Denis Ribeaud

Does Community Service Rehabilitate better than Short‐term Imprisonment?: Results of a Controlled Experiment

Community service, along with other new sanctions, has been recommended in many Western countries as an alternative to incarceration over many years. Despite a rich literature on evaluations of so-called alternative sanctions, random assignment has only exceptionally been used in this field, and (short-term) imprisonment has never been an option in such designs. The present study tried to assess the comparative effects of community service and prison sentences of up to 14 days, through a controlled experiment in Switzerland in which 123 convicts have been randomly assigned. The results show no difference with respect to later employment history and social and private life circumstances. However, re-arrest by the police was more frequent among those randomly assigned to prison than among those selected for community service. Prisoners also developed more unfavourable attitudes towards their sentence and the criminal justice system.

Juvenile Delinquency and Gender

This article considers differences in patterns of youth delinquency and problem behaviour between boys and girls. It uses cross-sectional surveys of self-reported youth offending in 11 European countries, and a similar survey covering various ethnic groups in Rotterdam, both carried out in 1992. These surveys show that there remains a substantial gap in the level of delinquency between girls and boys across all countries and ethnic groups. The findings confirm that weak social controls by family and school are an important correlate of delinquency for males and females in all country clusters and across all ethnic groups. On the whole, the correlates of delinquency are found to be similar in males and females, which suggests that there is no need for a different theory to explain delinquency in boys and girls. Social control explains part of the gap in delinquency between boys and girls, simply because social controls of girls tend to be stronger and tighter. Culturally determined differences in the strength of family-based social controls can also explain some of the variation in delinquency between ethnic groups.

The ‘Drug–Crime Link’ from a Self-Control Perspective An Empirical Test in a Swiss Youth Sample

The present paper explores to what extent low self-control can account for the ‘drug–crime link’, i.e. the correlation between substance use and delinquency. Based on a large representative sample of Swiss 9th grade students, we reassess the dimensionality of Grasmick et al.s self-control scale and propose a fivedimensional second-order factor model. This model is then used as a predictor of two correlated behavioural continua, one measuring overall delinquency and the other overall substance use. Results indicate that self-control is a strong and stable predictor of both types of behaviour. However, although self-control substantially accounts for the correlation between delinquency and substance use, a considerable residual correlation remains. It is argued that dynamic or ‘state-dependent’ factors are most likely to account for this residual correlation. Analyses of the predictive power of individual sub-dimensions of self-control further indicate that self-control might be reduced to the sub-dimensions of ‘risk-seeking’ and ‘impulsivity’. Results are discussed in the broader context of past research and of the ongoing theoretical debate.

The Social and Developmental Antecedents of Legal Cynicism

Objectives: This study explores the social and developmental antecedents of legal cynicism. This study comprises a range of indicators organized into four domains—bonds to institutions, predispositions, experiences, and delinquent involvement—that bear on theoretically plausible mechanisms involved in the development of legal cynicism. Methods: This study examines four pathways to legal cynicism using data from two waves of the Zurich Project on the Social Development of Children and Youths (N = 1,226). Ordinary least squares (OLS) procedures are used to regress legal cynicism at t 2 (age 15) on social and psychological characteristics measured at t 1 (age 13), and retrospective variables measured at t 2. Baseline legal cynicism was included as a covariate in all models. Results: The results show that self-reported delinquency is the strongest predictor of legal cynicism. There is also evidence that alienation from society, negative experiences with police, and association with deviant peers can foster legal cynicism. Conclusions: This study shows that legal cynicism is to a small extent the result of alienation from social institutions and negative experiences with the police. To a much larger degree, legal cynicism seems to represent a cognitive neutralization technique used to justify one’s previous self-reported delinquency.

A randomised field experiment to prevent violence

The Zurich Intervention and Prevention Project at Schools ZIPPS is a research project aimed at contributing to more effective violence prevention in the multicultural urban context of a European city. It combines a longitudinal study of approximately 1100 children that entered primary school in 2004 with a randomised field experiment whereby two general prevention programmes at the parent and the school levels are being introduced. The project is guided by developmental theory positing that influences at different levels interact throughout the life-course in promoting or inhibiting pro-social skills of children and adolescents. Among these, risk factors associated with the family (i.e., erratic parenting, harsh discipline, low parental bonds, partner conflict) and the childʼs personality (i.e., impulsivity, risk-seeking, attention deficits) are among the empirically best established antecedents of later problem behaviour. The study hence experimentally introduces a programme aimed at promoting parenting skills and a school-based curriculum to improve pro-social competencies skills among children. Their effectiveness will be tested by means of a longitudinal study including three consecutive waves of interviews. At each wave, interviews will be carried out with the children, their primary caregivers and their teachers. Although randomised field experiments are commonly seen as the best possible way to promote knowledge about effective prevention, respective studies continue to be rare in Europe. This is partly due to an array of political, financial, organisational,

Learning Through Controlled Experiments: Community Service and Heroin Prescription in Switzerland

Europe, over the past two decades, has seen many innovations in the field of corrections, particularly new sanctions that are becoming increasingly popular as alternatives to imprisonment, such as community service. Innovative approaches have also been tested in the field of drug treatment, including large-scale drug-substitution programs. Usually, such programs have been evaluated, if at all, under the form of before-after studies. Thus, little is known about treatment effects, particularly in the longer run and/or compared to alternative approaches. Two controlled experiments conducted recently in Switzerland involving community service and heroin prescription to addicts may indicate a shift to more rigorous evaluations. They both illustrate the potentials of controlled experiments for progress in knowledge as well as some problems in methodological, legal, ethical, and practical respects. Whereas controlled experiments are necessary to learn in some areas, more conventional before-after studies may be valid under particular circumstances.

