Article Review

Searching for the Best Mix of Strategies: Delinquency Prevention and the Transformation of Juvenile Justice in the “Get Tough” Era and Beyond M I C H A E L B . S C H L O S S M A N

William Paterson University o f New Jersey

B R A N D O N C . W E L S H

Northeastern University and Netherlands Institute for the Study o f Crime and Law Enforcement

a b s t r a c t A t the same tim e as politicians were calling for and legislating "get

tough” policies th a t led to mass incarceration and increased rates o f im prisonm ent

fo r juvenile offenders in the 1990s, many states and ju risd ictio ns began ado ptin g an

array o f evidence-based therapeutic programs. Beginning w ith th e Chicago Area

Project o f th e 1930s, we examine th e historical developm ent o f delinquency p re­

vention in th e context o f broader shifts in the politics o f crim e and punishm ent. We

focus on the recent cases o f Pennsylvania and W ashington State in p articular to il­

lustrate th a t prevention, beginning in th e 1990s and continuing into the 2000s, is

now a form idable part o f a mix o f strategies for reducing delinquency. In spite o f the

seeming transform ation o f th e social and p o litic a l co n text s urrounding delinquency

prevention in the “get tough” era, we argue th a t there is m ore continuity than change

in th e role o f prevention in our society’s response to delinquency.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

In his farewell speech upon resigning from the Pennsylvania governorship to become the nation’s first director of homeland security in 2001, Republi­ can Tom Ridge began by commenting on the issue that was crucial to get­ ting him elected and that was the focus of his first executive action as gov­ ernor: the perceived leniency and ineffectiveness of the criminal justice system’s response to growing violent crime. “We passed more than three

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D elin q u en c y P re v e n tio n a n d th e T ra n s f o rm a tio n o f Ju v e n ile J u s tic e | 623

dozen tough new laws. We restored the death penalty. We toughened laws against gun crimes while respecting the rights of gun owners. And we re­ defined the mission of the juvenile justice system, to protect the commu­ nity, not just the criminal” (Ridge 2001). Rather than ending his discussion of the crime policy issue by defending this general approach and suggest­ ing the need for similar policies in the future, the governor chose a different theme: policies that offer youth therapeutic and community resources in order to prevent juvenile delinquency and later adult crime. “We were tough. But we also were compassionate. We began the Community Partner­ ship for Safe Children in 1995 with one goal: to prevent violence commit­ ted by and against our children. And it’s working . . . giving young people a real alternative to violence—before the violence starts” (Ridge 2001).

While the case of Pennsylvania is in some ways unique, in other ways it highlights a national trend. At the same time as politicians were calling for and legislating “get tough” policies that led to large increases in adult imprisonment and to increasing numbers of youth (people under age 18) being punished in adult criminal court, many states and jurisdictions also adopted an array of child-focused, developmental, evidence-based prevention and treatment programs. Of course the country’s relatively recent spending on delinquency prevention programs pales in comparison with its spending on incarceration and delinquency prevention and is still a piecemeal work in progress when compared to the across-the-board increases in imprison­ m ent occurring in the adult system over the past 30 years (Barker 2009; Campbell and Schoenfeld 2013; Clear and Frost 2014). Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that prevention programs meant to target some of the early root causes of juvenile crime were established at the same time as Amer­ ican society supposedly rejected this approach in favor of pure punishment. This raises some im portant questions about the nature and scope of the contemporary societal response to juvenile crime.

Our analysis of this mix-of-strategies approach focuses on the possibil­ ity that delinquency prevention is being adopted in ways that simply widen the net of social control and justify giving harsher treatment to certain ju­ veniles who are seen as adult-like and culpable because of their age, offense, or race (Cohen 1985; Fagan 2008). As the case of Pennsylvania makes clear, however, the punitive components of the mix-of-strategies approach of the 1990s, at least for juveniles, were never fully applied. Meanwhile, many states, like Washington, continued to invest in evidence-based court treat­ ment and prevention programming. In the broader context of recent pro-

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gressive efforts to return the focus of juvenile justice to the best interest of the child, modern prevention is at the forefront of attempts to make our so­ cietal response to youth crime smarter and less harmful (Greenwood 2006).

T H E O R E T I C A L F R A M E W O R K

There is a growing body of literature that recognizes the multiplicity of re­ sponses to rising crime rates, the politicization of crime, and the declining faith in traditional rehabilitation that began in the 1960s (Matthews 2005; Gottschalk 2006; Phelps 2013). Rather than simply identifying growing pu­ nitiveness, this recent scholarship analyzes the full range of contemporary responses to crime, many of which “braid,” or combine, coercive and reha­ bilitative components (Maurutto and Hannah-Moffat 2006). For example, Paula Maurutto and Kelly Hannah-Moffatt (2006) examine the growing in­ corporation of risk assessment tools into everyday criminal justice decision making and find that, rather than necessarily leading to “reconfinement, which becomes the heart of the program” (Simon 1993, 200), standardized assessment tools can also be used in a way that is “ameliorative” and that “reaffirms rehabilitation” (Maurutto and Hannah-Moffat 2006, 449-51). Likewise, drug courts, which mix therapeutic and coercive responses to drug use, have grown during the 1990s and 2000s and have become a main­ stay of contemporary criminal justice even as the purely punitive prison- based policies embodied in the war on drugs continued to expand (Nolan 2003; Tonry 2004).

The braiding of punitive and therapeutic policies is, therefore, nothing new in criminal justice (and especially juvenile justice) history. As Stanley Cohen (1985) argues, efforts to offer community-based services that are in­ clusionary (or that attempt to rehabilitate offenders back into society) often end up widening the net of social control while also validating and contrib­ uting to exclusionary responses (or punitive responses such as imprison­ m ent that separate offenders from society) to groups that are considered irredeemable. Cohen writes: “Policies like community-control, diversion and privatization have allowed the hard-end professionals to concentrate their power (long fixed sentences, deterrence, selective incapacitation), dumping their soft-end cases elsewhere for more efficient preventive screen­ ing and the ‘correct’ bifucatory classification. In medicine, this takes the form of ‘planned patient dumping’” (1985, 172; see also Singer 1996).

