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This article discusses antisocial behavior orders (ASBOs) in England and Wales and recent U.S. policies based on the broken windows hypothesis. The broken windows hypothesis and its policy progeny and ASBOs implicate different categories of troubling behavior, each of which raises distinct normative and policy issues. It discusses developments and related research. The important questions about ASBOs are the reduction of the prevalence of antisocial behavior, the concern of people with respect to them, and the costs they entail. With broken windows, the important issues are the correctness of the slippery slope hypothesis, the contribution of police initiatives to the crime rate, and the justification of the collateral costs of new policing policies. The article discusses a series of normative and policy issues.

Community-based organizations have proliferated throughout Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Undergirded by the neoliberal privatization of turning social policy over to the market to foster “better” and cheaper social interventions, community-based organizations are funded to prevent adolescent “problem” behaviors including substance abuse, teenage pregnancy, school dropout, delinquency, and youth violence. This article reviews research on the practices and effectiveness of community-based organizations, mostly in the United States, regarding crime prevention. After discussing the background social context, the article reviews research on the range of services and programs that community-based organizations deliver followed by a review of the research on their effectiveness for preventing crime. The article then discusses a pattern by which organizations veer from program fidelity and reformulate and revise mandated evidence-based practices. It concludes with a discussion of some of the implications and possible consequences of shifting the provision of services to nonstate actors.

This article discusses community-level influences on offending and crime. It shows how the general ecological model can help understand the spatial distributions of patterns of urban activity and unconventional behaviors including crime and delinquency. It then identifies the supporting causal explanations of neighborhood effects and studies the emerging research on reciprocal causation and the role of crime in the stratification of neighborhoods. The last section of the article comments on the lessons learned and the challenges that needs to be faced for further development in the field.

This article studies comprehensive community initiatives to prevent violence, crime, and drug abuse. It focuses on the role of partnerships or coalitions as the main tool for imagining, executing, and maintaining these crime-prevention strategies. It studies the literature on coalitions that are mostly outside the public safety domain, and then reviews evidence on program impact. It then lists the factors that help determine the effectiveness of partnership. The article also identifies various efforts in America to prevent youth violence by introducing complete community strategies.

This essay provides a synthesis of criminological and social welfare theoretical frameworks, along with empirical data illuminating the links between crime policy and welfare policy. It also reviews current debates regarding the extent to which European countries are undergoing a shift toward more punitive welfare or crime policies. Building upon Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s classic typology of welfare regimes, current scholarship ties liberal welfare regimes to punitive penal ideologies and high rates of incarceration and social democratic welfare regimes to lenient attitudes toward punishment and low incarceration rates. Research also underscores the significance of economic and social inequality in the production and outcomes of crime and welfare policies. Comparative empirical data supports the persistence of penal-welfarism in Europe, particularly in social democratic states, exemplified by Sweden, while indicating more punitive policies targeting marginalized sectors of the population, notably immigrants.