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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.

This article reviews our current knowledge about automobile theft. It defines crime and outlines its prevalence. It further examines the social and economic consequences of auto theft and deals with patterns of auto theft in the United States and elsewhere. Auto theft is found to be an activity of greater salience among the socially advantaged. It moves on with the discussion of forms of motor vehicle theft, including various types of offenders and offender motivations. It includes discussion about victim and offender characteristics, correlates of victimization risk, and types of vehicles stolen and motor vehicle theft offenders. Finally, it examines the ways of controlling auto theft, concluding with a discussion of policy-relevant issues and directions for future research.

This article addresses burglary in various countries and jurisdictions, in criminal law as well as in victimization survey questions. It discusses victims, offenders, and the police as sources of information. It presents data on the current prevalence of burglary in the United States, England, and Wales. This article discusses burglary targets and reviews data on the people who commit burglaries. Burglars are described in terms of their demographic attributes, motivations for burglary, co-offending patterns, and level of planning involved in the commission of a burglary. The burglary daily time cycle and its relation to target choice are also mentioned. The next section is dedicated to the issue of repeated burglaries against nearby addresses and is a phenomenon that has received considerable attention during the past decades. It discusses evidence on the effectiveness of situational burglary prevention measures and concludes by enumerating future research priorities.

This article studies child social skills training, which can be easily implemented by teachers in schools or preschools. This training aims to prevent antisocial development in children, which may ultimately lead to criminal behavior in the future. The discussion begins with a brief conceptual and theoretical background of child social skills training. It is then followed by a description of some leading child skills programs, such as the I Can Problem Solve (ICPS) and Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (PATHS). Finally, this article considers the effects and effectiveness of these programs.

This article analyzes scientific evidence on the effectiveness of strategies aimed at preventing substance use within the community. It considers the potential of community-based devices to reduce drug use among youths, and then describes the methods that can identify various interventions. The next section discusses these interventions and their effects on youth substance use. Finally, the article determines the features of community-based strategies that are most likely to lead to positive outcomes.

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 article reviews the research concerned with crime displacement. It summarizes previous reviews on crime displacement and describes the search strategy used to identify studies for inclusion. It then considers the analytical approach and methodological challenges for studies concerned with crime displacement. This article also aims to study the available evidence on the extent to which situational crime-prevention interventions geographically transfer crime or diffuse crime-control benefits.

This article provides a comprehensive overview of research on and key issues facing crime prevention. Section I summarizes the main ways of classifying or organizing crime prevention programs. Sections II, III, and IV review, respectively, the research on the major crime-prevention strategies of developmental, community, and situational prevention. Here, primary emphasis is placed on research carried out in the last decade. An evidence-based approach is a major theme of these reviews. Section V discusses implications of the current knowledge base on crime prevention and outlines an agenda of highest-priority research for the next decade.

Delinquency prevention involves intervening in the lives of children and youths before they engage in delinquency. Delinquency control or repression responds to individuals after a delinquent act has been committed. Delinquency prevention takes place outside of the juvenile justice system, but delinquency prevention programs are not designed with the intention of excluding justice personnel. This article reviews the research on and key issues facing the prevention of delinquency. It opens by drawing attention to two important yet divergent issues confronting the present state and future of delinquency prevention, which are, research in prevention of delinquency, and the reality of policy and practice. It reviews scientific evidence on what works to prevent delinquency through individual, family, and environmental interventions that are delivered in the early years of the life course. Finally, it examines the implications of this research for juvenile justice policy and practice.

This article discusses female delinquency and offending. It reviews some related literature in order to update the prevention efforts. The first section presents data on the rates and patterns of offending among girls and shows how these have developed over the years. It then studies the predictors and correlates of involvement among females that should be considered whenever prevention programs are developed and implemented. This article also tries to determine if interventions for girls have had any program impact and if there is any difference on the impact between interventions directed towards girls and boys.

This article takes a look at the roles disorder plays in relation to crime; one of these is its ability to cause other forms of crime. It lists the various definitions of disorder, and looks at the ways that disorder is measured and studied. The latter half of the article outlines current knowledge about the role of disorder as a tool of neighborhood destabilization and decline.

This article sets out an analytical framework for thinking about drug use and abuse and about drug policy. It summarizes current knowledge about patterns of drug use and patterns of drug-related harm. It presents an overview of policy responses to drug abuse and trafficking, which includes interdiction and source-country programs, arrest and imprisonment, treatment, and prevention. This article discusses a range of programs and offers a number of proposals—centering on the need to investigate not only the prevalence of drug use but also quantities consumed and harms associated with both drug use and drug policy strategies—for increasing our understanding of current patterns of drug use and of effects of drug policy. It concludes with two trends that have the potential to challenge current cultural assumptions about drugs and drug control.

This article provides a comprehensive overview of research on and key issues facing the evidence-based movement as it applies to crime and justice. Section I describes the core elements of the evidence-based paradigm with its focus on the most scientifically valid evaluation studies and the most rigorous methods for assessing evidence. It also includes a discussion of economic analyses. Section II discusses crucial linkages that exist between research and policy processes, including research on the use of evaluations in public policy. Section III overviews the institutional base of the evidence-based approach, from its beginnings in medicine to social sciences more generally, including the development of the Campbell Collaboration and its Crime and Justice Group. Section IV reports on key developments that have advanced evidence-based crime policy in a number of leading Western countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Section V outlines the main challenges that confront an evidence-based approach.

Much controversy exists about the use of juvenile residential programs for delinquents. They are argued to be inherently detrimental by some, means of rehabilitation by others, and still others argue that they should be employed only when the juvenile is a danger to self or others and that appropriate programming can be successfully employed in such institutions. This article reviews the literature on the effectiveness of juvenile residential programs with an emphasis on the impact on later criminal or delinquent behavior. The research reviewed does not support the perspective that incarceration is successful in deterring juveniles, nor do all facilities have detrimental impacts. But the article does state that programming brings about cognitive transformations and may be the most effective method in reducing recidivism. In general, the impact of programs is similar for different races, ethnicities, genders, or ages. Studies have not demonstrated differences between these groups in terms of the impact on recidivism.

This article assesses the theoretical and empirical evidence on the concentration of crime in a small number of places and times, and the concentration of offending among a small number of very active offenders. It describes the salience of co-offending to serious crime problems, and then studies the relationship between place dynamics and high-crime times, as well as some significant criminological theories and perspectives. The article also studies the concepts of urban violence, repeat victimization, and crime hot spots. It also shows how citywide crime rates can be controlled by focusing on crime-prevention resources on high-crime places, times, and offenders.

This article provides a vivid description of how persons with mental illness continually find themselves involved in the corrections system. It first explains how their unique needs are interpreted into relevant management problems for corrections agencies. It discusses the 1970s deinstitutionalization movement, where the mentally ill were moved out of state hospital and placed in the community. Unfortunately, most of these mentally ill persons became unemployed, homeless, and even abused drugs and alcohol, which placed them in and out of corrections. This article emphasizes that there is a move towards adequate knowledge on how to identify and effectively treat persons who have mental illnesses, and notes that the public is becoming even more sympathetic to giving services to the nonviolent mentally ill who can be supported within the community.