We believe that the proliferation of delinquency prevention programs during the 1990s and 2000s highlights two important trends in the increasingly

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bifurcated, or divided, use of inclusionary and exclusionary forms of social control. First, while society’s response to adult offenders has grown tougher and more exclusionary, juvenile offenders have largely received more in­ clusionary and forward-looking treatment. As Stanley Cohen predicted in the mid-1980s, the past 30 years saw large-scale increases in the size of the penal state even as softer or more inclusionary responses such as diversion and alternatives to incarceration proliferated. Age is increasingly a factor de­ termining which offenders receive exclusionary treatment and which re­ ceive inclusionary treatment. Overall, increases in confinement of youth (whether through adult or juvenile court) during the 1980s and 1990s were much smaller than increases in adult imprisonment. The main “tough on crime” reform during the 1980s and 1990s was legislation making it easier for juvenile offenders to be tried in the adult system. Between 1992 and 1996,40 states passed laws that made it easier for a wider range of juveniles to be prosecuted in adult criminal court based on predeterm ined criteria, and 45 states (and the District of Columbia) increased the severity of pun­ ishment for violent crime (Torbet et al. 1996). For a variety of reasons, how­ ever, in many states, including Pennsylvania, transfer laws had more bark than bite. No state experienced large increases in youth incarceration as a result of transfer legislation passed in the 1990s (Zimring and Tanenhaus 2014).

Instead, while adult incarceration rates continued to increase steadily up until 2008 (Clear and Frost 2014), the number of youth sentenced to ju­ venile confinement declined by 41 percent between 2001 and 2011, which is consistent with declines in juvenile arrest rates for serious crimes (Snyder and Sickmund 2006; National Juvenile Justice Network 2012; Butts 2013). The different patterns in juvenile and adult incarceration have led some, like Franklin Zimring (2005), to argue that the juvenile court today, as in the past, continues to play what he terms a diversionary role in protecting youth from the punishment-based, get tough approach they would face without a separate court system. The juvenile court’s relative insulation from mass in­ carceration, in spite of the politicization of juvenile crime and moral panics about a new generation of w hat John Dilulio called “super-predators” (Dilulio 1995; Bennett, Dilulio, and Walters 1996), is an important context for understanding the spread of delinquency prevention programs over the past 25 years.

The second trend that we highlight, which has been given less attention in the scholarly literature, is the profusion of somewhat new and nontraditional forms of therapeutic expertise arising within juvenile justice, though often

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outside of the formal system (Mihailoff 2005). Prevention programs and community-based alternatives employ the expertise of community leaders, social workers, social scientists, and neighborhood residents in an attempt to prevent and reduce delinquency. This is important to take into account when analyzing recent trends.

David Garland’s Culture o f Control (2001), a classic work on punishment in the post-1960s, sketches out w hat he views as two responses to declin­ ing faith in rehabilitation and high crime rates stemming from the socie­ tal upheavals produced by deindustrialization. First, there was the well- documented “expressive” reaction, which led politicians to enact laws that incited and responded to popular punitiveness without regard to how these policies affected the lives of those being punished (Garland 2001,110). Sec­ ond, there was the more “adaptive” response of using criminal justice re­ sources to partner with community organizations and private agencies in order to improve the system’s functioning and to regain the public’s trust (Garland 2001,113).

The expansion of community-based alternatives to incarceration and prevention programs came in response to the critique that interventions from the rehabilitation-oriented juvenile court of the first half of the twen­ tieth century (which emerged in the 1970s) that were intended to be in the best interest of the child were often stigmatizing and harmful (Allen 1981). The juvenile court at this time drew heavily on the discretionary decisions of expert decision makers, especially judges and probation officers, and on psychology and psychiatry (Rothman 1980). We are currently witnessing the expansion of adaptive programming that gives greater authority to a some­ what new network of experts outside of traditional juvenile justice who might be more effective at accomplishing therapeutic goals in nondisfiguring ways (Zimring 2005). The recent proliferation of prevention programs highlights continuity in the juvenile justice system’s avoidance of the pure punishment approach of the adult system and in the giving of great authority to a des­ ignated set of experts. But there is also evidence of change in the nature of this professional expertise and the methods of intervention.

H I S T O R I C A L O V E R V I E W

Perhaps ironically, it was in the get tough era of the 1990s that delin­ quency prevention programs like Communities That Care (CTC) became more widespread and received increased funding. While the co-occurrence

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of get tough strategies and delinquency prevention should not necessarily be surprising in itself, the character and nature of the modern system and the role that prevention plays necessitates analysis of the historical roots of community-based delinquency prevention. Consideration of the Chicago Area Project (CAP) of the 1930s illustrates the innovative and experimen­ tal nature of the original vision of delinquency prevention, as well as the similarities and differences between CAP and other modern prevention initiatives.

T H E C H I C A G O A R E A P R O J E C T A ND T H E O R I G I N S

OF M O D E R N D E L I N Q U E N C Y P R E V E N T I O N

The history of delinquency prevention as a unique social concept in the United States can be traced back to Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay’s (1942) Chicago Area Project.1 First implemented in 1931, the CAP was designed to produce social change in the so-called delinquency areas, or communi­ ties that suffered from high delinquency rates and gang activity (Shaw and McKay 1942). As part of the project, local civic leaders coordinated social service centers that counteracted community deterioration and social disor­ ganization and that redirected youth gangs and peer groups in a productive and law-abiding direction.

The CAP arose from the same socially progressive approach to respond­ ing to youth crime that led to the creation of the juvenile court. However, there were important distinctions between the methods of the juvenile court and the model CAP intervention. Shaw, a former probation officer, came to the conclusion, which was also shared by a growing number of profession­ als during the 1930s, that reform schools and other correctional institutions were ineffective at rehabilitation (Scudder 1936; Mihailoff 2005). Shaw and his Chicago School of Sociology colleagues did not believe that traditional probation was much more effective than court rehabilitation, because it treated in “individualistic terms those persons whose life organization is the product of a whole set of community forces” (Burgess, Lohman, and Shaw 1937, 15 16). More generally, Shaw believed that the juvenile justice

1. According to Brandon Welsh and Rebecca Pfeffer (2013,537), “The idea that crime preven­ tion could take place outside of the formal justice system may have already been considered due to earlier influences, but the CAP was the first documented initiative in the United States that measured crime prevention.”

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system unintentionally stigmatized youth by labeling them as delinquent and then pushed them further into delinquency through misguided ap­ proaches to treatment.

Shaw stressed the difference between the CAP and the social service efforts of character-building organizations such as the YMCA and social settlement houses, which ended up trying to impose outside values on the community, generating resentment and m istrust and impeding the com­ munity’s ability to respond to its own delinquency problems. The seeming ineffectiveness of previous efforts by the helping professions (both juve­ nile justice and social service) to assist predelinquent and delinquent youth led Shaw to search to discover “the pertinent social processes and signif­ icant cultural organization of local residents themselves” and to organize “collective action on the part of the public itself” (Burgess et al. 1937,23,28). The importance of neighborhood ownership for the delinquency problems and their solutions cannot be overstated. As David Wolcott and Steven Schlossman note (2006, 118), “W hat truly distinguished the CAP in each neighborhood was that it was funded, staffed, and run largely by indige­ nous neighborhood organizations and local residents. Communal self-help was its guiding principle.”

