrington and Welsh (2005, 2006) reviewed randomized experiments in criminology with the following features: (1) at least fifty units (e.g., persons or areas) were initially assigned to each condition, or at least one hundred units were initially assigned to two experimental conditions; (2) there was an outcome measure of offending; and (3) the experiment was published in English. They found that 122 different experiments of this kind had been published up to 2004. Farrington (1979) reviewed longitudinal studies in criminology with the following features: (1) at least several hundred persons were initially studied; (2) there were at least two personal contacts with the participants and/or their families, separated by at least five years; (3) there was a measure of offending; and (4) the study was published in English. At that time, only eleven studies of this kind had been published. Farrington, Ohlin, and Wilson (1986) reviewed the advantages and problems of both experimental and longitudinal studies in criminology and recommended that combined longitudinal- experimental studies should be carried out. For a number of reasons (specified in more detail by Tonry, Ohlin, and Farrington 1991), they recommended that the ideal study should have several assessments (personal contacts) over several years, followed by an experimental intervention, followed by several more assessments over several years. No study of that kind had ever been conducted in criminology, although there had been studies that compared officially recorded offending in a few years before the intervention with officially recorded offending in a few years after (e.g., Empey and Erickson 1972; Empey and Lubeck 1971).

Prevention and Early Detection of Conduct Disorder and Delinquency

This chapter has two main aims. First, it summarizes the major risk factors for conduct problems and delinquency and, second, it reviews the scientific evidence on the effectiveness of interventions to prevent conduct disorder and delinquency. The chapter focuses on risk factors discovered in prospective longitudinal surveys and on successful interventions demonstrated in randomized controlled experiments. (For descriptions of longitudinal surveys, see Kalb et al. 2001; for reviews of risk factors, see Hawkins et al. 1998; for reviews of intervention studies, see Farrington and Welsh 2003.) It also focuses mainly on young people aged 10–17 and relies on research carried out in North America, Great Britain, or similar Western countries. Most research has been carried out with males, but studies of females are included where applicable (e.g., Moffitt et al. 2001). The focus is on substantive results rather than methodological and theoretical issues.

Saving Children from a Life of Crime: the Benefits Greatly Outweigh the Costs!

This article reviews some of the most effective programmes for saving children from a life of crime, and also presents the results of cost-benefit analyses of some of these programmes. The best programmes include general parent education in home visiting programmes, parent management training, pre-school intellectual enrichment programmes, child skills training, Functional Family Therapy, Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care and Multisystemic Therapy. Communities That Care is a useful overarching programme. Most of these programmes have been shown to reduce crime and save money. The time is ripe to establish national agencies in all countries which will advance knowledge about early risk factors (from longitudinal studies) and about effective developmental interventions (from randomized experiments and cost-benefit analyses).