Long-term Impacts of the Swiss Heroin Prescription Trials on Crime of Treated Heroin Users

During the Swiss heroin prescription trials (PROVE, 1994–1996), over 1,000 heavily addicted heroin users were recruited into the program. While short- and medium-term effects of the program had been thoroughly assessed earlier, only a small body of data on the long-term effects on treated subjects was available. Data on program dropouts were particularly scarce. In order to partially fill that gap, police records of all participants were collected in summer 2000. Based on these data, the present paper focuses on the long-term effects (up to 48 months after admission) of heroin maintenance on criminal involvement and, to some extent, on addictive behavior. Results suggest that heroin prescription causes a strong and stable decrease in criminal involvement of most patients. Similar patterns of desistance are observed for a broad range of offenses and across different subpopulations of patients. Although the most pronounced decrease in criminal involvement is observed in the group of those treated permanently, treatment effects seem to hold in the post-treatment period. In particular, post-treatment rates of records related to use/possession of heroin remain comparatively stable, indicating that most program dropouts do not reengage in (public) use of illegal heroin. Additional data suggest that such stabilization is mainly related to the ability of the program to redirect the majority of patients towards alternative treatments once they left the treatment program.

Effects of Heroin Prescription on Police Contacts among Drug-Addicts

Switzerlands programme of opiate prescription to drug-addicts has been thoroughly evaluated under many aspects. The results published so far on the final findings, covering the programmes first year of operation, have focused on self-reported delinquent acts and victimisation reported during interviews. This article addresses these two issues. How did police recorded crime develop over time, taking the offence type into account? Have these trends been affected by changing police control over the addicts participating in the programme? In other words, has an eventual drop been produced by less strict crime reporting (or recording) practice for programme participants, rather than by lower crime rates among this group? The analysis reported here confirms the results based on self-reported delinquency and victimisation data. According to police files, the drop in serious property offences was indeed comparable. As it turned out, this drop is not due to reduced probabilities of the police recording offences committed by programme participants after their admission to heroin prescription.

A non-bipartite propensity score analysis of the effects of teacher–student relationships on adolescent problem and prosocial behavior

Previous research suggests a link between the quality of teacher–student relationships and the students’ behavioral outcomes; however, the observational nature of past studies makes it difficult to attribute a causal role to the quality of these relationships. In the current study, therefore, we used a propensity score analysis approach to evaluate whether students who were matched on their propensity to experience a given level of relationship quality but differed on their actual relationship quality diverged on their concurrent and subsequent problem and prosocial behavior. Student/self, teacher, and parent- (only waves 1–3) reported data from 8 waves of the Zurich Project on the Social Development of Children and Youths (z-proso), a longitudinal study of Swiss youth among a culturally diverse sample of 7- to 15-year-olds were utilized. The initial sample included 1483 (49.4xa0% female) students for whom information relevant for this study was available. The sample represented families from around 80 different countries, from across all the continents; with approximately 42xa0% of the female primary caregivers having been born in Switzerland. Following successful matching, we found that students who reported better relationships with their teachers and whose teachers reported better relationships with them evidenced fewer problem behaviors concurrently and up to 4xa0years later. There was also evidence for an analogous effect in predicting prosocial behavior. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to prevention and intervention practices.

Evaluating Longitudinal Invariance in Dimensions of Mental Health Across Adolescence: An Analysis of the Social Behavior Questionnaire

Measurement invariance over time (longitudinal invariance) is a core but seldom-tested assumption of many longitudinal studies on adolescent psychosocial development. In this study, we evaluated the longitudinal invariance of a brief measure of adolescent mental health: the Social Behavior Questionnaire (SBQ). The SBQ was administered to participants of the Zurich Project on the Social Development of Children and Youths in up to four waves spanning ages 11 to 17. Using a confirmatory factor analysis approach, metric invariance held for all constructs, but there were some violations of scalar and strict invariance. Overall, intercepts tended to increase over time while residual variances decreased. This suggests that participants may become more willing or able to identify and report on certain behaviors over time. The noninvariance was not practically significant in magnitude, except for the Anxiety dimension where artifactual increases over development would be liable to occur if invariance is not appropriately modeled. Overall, results support the utility of the SBQ as an omnibus measure of psychosocial health across adolescence.