More than 20 different prevention programs were developed for youth, featuring discussion groups, counseling services, hobby groups, a summer camp, school-related activities, and athletic leagues. These programs were organized around the three main prevention foci of the CAP: recreation, com­ munal self-renewal, and mediation (Schlossman and Sedlak 1983). The latter was best captured by one-on-one interactions between field workers, who were young men from the community, and youth gang members. This ap­ proach became popularly known as “curbstone counseling” (Schlossman and Sedlak 1983, 429). Field workers, much like street outreach workers today, were employed to gain the confidence of the neighborhood boys with the aim of convincing them to desist from delinquent behavior, adopt prosocial behaviors, and return to school or seek out employment. A lesser known but important aspect of the CAP was program counselors’ and staff’s efforts to work with public agencies such as the schools and the police to divert youth from being formally charged in court and to instead be directed to the CAP’S growing array of progressive, community-based services. Some evaluations indicated overall positive results on juvenile delinquency, while others showed that the CAP efforts made little difference (see Schloss­ man and Sedlak 1983).

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The CAP’S community-based approach was appealing to liberal reform­ ers in the decades to come. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was heightened interest in preventing delinquency through community-based prevention programs based on the CAP model. Elements of this could be seen in Pres­ ident Johnson’s War on Poverty. Programs such as New York City’s Mobi­ lization for Youth (MOBY) and Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU), which sought to increase opportunities for youth in low-income African American communities, received substantial federal and state fund­ ing (Ward 2012; Welsh and Pfeffer 2013). While these programs were in­ fluential, they were relatively short-lived. The loss of faith in the criminal justice system that occurred in the wake of the dramatic increase in crime rates in the 1960s inspired renewed interest in prevention. This loss of faith was due to a confluence of factors, including declining public support for the criminal justice system, increasing levels of fear of crime, and crimino­ logical research that demonstrated that many of the traditional modes of crime control were ineffective and inefficient in reducing crime (Martin­ son 1974; Curtis 1987; Visher and Weisburd 1998). It was becoming readily apparent among researchers and public officials alike that a justice system response on its own was insufficient for the task of reducing crime. Liberal reformers moved quickly to support the development of diversion and prevention programs, which sought to deal with less serious forms of anti­ social behavior and delinquency outside of the court system (Galvin and Polk 1983; Ohlin 1983). Their efforts led to the passage of the federal Juve­ nile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (JJDP) Act in 1974, which tied federal juvenile justice funding to states’ progress in removing status of­ fenders from correctional facilities and young people from adult jails and prisons and created the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Pre­ vention (OJJDP) to distribute money to targeted treatment, diversion, and prevention programs.

Nevertheless, with crime rates and public fear of crime on the rise in the 1970s and early 1980s, the political climate surrounding juvenile crime changed rather drastically. Federal and state politicians went out of their way to show how tough they were on crime, and they led a backlash—which found voice in some states (e.g., New York and Florida)— against the deinstitutionalization-era reforms of the previous decade. The Reagan admin­ istration sought to reverse the deinstitutionalization of status offenders and refused to fund the OJJDP’s treatment and prevention programs (Guarino- Ghezzi and Loughran 1996). As Michael Tonry (2004, 3) notes, “ ‘Soft on

6 3 0 | S o c i a l S e r v i c e R e v ie w

crime’ was a label few politicians dared risk during the late 1970s through the 1990s, and many supported policies they believed unwise or unjust rather than risk losing an election.” The purposeful polarization of punish­ ment and prevention laid the groundwork for a massive and expensive crime bill that was being deliberated.

The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (here­ after, Violent Crime Act) authorized funding to put 100,000 new police officers on the streets and to make 60 more federal crimes eligible for the death penalty; it also devoted $10 billion for new prison construction. Crime prevention programs (in the broadest sense) were allocated a sizable $6.1 billion, but most of this was used on existing federal programs like Head Start in order to keep them afloat (Gest 2001). From the beginning of the bill’s debate on Capitol Hill and across the country, crime prevention— especially programs for at-risk youth—was heavily criticized. Politicians with a growing political thirst to get tough on juvenile and adult criminals alike sought to paint prevention and its supporters as soft on crime. Pre­ vention was characterized as nothing more than pork-barreling—wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars (Mendel 1995). Meanwhile, liberals such as Elliott Currie protested against the focus on punishment rather than pre­ vention: “Prisons, our most spectacularly failed social experiment, get a free lunch; prevention gets the shaft, forced again to fight for every penny year after year, even though we know it can work” (1994, 121).

The social and political context seemed to favor the get tough response to the upsurge in violent youth crime and growing fear of crime in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and, as the debate surrounding the 1994 Violent Crime Act illustrates, prevention and punishment seemed like opposed choices. As the next section documents, it was perhaps somewhat ironic that the community-based, social science-driven approach to delinquency prevention embodied in the CAP began to expand and receive greater fund­ ing at the state and federal levels even as “tough on crime” laws were also enacted.

P R E V E N T I O N A N D T H E M I X - O F - S T R A T E G I E S A P P R O A C H

O F T H E 1 9 9 0 S A N D 2 0 0 0 S

While the 1994 Violent Crime Act focused predominately on punishment, other federal initiatives expanded funding for delinquency prevention. The 1992 law reauthorizing the JJDP Act contained a provision called Title V— Incentive Grants for Local Delinquency Prevention Programs, whose pur­ pose was “to prevent young people from becoming involved in the juvenile

Delinquency Prevention and the Transformation of Juvenile Justice ] 631

justice system” (OJJDP 1996, i). Previously, the State Formula Grant Pro­ grams administered under the JJDP Act funded state and local prevention efforts. However, because there was no direct way for counties to request funding from the federal government for prevention programming, for­ mula grant funding tended to go toward “paying the expensive ‘back-end’ costs of the juvenile justice system—enforcement and treatment—but were not provided with an alternate source of Federal juvenile justice funds for ‘front-end’ prevention strategies” (OJJDP 1996, 3).

The renewed interest in prevention stemmed in part from OJJDP’s de­ velopment of a comprehensive strategy to deal with the upsurge in serious youth crime, which drew heavily on criminological evidence on risk and pro­ tective factors for delinquency and growing evidence that certain preven­ tive and therapeutic programs worked to reduce youth crime (Krisberg 2005). The comprehensive strategy argues that, “As families and com­ munities are strengthened and more children at an early age are directed toward healthy behaviors, fewer youth are expected to become serious ju­ venile offenders requiring expensive back-end intervention or confinement resources” (OJJDP 1996, 7-9).

