Cost-benefit analyses of developmental crime prevention programmes.

Background: Children and youth who are at risk of becoming early-onset life-course-persistent offenders often slip through the cracks of other systems in society (e.g., health, education, child welfare, substance use and mental health).

Correctional treatment as an economically sound approach to reducing the high costs of recidivism: A review of the research.

Background: Prior research indicates that correctional treatment programmes can be highly effective in reducing reoffending. Less studied, however, is whether such programmes are economically efficient.

Aims: To review the research literature on the economic efficiency of correctional treatment programmes.

Association of a Crime Prevention Program for Boys With Mortality 72 Years After the Intervention: Follow-up of a Randomized Clinical Trial.

Importance: Mortality is an important outcome in evaluating crime prevention programs, but little is known about the effects on mortality during the full life course.

Objective: To determine the long-term outcomes of a crime prevention program on mortality and whether the iatrogenic effects on mortality observed in middle age persist or change in old age.

Design: This longitudinal follow-up was conducted in a cohort of boys included in a matched-pair randomized clinical trial (the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study).

Broken (windows) theory: A meta-analysis of the evidence for the pathways from neighborhood disorder to resident health outcomes and behaviors.

The criminological "broken windows" theory (BWT) has inspired public health researchers to test the impact of neighborhood disorder on an array of resident health behaviors and outcomes. This paper identifies and meta-analyzes the evidence for three mechanisms (pathways) by which neighborhood disorder is argued to impact health, accounting for methodological inconsistencies across studies. A search identified 198 studies (152 with sufficient data for meta-analysis) testing any of the three pathways or downstream, general health outcomes.

The spillover effects of focused deterrence on gang violence.

Background: Focused deterrence strategies attempt to increase punishment risks faced by violent gangs through the development of new and creative ways of deploying traditional and non-traditional law enforcement tools. In addition to increasing the swiftness and certainty of sanctions, these strategies explicitly communicate incentives and disincentives to deter likely gang offenders from violent behavior.

Objective: This study seeks to determine whether focused deterrence strategies generate spillover deterrent effects on the gun violence behaviors of vicariously treated gangs that were socially tied to directly treated violent gangs.

Implementing and sustaining evidence-based practice in juvenile justice: a case study of a rural state.

US juvenile justice is at the forefront of experimentation with the evidence-based paradigm, whereby the best available research is utilized to help inform more rational and effective practice. Increasingly, state governments are playing a major role in this endeavor. Maine is one of these states and is the focus of this article.

When early crime prevention goes to scale: a new look at the evidence.

It is a widely held view--in both research and policy communities--that desirable effects on delinquency and later offending from early prevention trials will attenuate once they are "scaled-up" or "rolled-out" for wider public use. Some of the main reasons for this include a reduced level of risk, a more heterogeneous population, insufficient service infrastructure, and loss of program fidelity. If attenuation of program effects is not only possible but is highly probable, then the issue for researchers and policymakers should be how to preserve or even enhance effects in moving from efficacy trials to community effectiveness trials to broad-scale dissemination.

Crime prevention: more evidence-based analysis.

This paper introduces a new section of Psicothema dedicated to the evidence-based approach to crime prevention. Along with an original sexual-offender-treatment programme implemented in Spain, this section presents four systematic reviews of important subjects in the criminological arena, such as sexual offender treatment, the well-known <> programme, the effectiveness of custodial versus non-custodial sanctions in reoffending and the fight against terrorism. We also highlight some of the focal points that scientists, practitioners and governments should take into account in order to support this evidence-based viewpoint of crime prevention.

Effectiveness of family-based programs to prevent delinquency and later offending.

This paper reviews the effectiveness of family-based prevention programs in reducing delinquency and later offending by children and adolescents. Eleven large-scale randomized experiments and eleven other controlled evaluations (smaller-scale experiments or quasi-experiments) are reviewed. Out of 22 evaluations, the experimental group did better than the control group in 19 cases, and the differences were significant (or nearly significant) in 12 of these 19 evaluations.

The importance of an evidence-based approach in the current Spanish policy for crime prevention.

This introductory paper has two objectives. On the one hand, to present the guidelines of the evidence-based perspective on crime prevention as an alternative to the usual criminal policy, which often disregards conclusions based on scientific evidence. On the other hand, to discuss the contemporary situation in Spain regarding crime prevention and particularly the role psychology develops in terms of the utility/effectiveness dichotomy.