The Title V program addressed existing deficiencies by having states and counties apply for Community Prevention Grants to fund a range of prevention initiatives, such as parent training, early childhood education, family support, school management, tutoring, and community mobiliza­ tion. Applicants were required to meet particular criteria that were based on the Communities That Care design. First developed in the early 1990s by David Hawkins and Richard Catalano (1992), CTC soon became a national model for a community violence prevention system that partners with com­ munity leaders, local organizations, and social service agencies to assess lev­ els of risk and protection faced by the community’s young people and to select and implement evidence-based programs to reduce elevated risk factors for delinquency (e.g., availability of drugs, family conflict, and aca­ demic failure) and enhance protective factors. The intervention techniques are tailored to the needs of each particular community. Under this man­ tle, all recipients had to convene a prevention policy board from various so­ cial service agencies and community members and leaders. Recipients also had to operate community boards, which employed parents and commu­ nity members in the task of figuring out w hat risk factors were affecting the community and should be the target of intervention. A good example of model OJJDP programming was the Bond Neighborhood Initiative in Tallahassee:

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The Prevention Policy Board held community forums to discuss local con­ ditions and review risk-factor data. . . . Momentum created by the risk- assessment forums has helped the Neighborhood Initiative establish a core of 350 volunteers ready to help implement program activities. In one meet­ ing, a minister offered to “walk the streets at night if that is w hat it takes to make this happen.” Turning to their volunteers, they have begun a program that will use professional family and marriage therapists to oversee a group of student therapists (all will be unpaid) while they provide counseling to low-income families in the community and at the same time earn hours of practical experience they need to graduate. (OJJDP 1996, 56)

Originally, all states received a minimum of $100,000, with a total of $13 million and $20 million distributed in 1994 and 1995, respectively. Af­ ter some initial success stories, funding for Community Prevention Grants expanded significantly, rising to as much as $40.5 million in 1999 (with a to­ tal of 511 funded communities). Funding for the program was gradually reduced and was abruptly eliminated in 2003 before being reintroduced at much lower levels. In total, between 1994 and 2003, 1,525 communities received funding from Title V’s Community Prevention Grants (OJJDP 2004, 2005, 2011a). Thus, at least in terms of federal funding, prevention was expanding, not contracting, during the height of public concern about youth superpredators and school violence.2

At the state level, legislative responses to juvenile crime during the 1990s had a mix of both expressive and adaptive components (Garland 2001). On the surface, the juvenile system’s response to the culture of control mirrored the movement in the adult system toward expressive punishment and politicization of decisions that used to be solely the prov­ ince of criminal justice officials (Garland 2001). In line with dramatic po­ litical rhetoric, such as the popular slogan “adult time for adult crime,” the 1990s saw the well-documented move by state legislators to get tough on youth crime through laws that transferred certain juveniles to be tried as adults, made delinquency records more easily available to the public,

2. Other sources of federal funding, such as the Juvenile Accountability Incentive Block Grant Program (JAIBG), may also have funded certain prevention programs. However, JAIBG was primarily used to fund court-based interventions w ith delinquent youth, though some money was allocated to restorative justice-oriented programming involving neighbor­ hood alliances and community service projects for at-risk youth (OJJDP 1997; Griffin 1999).

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and led to more youth being sentenced to life without parole (Torbet et al. 1996).

The debates over what to do about increases in youth violence appear to have been influenced by more adaptive-minded lobby groups represent­ ing juvenile court officials and special commissions composed of experts who based their decisions on research and actual court experience, not simply on political factors (Torbet et al. 1996). For example, in Pennsylva­ nia, Connecticut, Florida, Minnesota, and Tennessee, these groups were involved in the drafting of legislation and helped to moderate the expres­ sive, punitive response to youth crime, confining these policies to partic­ ular groups while reducing their purview. Certain states were much more focused on punishment than anything else (e.g., Texas and New York), but others, at least initially, developed versions of a mix of strategies more con­ sistent with the OJJDP comprehensive strategy’s focus on prevention and early intervention programs for first-time and minor offenders, a continuum of intermediate sanctions and services for moderate offenders, and longer prison sentences for a small group of serious and violent offenders.

The National Center for Juvenile Justice (NCJJ), which put together probably the most comprehensive analysis of juvenile justice legislative en­ actments in the mid-1990s, identified nine states “that appeared more pos­ itive, took a long-term view and went beyond only retributive responses that increased punishment/accountability for juveniles who commit violent or other serious crimes” (Torbet et al. 1996, 53). Among these is Arkansas, which convened a Special Session on Juvenile Crime that made it easier for prosecutors to direct file 14- and 15-year-old youth offenders as adults. While talk of punishment dominated the special session, the governor also committed money to develop a system of coordinated community-based pre­ vention, enacted a $9 million community work and youth recreation bill, and funded the expansion of therapeutic group homes and independent living programs.

Some states like Minnesota, Tennessee, and New Mexico specifically af­ firmed the difference between the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems and advocated preserving and strengthening a system geared toward indi­ vidualized treatm ent for the majority of youth. Meanwhile, they targeted serious and violent offenders, for whom they felt the current system was not working, for longer prison sentences. In this context, prevention was considered to be an alternative to juvenile justice as usual. Minnesota thus affirmed that, “Juvenile justice interventions are not the solution to the

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increase in serious juvenile crime; rather, the solution lies in the strengthen­ ing of families and communities and the implementation of prevention and early intervention programs” (Torbet et al. 1996, 55).

In 1995, a year of frequent legislative activity surrounding youth crime, 17 states passed laws making it easier to transfer youth to adult court, 12 states opened up juvenile records to the public, 7 states passed sentenc­ ing enhancement laws for gang members, and 13 states passed laws that specifically addressed delinquency prevention (Lyons 1995). Thus, while pu­ nitive responses received more public attention, in certain states, invest­ ment in prevention was a key component of policy reforms in the 1990s.

Rather than giving rise to a polarization between prevention and punish­ ment, the 1990s saw increased investment at both the federal and state lev­ els in both prevention-based strategies geared toward rooting out the causes of crime and punishment-based approaches for juveniles who, because of their offenses and other factors, were categorized as adults. Supported in part by state and federal funding, prevention programs received consider­ able investment, especially in certain states such as Pennsylvania and Wash­ ington. The next section focuses on these two states to examine the evolu­ tion of the mix of strategies approach up until the present era.

While Cohen predicted that, with investment in prevention and community-based alternatives, “the end result can only be increased in­ tervention” (1985,132), in fact, the opposite has occurred in an important sense: juvenile justice and youth incarceration rates have been on the de­ cline (Abrams 2013). Rather than inclusionary measures simply reinforc­ ing the exclusionary, punitive responses, in retrospect it appears that the exclusionary measures such as automatic transfer laws may have also pro­ vided political cover for systematic efforts to adapt the juvenile court’s child­ saving mission to an era of declining confidence in traditional court-based intervention. The cases of prevention in Pennsylvania and Washington State highlight growing bifurcation between juvenile and adult criminal justice systems and the proliferation of new forms of social science-informed and community-based expertise in juvenile justice.

T W O C A S E S : P E N N S Y L V A N I A A N D W A S H I N G T O N S T A T E

P E N N S Y L V A N I A

In his closing remarks to the 1995 Special Session on Crime, Republican Governor Tom Ridge declared: “Brazen, hardened crim inals will be

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held accountable even when they are juveniles. And now if you commit an adult crime in Pennsylvania, you will do adult time in Pennsylvania.” Later in the speech, he explained the logic behind increased funding for preven­ tion efforts: “To be successful, preventive measures cannot be the prior­ ity of just elected officials or a few citizens. We must engage the entire com­ munity. Together we will attack the root causes: teen pregnancy; child abuse and neglect; drug and alcohol addiction; domestic violence; truancy; drugs and weapons in our schools and neighborhoods” (Commonwealth of Penn­ sylvania 1995b, 548-49). Ridge’s policy focus on softer solutions such as pre­ vention for youth deemed still redeemable and the ramping up of a purely punitive approach for those whose criminal behavior made them seem adult-like and fully culpable might have defined Pennsylvania’s response to youth crime had this vision of social control (as Cohen terms it in the title of his book) been straightforwardly translated into practice (Cohen 1985).

One of Governor Ridge’s first acts in office was to convene a Special Session on Crime in 1995. In part as a result of policies developed in the Special Session on Crime—such as mandatory minimum sentences for drug and gun offenses—Pennsylvania saw a 52 percent increase in overall incar­ ceration between 1997 and 2009 (Pennsylvania Commission on Sentenc­ ing 2009). Between 2000 and 2008, Pennsylvania’s increase in incarcera­ tion (both federal and state prisoners) was more than twice that of the rest of the country (Sabol, West, and Cooper 2009). Pennsylvania’s growing in­ carceration rate, and the resulting prison overcrowding, is an object of lobbying efforts by anti-mass incarceration groups and has resulted in a situation that state politicians on both sides of the aisle acknowledge is un­ tenable (Commonwealth Foundation 2009).

In the Special Session on Crime, the legislature passed Act 33, which mandated that youth who were ages 15 and over and had committed a vio­ lent crime with a firearm would now be tried as adults.3 The new transfer law was the public face of the legislative response to the outbreak of youth violence in the early 1990s and calls to get tough on what was supposedly a new generation of superpredators (Dilulio 1995). Pennsylvania State

3. See http://www.ncjj.org/Publication/State-Juvenile-Justice-Profile-Pennsylvania.aspx. In addition, Act 33 covered those who were age 14 and over and charged with serious and violent crimes who also had prior adjucations for serious violent crimes. However, in practice, there were very few cases that met these criteria (according to conversations with NCJJ researchers and court officials).

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Senator Michael O’Pake (Democrat) urged support of Act 33 because “we have gotten past the time when we can say that because this kid is 15, we have to handle him and rehabilitate him and let us hush this up and let us slap him on the wrist and let us send him back into the gang or onto the street corner. This tells the people of Pennsylvania that we are serious, that if you commit an adult crime you are going to do adult time” (Common­ wealth of Pennsylvania 1995a, 305).

The transfer legislation was expected to affect between 500 and 1,000 cases, according to Pennsylvania State Senator D. Michael Fisher (Re­ publican), the sponsor of the bill (Commonwealth of Pennsylvania 1995c, 227). The senator thought that as many as 500 juveniles would be con­ victed and sentenced in adult criminal court as a result of Act 33. Based on these projections, Pine Grove Prison in Indiana County was built to house the estimated 500 youth offenders who were to be punished as adults (Commonwealth of Pennsylvania 1995a). W hen the prison finally opened in 2001, there were only 160 juveniles in the 500-person facility (70 percent of whom were from Philadelphia), and so they had to fill a separate wing of the prison with adults. Presently, the prison serves mainly young adults (18 and over), and only 10 percent of inmates are 16 and 17 years old (Wiggins 2001; Togneri 2010).

Act 33 did not affect nearly as many youth as politicians may have ex­ pected. The language of the law and court decisions regarding its imple­ mentation play an important role in explaining this outcome, as do declin­ ing rates of youth violent crime. In line with almost half of the states with automatic transfer mechanisms in place (22 out of 45 states), Pennsylva­ nia’s Act 33 specifically permitted adult court judges with original juris­ diction over Act 33 cases to decertify youth, or to redirect their cases from adult court back to juvenile court (OJJDP 2011b). Decertifications appear to play a major role in why a lower than expected number of youth were sentenced as adults. In 1996, in the three largest counties in Pennsylvania, 19 percent of cases prosecuted under Act 33 resulted in dismissed charges and an additional 30 percent were later decertified to juvenile court (Sny­ der, Sickmund, and Poe-Yamagata 2000). Because of dismissals and de­ certifications, of the 473 cases that were excluded from juvenile court on Act 33 charges in 1996, only approximately 135 resulted in conviction and sentencing in adult criminal court. As a result of declining violent crime rates and these various decisions, “the ultimate impact of Pennsylvania’s ex-

Delinquency Prevention and the Transformation o f Juvenile Justice

elusion legislation in 1996 was to retain in criminal court those cases that the juvenile court would have judicially waived had it been given the op­ portunity” (Snyder et al. 2000, 38).

While the new transfer provisions of Act 33 received the most media attention, the law also mandated that Balanced and Restorative Justice (BARJ) would be the new mission statement of the Pennsylvania juvenile court. The state’s previous legislatively defined purpose clause for juvenile justice, which emphasized the child’s “treatment, supervision, rehabilita­ tion and welfare,” was now to be interpreted in ways that would further “the protection of the community, the imposition of accountability for of­ fenses committed and the development of competencies to enable chil­ dren to become productive and responsible members of the community” (Griffin 2006, 1). While Ridge publicly declared that “we redefined the mission of the juvenile justice system, to protect the community, not just the criminal” (Ridge 2001, 2), in practice, he left the sculpting and imple­ mentation of the new mission statement almost fully up to advisory agen­ cies such as the Juvenile Court Judges’ Commission (JCJC), the Pennsyl­ vania Council for Crime and Delinquency (PCCD), and the Pennsylvania Council of Chief Probation Officers (PAC JO).

These agencies interpreted and applied BARJ in terms of restorative justice principles by investing in family-group conferences, community ser­ vice, paying restitution, and other programming that had youth make amends to victims (Bazemore and Umbreit 1997). Likewise, under BARJ’s provision for court partnerships with the community, a number of counties developed community-based alternatives to incarceration for delinquent youth (Maloney, Romig, and Armstrong 1988; Kurlychek 1998; DeAngelo 2005).

W hen Governor Ridge came into office, one of the first things he did was to create the Community Partnership for Safe Children (Children’s Part­ nership), a policy effort for reducing violence committed by and against children. His wife, Michele, the former head librarian at the Erie Public Library, was put in charge of this multipronged antiviolence initiative. The Children Partnership’s prevention efforts largely revolved around spreading and implementing the Communities That Care program (Fagan et al. 2011). Between 1995 and 1999, Ridge allocated $7.5 million to CTC. By 2001, there were 107 CTC sites in 55 counties (out of a total of 67 counties), and 21 new CTC sites were established later that year. In total, his administration spent

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$30 million on CTC and other child-focused, evidence-based prevention programs between 1995 and 2001 (Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency 1999; Juvenile Court Judges’ Commission 2001). Partly as a result of Ridge’s strong support of prevention programs, Pennsylvania is considered to be on the cutting edge of state efforts to invest in evidence- based prevention and treatm ent programs (Greenwood and Welsh 2012; Welsh and Greenwood 2015).

State officials used Ridge’s financial support of community prevention efforts such as CTC to propel local prevention efforts until the state’s fund­ ing of prevention was reduced in the mid-2000s. More recently, prevention has received increased investment as part of a statewide agenda, the Juve­ nile Justice System Enhancement Strategy (JJSES), to implement evidence- based policy to reduce delinquency (Juvenile Court Judges’ Commission 2012, 2014). Presently, there are 70 active CTC communities (http://www .episcenter.psu.edu/ctcresources). Looking back at the large-scale changes that occurred in Pennsylvania juvenile justice in the 1990s, one state offi­ cial, who was centrally involved in efforts to implement BARJ and over­ see CTC and who was interviewed by the first author for another project, pointedly commented in an in-depth interview that the transfer legisla­ tion of Act 33 gave them “cover to do something productive.”

As the case of Pennsylvania illustrates, the pure punishment aspect of the mix of strategies approach was not always fully applied. In fact, no state appears to have experienced large increases in incarceration as a result of transfer legislation passed in the 1990s (however New York and Florida saw increases in incarceration because of laws passed in the 1980s; Zim- ring and Tanenhaus 2014). As a result, youth policy experts have been somewhat insulated from tough on crime political demands and have had a fair amount of freedom to explore innovative therapeutic program ­ ming and to invest in social science-informed and community-based ap­ proaches to delinquency prevention influenced by CAP.

W A S H I N G T O N S T A T E

By every indication, Washington State today is the embodiment of a mix- of-strategies approach, with community-based and social science-informed expertise playing a major role in delinquency prevention policy making and not just existing at the margins and legitimating punishment-based ap­ proaches. Like Pennsylvania, Washington State responded to the crisis of

Delinquency Prevention and the Transformation of Juvenile Justice |

rising juvenile violent crime rates in the early 1990s and declining faith in the juvenile court by passing legislation that led to harsher treatm ent for the most serious offenders and by including provisions for punishing a greater number of youth in the adult criminal justice system (see Garland 2001). The Youth Violence Reduction Act of 1994 and the Community Juvenile Accountability Act of 1997 led to an initial large spike in the mid- to-late 1990s in the number of juveniles being charged as adults, with a peak of over 500 cases transferred in 1998, but this number had gone down by the early 2000s. Overall, between 1992 and 2002, the number of youth being treated as adults went from 200 to 300. In sum, the large initial effect of the automatic transfer laws was short-lived, and this por­ tion of the 1994 and 1997 legislation affected a relatively small number of cases (Barnoski 2003). These bills initiated the state’s support of a grow­ ing range of therapeutic and prevention-oriented programs that research showed might work to reduce delinquency (Lieb, Fish, and Crosby 1994; Barnoski 1999).

In the late 1990s, the state legislature commissioned the Washington State Institute for Public Policy (WSIPP), the nonpartisan research arm of the legislature, to assess the effectiveness and economic efficiency of a wide range of crime prevention and criminal justice programs with the aim to “identify interventions that reduce crime and lower total costs to taxpayers and crime victims” (Aos, Barnoski, and Lieb 1998, 1). To do so, the WSIPP developed a comprehensive cost-benefit model along the lines of a bottom- line financial analysis, because it considered analyzing the effectiveness of crime interventions to be parallel to the work of investors who study rates of return on financial investments (Drake, Aos, and Miller 2009). The re­ search found that a number of programs were worthwhile, and the WSIPP recommended that the state pilot two evidence-based programs initially: Functional Family Therapy (FFT) and Aggression Replacement Therapy (ART; Barnoski 1999).4 The list of state-funded programs soon expanded to include a wider range of programs in the 2000s, including early child­ hood education for low-income children and community- and home-based treatm ent for serious and violent juvenile offenders (Drake et al. 2009).

4. This was no small investment, as the legislature initially planned to serve a substan­ tial number of clients; 271 youth were expected in the FFT program (served by 14 courts), and 743 youth were expected in ART (served by 23 courts) within 6 months of their adoption (Barnoski 1999).

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Washington State’s approach to delinquency prevention consciously developed in tandem with OJJDP’s comprehensive strategy for respond­ ing to serious, violent, and chronic juvenile offenders and focused on ad­ dressing similar risk factors and high-risk behaviors (e.g., teen pregnancy and substance abuse) through research-based programming (Wilson and Howell 1993; Lieb et al. 1994,15). Between 1999 and 2001, the state budgeted $162.8 million for a range of prevention programs that addressed at-risk be­ haviors identified by the 1994 legislation, such as teen pregnancy and drug use (Gookin and Aos 2001).

The state’s growing reliance on research and appetite for evidence- based programming was tested in the early 2000s when the state’s Case­ load Forecast Council projected the need for two new prisons by 2020 and possibly a third by 2030 (for a total of 7,000 new beds), with a price tag of $250 million apiece for capital costs and an additional $45 million annually per prison for operating costs (Aos, Miller, and Drake 2006). The 2005 leg­ islature directed the WSIPP to conduct research on evidence-based and cost-beneficial policy alternatives. Over the next 2 years, the WSIPP sys­ tematically reviewed and analyzed almost 600 of the highest-quality crime prevention and justice programs (juvenile and adult), estimated the fi­ nancial costs and benefits, and “projected the degree to which alternative ‘portfolios’ of these programs could affect future prison construction needs, criminal justice costs, and crime rates in Washington” (Aos et al. 2006,1).

The WSIPP’s findings were nothing short of groundbreaking. Based on a moderate-to-aggressive portfolio of evidence-based programs (i.e., a $63- $171 million expenditure in the first year), a significant amount of future prison construction costs could be avoided, about $2 billion saved to tax­ payers, and crime rates lowered slightly (Aos et al. 2006, 16). The 2007 legislature responded in kind. It abandoned plans to build one of the two prisons set for 2020 and approved a sizable spending package ($48 million per annum) on evidence-based delinquency prevention and intervention programs (Drake et al. 2009). This was by no means the end of the story. Risk assessment (to ensure programs were matched with an individual’s risk level and treatment needs) and quality assurance (to ensure fidelity to the model) systems were put in place to foster effective program imple­ mentation and delivery. In the case of juvenile intervention programs, for example, a quality assurance steering committee was established, compris­ ing juvenile court staff (representing various ranks and geographic regions of the state), community and program experts, and regional consultants, and

D e lin q u en c y P re v e n tio n an d th e T ra n s f o rm a tio n o f Ju v e n ile J u s tic e | 641

tasked with the development of quality assurance plans for all evidence- based programs operating in the state (Drake 2008). According to the Func­ tional Family Therapy (FFT) plan, “Ensuring model fidelity in a commu­ nity based system of care requires an ongoing systematic system of both quality assurance and quality improvement” (CJAA Committee 2010, 1).

As David Garland (2001, 114) argues, the “professionalization and the rationalization of justice” became core goals of criminal justice officials un­ der conditions of great doubt about the ability of the courts to rehabilitate through traditional means and a need to justify officials’ power and discre­ tion to the general public. Consistent with this notion, Washington’s experi­ ment with evidence-based crime policy was fundamentally oriented around cost-cutting and creating a more efficient justice system (Welsh and Far­ rington 2012). Through issuing comprehensive evaluation reports, WSIPP provided a systematic analytical model for deciding what was a good return on their crime fighting dollars (Drake et al. 2009).

While evaluation research suggests that the state’s reductions in ju ­ venile crime generated by evidence-based programs have been modest (generally between 5 and 15 percent), there is now a growing body of re­ search indicating that certain programs are highly cost beneficial, produc­ ing substantial savings to taxpayers, the government, and potential crime victims, and provide a far more efficient use of resources than prison (Lee et al. 2012). As noted above, the comprehensive cost-benefit model devel­ oped by the WSIPP used only the highest-quality evaluation studies. Pre­ vention has played a key role in this more rationalized approach to crime reduction.

D I S C U S S I O N

Delinquency prevention programming has expanded over the last two and a half decades, even during the get-tough era of the 1990s. We are presently in a new era of declining youth crime and imprisonment rates and state ju­ venile justice reforms with a greater concern for the best interest of the child (Krisberg et al. 2010; Abrams 2013). It is not surprising that, in the current climate, prevention and evidence-based therapeutic programming more generally receive greater interest and at least the appearance of greater investment. Nevertheless, as our analysis shows, this greater investment in prevention at the federal level and, in many states and jurisdictions, be­ gan during the 1990s—at the same time when almost every state legislature

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passed laws making it easier to prosecute juveniles in the adult justice system (Torbet et al. 1996). Our study helps shed light on the variegated nature of juvenile justice reform and suggests a more complex account of the recent era that goes beyond assumptions about the system trending toward punitiveness in the 1990s and then returning to focus on rehabil­ itation from the mid-2000s through the present (Matthews 2005; Good­ man 2012).

Prevention-based strategies and programming were adopted, along with new court-based therapeutic programming and purely punitive ex­ clusionary responses to juveniles who are viewed as adult-like, in what can be called a mix-of-strategies approach to youth crime. More generally, the policy changes of the 1990s in juvenile justice evidenced a rejection of the status quo focus on rehabilitation in response to elevated youth violent crime rates in the early 1990s (Garland 2001). As exemplified by the policy reforms adopted by Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge during the 1995 Special Session on Crime, preventive approaches were viewed as part of a general attack on youth crime (Commonwealth of Pennsylvania 1995b). As Cohen (1985) predicted, softer forms of punishment, such as prevention, legitimated the isolation of a group viewed as serious and violent or hard­ core for more severe punishment. Thus, it is not totally surprising that a greater tendency to resort to prevention and punishment would occur simultaneously. Had these politicized visions of social control been fully realized, prevention would have behaved as Cohen predicted and legiti­ mated “increased intervention” across the board (1985,132).

The greater societal concern with youth violence and crime and declin­ ing faith in traditional rehabilitation led to a forceful policy response, but many states took a mainly adaptive, rather than expressive, response (Gar­ land 2001). Washington and Pennsylvania, like the majority of states, passed laws that increased the role of the legislature and prosecutors in deciding which offenses and prior record profiles should be excluded from the ju ­ venile court and handled in the adult justice system. Nevertheless, for rea­ sons having to do with the reduction in youth violent crime in the late 1990s and 2000s, as well as the wording of these laws and their implementation by court officials, these statutes had a great deal more bark than bite and only affected a small subset of delinquent youth (Zimring 2002, 2005; Ruth and Reitz 2003).

Other aspects of the get tough reforms affected public policy toward ju­ venile crime in potentially more long-lasting ways. For example, mandatory

D elinquency Prevention and the T ransform ation o f Juvenile Justice | 643

juvenile sex offender registration laws proliferated in the 2000s, and 1990s laws making juvenile records easier to access remain on the books (Saha Shah, Fine, and Gullen 2014; Zimring and Tanenhaus 2014). Youth are still far too often confined in large and crowded facilities, and a large number experience solitary confinement (ACLU 2014). While there has been a sus­ tained movement in the direction of smaller, more home-like facilities, these reforms have made much more headway in some states than in others (Miller 1991; OJJDP 2010; Krisberg 2011).5 Likewise, a disproportionate number of minority youth come into contact with the justice system, and this has continued in spite of recent policy reforms and declining youth crime rates (Sentencing Project 2014; Cox 2015). Strikingly, however, dur­ ing an era in which rates of adult imprisonment skyrocketed, juvenile jus­ tice largely did not move in this purely punitive direction.

Drawing on Cohen’s theoretical framework, one might argue that the softer and inclusionary aspects of juvenile justice actually serve to legiti­ mate an expressive, pure punishment approach for adults and those (rela­ tively few) juveniles who are considered to be adult-like. While this inter­ pretation deserves consideration in future empirical analysis of responses to juvenile and adult crime, it probably overstates the degree of coordina­ tion and intentionality of political actors and policy decision makers. It appears that politicians seeking to do something to show that they were tough on youth crime encountered, and accepted to some degree, the in­ stitutional legacy of a separate juvenile justice system focused on the child’s best interest. As the case of Pennsylvania illustrates, youth expert com­ missions, reform lobby groups, court officials, and social scientists appear to have partially tamed the effect of get tough reforms and helped move juvenile justice policy in a more productive direction. As Zimring argues (2002), having a separate juvenile justice system continues to serve a diver­ sionary role, protecting youth from the excesses of societal punitiveness in a generally punitive era.

While juvenile justice in the 1990s and 2000s continued to shield youth from punitiveness and give substantial discretion to youth experts, we be­ lieve that the 1990s and 2000s also saw important changes in the content and nature of that expertise. This is reflected in the simultaneous spread

5. In 2010, 42 percent of incarcerated youth were held in facilities that had a capacity for 100 or more wards, and 46 percent of youth removed from their homes were held in locked, jail-like facilities (OJJDP 2010).

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of prevention-based approaches, evidence-based programming, and alter­ natives to incarceration for court-involved youth. These new programs draw in large part on non-court-based forms of community-driven, interagency, and social science-based expertise. In Washington State, for example, delin­ quency prevention programs such as the Nurse-Family Partnership and greater investment in early childhood education are part of a com prehen­ sive effort to implement a cost-effective, research-based approach to reduc­ ing delinquency that relies less on imprisonment.

Our research asks w hat role prevention will take within the mix of strategies approach. Will prevention be used proactively to reduce the use of incarceration and punishment-based approaches, as it was in Washington State? Will preventive strategies rhetorically legitimate the spread of puni­ tive practices, as they threatened to do in the 1990s? Or, despite the rh et­ oric surrounding change in the juvenile justice system, will we continue to react to youth crime after the fact, and primarily with traditional thera­ peutic strategies (e.g., probation and out-of-home placement), while invest­ ing very little in addressing the root causes of delinquency?

In some ways, delinquency prevention efforts today have the potential to play the same role as they did with the creation of the CAP in the 1930s. Prevention still functions as an innovative alternative to the norm of pro­ bation and out-of-home placement as the main interventions for the majority of delinquent youth. Intervening with youth at an early age and before their involvement in serious delinquency—as well as working outside of a some­ times dysfunctional court system—is as advantageous today as it was in the past. However, as we have argued, the social context of prevention has changed considerably since the 1930s. Rather than being an antisystem strat­ egy for handling antisocial behavior and delinquency, prevention is now folded into a reform process also involving greater investment in evidence- based and community alternatives programming for court-involved youth.

We think it is possible that delinquency prevention’s role as part of re­ cent adaptive reforms to the juvenile justice system will lead to a much more widespread implementation of prevention-based programming than we saw in the past. Historically, prevention has emerged in a spotty fashion, rather than as a sustained social movement. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was heightened interest in preventing delinquency through community- based prevention programs based on the CAP model, such as New York City’s Mobilization for Youth (MOBY) and Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU). While these programs were influential, they were

D e lin q u en c y P r e v e n tio n a n d th e T ra n s f o rm a tio n o f Ju v e n ile J u s tic e | 645

relatively short-lived and did not achieve the same level of success as CAP, which continues to this day. Greater use of prevention and diversion also figured heavily in the recommendations of the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice (1967) and as a com­ ponent of President Johnson’s Great Society agenda. However, the recom­ mendations of the Commission’s report failed to achieve any real traction with policy makers (Morris 1968).

By contrast, the BARJ and evidence-based movements, while supported to some degree at the federal level, also found backing among state and local court officials and a whole host of nonprofit organizations, foundations, and research think tanks that promote and fund new innovations (Greenwood 2006; MacArthur Foundation 2006). Given the decentralized nature of American juvenile justice (Bishop 2006), this bottom-up approach involv­ ing a variety of organizations and actors is more likely to be successful at spreading CTC-like programming than a top-down strategy. Likewise, tying prevention to the movement to revise court-based treatm ent may make prevention more appealing and urgent than if prevention alone were the main goals of reformers. That said, given the desire of policy makers to do something right away to respond to juvenile crime and the short-term focus on attaining immediate results, it is also possible that prevention programs will be placed on the back burner and will mainly serve as lip service for court-based responses to delinquency. While the cases of Penn­ sylvania and Washington suggest that prevention has the potential to per­ form an important role in contemporary policy, it is unclear exactly what role prevention currently plays or will play at the state level in the mix of strategies approach to delinquency reduction.

We also wonder whether policy makers will lump prevention programs in with court-based responses to delinquency, and as a result, whether de­ linquency prevention will begin to lose its distinctive and innovative qual­ ities. As Brandon Welsh and Rebecca Pfeffer (2013) point out, a view of prevention that includes policies geared toward short-term community pro­ tection and retribution fails to acknowledge prevention’s unique focus on addressing risk factors before the occurrence of serious delinquency. While there is value in prevention and court-based approaches—both can work to reduce later delinquency—this view mutes the community-focused aspect of prevention and the corresponding concerns about the limita­ tions and potential for harm of even the most well-designed court-based programs.

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It is also unclear whether, in practice, new forms of community and so­ cial science-based expertise will be consistently applied at the ground level of intervention. The quality of evidence-based programming will vary, es­ pecially as well-regarded, proven programs expand and operate with a new set of actors and in different environments (Fixsen et al. 2013). Likewise, there may be a tension between the more rationalized and centralized ap­ proach to planning evidence-based policy, as embodied in Washington State’s approach, and innovative, home-grown prevention programming that is more genuinely community-driven and operated (Greenwood and Welsh 2 0 1 2 ).

C O N C L U S I O N

We believe that continuing to invest in community-focused delinquency prevention programs is necessary if we are to intervene in ways that alle­ viate the potential harm done by the justice system (National Juvenile Jus­ tice Network 2012). We are hopeful that recent reforms will follow in CAP’S footsteps and will incorporate innovative, nontraditional forms of exper­ tise as a central part of their response to delinquency. We envision that de­ linquency prevention initiatives that are consistent with the early vision of Clifford Shaw and the CAP and with the reforms taking place in Washing­ ton State and Pennsylvania could generate innovative programming that would bring about sustainable reductions in delinquency and counter the need or desire to resort to punishment as a first response.

N O T E

Michael B. Schlossman is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at William Paterson University. He is interested in the history and sociology of punishment, and his current research examines how the contemporary juvenile justice system responded to increases in violent youth crime and demands for more punitive crime policies.

Brandon C. Welsh is a professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at North­ eastern University and is the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Visiting Profes­ sor and Senior Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement in Amsterdam. His research interests include the prevention of delinquency and crime and evidence-based social policy. His latest book is Experimental Criminology: Pros­ pects fo r Advancing Science and Public Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

We are grateful to the journal editor and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful com­ ments. We would also like to thank the Friday Writing Group at William Paterson University for their helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this article.

D e lin q u e n c y P r e v e n tio n and th e T r a n sfo r m a tio n o f J u v e n ile J u s tic e | 647

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