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With over 4 million adults under community supervision and an average of 30% that do not fare well, an unanswered question is which strategies reduce the likelihood of technical, absconding, and new arrest violations during the early phase of supervision. Utilizing data on 32,335 moderate to high-supervised individuals on supervision in North Carolina, the study found that success during the first 6 months is due to probation officers' use of incentives to promote positive behavior and swift community-based consequences to address negative behavior, prioritizing treatment services or cognitive programs, increasing monitoring requirements, and using skill-building worksheets to increase engagement and build rapport. Officer actions are more important than individual characteristics, and can promote success for those that are under the age of 31, have more complex needs, and are identified as at-risk for violating supervision. Future studies should explore these concepts more directly regarding their relationship with recidivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Washington State Institute for Public Policy (WSIPP) uses meta-analyses to help program administrators identify effective programs that reduce recidivism. The results are displayed as summary effect sizes. Yet, many programs are grouped within a category (such as Intensive Supervision or Correctional Education), even though the features of the programs might suggest they may be very different. The following research question was examined: What program features are related to the effect size in the WSIPP program category? Researchers at ACE! at George Mason University reviewed the studies analyzed by WSIPP and their effect sizes. The meta-regression global models showed recidivism decreased with certain program features, while other program features actually increased recidivism. A multivariate meta-regression showed substantial variation across Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy programs. These preliminary findings suggest the need to further research how differing program features contribute to client-level outcomes, and develop a scheme to better classify programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Violence reduction initiatives based on focused deterrence strategies have gained attention in recent years due to their empirical support. The evaluations have generally assessed the impact of this intervention on trends in gun violence at the aggregate level, but not at the gang level. The current study evaluates both the community- and gang-level impacts of the Philadelphia Focused Deterrence strategy. Methods: The intervention was assessed using a quasi-experimental design that measured trends in shootings over a twelve-year period, including two years after the implementation of the initiative. Propensity scoring and matching techniques were used to match neighborhoods and gangs, and a number of regression models were run to assess impact. Results: Although a statistically significant reduction in total shootings across the treated neighborhoods was observed when compared to matched neighborhoods, the findings at the gang level were mixed. Models comparing shootings around gang territories showed significant reductions when compared to shootings around the territories of matched gangs, but pre-post-only models of treated gangs using the more rigorous measure of gang-involved shootings did not show evidence of impact. Conclusions: The findings suggest that focused deterrence may provide a mechanism for general deterrence among a broad pool of potential offenders. Specifically, violent gangs, even when targeted, may not be affected similarly for a variety of reasons. To better understand who is receiving the deterrence message and responding to it, future evaluations of focused deterrence strategies, when assessing impact, should include measures of the dosage of the message and other components relative to individuals and their groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age is the only factor used to demarcate the boundary between juvenile and adult justice. However, little research has examined how age guides the juvenile court in determining which youth within the juvenile justice system merit particular dispositions, especially those that reflect the court's emphasis on rehabilitation. Drawing on scholarship on the court's origins, attribution theory, and cognitive heuristics, we hypothesize that the court focuses on youth in the middle of the range of the court's age of jurisdiction-characterized in this article as 'true' juveniles-who may be viewed as meriting more specialized intervention. We use data from Florida for court referrals in 2008 (N = 71,388) to examine the decision to proceed formally or informally and, in turn, to examine formally processed youth dispositions (dismissal, diversion, probation, commitment, and transfer) and informally processed youth dispositions (dismissal, diversion, and probation). The analyses provide partial support for the hypothesis. The very young were more likely to be informally processed; however, among the informally processed youth, the youngest, not 'true' juveniles, were most likely to be diverted or placed on probation. By contrast, among formally processed youth, 'true' juveniles were most likely to receive traditional juvenile court responses, such as diversion or probation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Today, the ability of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) evidence to place persons at crime scenes with near certainty is broadly accepted by criminal investigators, courts, policy makers, and the public. However, the public safety benefits of investments in DNA databases are largely unknown and research attempting to quantify these benefits is only gradually emerging. Given the inherent difficulty in randomly assigning offenders to treatment and comparison groups for the purpose of inferring specific deterrence and probative effects (PREs) of DNA databases, this study developed an alternate strategy for extracting these effects from transactional data. Research Design: Reoffending patterns of a large cohort of offenders released from the Florida Department of Corrections custody between 1996 and 2004 were analyzed across a range of criminal offense categories. First, an identification strategy using multiple clock models was developed that linked the two simultaneous effects of DNA databases to different clocks measuring the same events. Then, a semiparametric approach was developed for estimating the models. Results: The estimation models yielded mixed results. Small deterrent effects—2-3% reductions in recidivism risk attributable to deterrence—were found only for robbery and burglary. However, strong PREs—20-30% increase in recidivism risk attributable to PREs—were uncovered for most offense categories. Conclusion: The probative and deterrent effects of DNA databases can be elucidated through innovative semiparametric models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a growing consensus among scholars that substance abuse treatment is effective at reducing offending, strict eligibility rules and budgetary considerations greatly limit the impact that current models of therapeutic jurisprudence can have on public safety in the United States. A question of pressing importance for U.S. drug policy is whether it is beneficial to expand application of this model to treat every offender in need and, if so, whether a set of evidence-based, going-to-scale strategies can be developed to prioritize participation. We use evidence from several sources to construct a synthetic dataset for answering the question: What are the benefits we can reasonably expect by expanding treatment to drug-involved offenders? We combine information from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) and the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program to estimate the likelihood of various arrestee profiles having drug addiction or dependence problems. We use the same sources to also develop prevalence estimates of these profiles among arrestees nationally. We use information in the Drug Abuse Treatment Outcome Study (DATOS) to compute expected crime-reducing benefits of treating various types of drug-involved offenders under different treatment modalities. We find that annually nearly 1.5 million (probably guilty) arrestees in the U.S. are at risk of abuse or dependence and that treatment alone could avert several million crimes that these individuals would otherwise commit. Results vary by treatment modality and arrestee traits and those results are described herein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an information theoretic approach for estimating the number of crimes averted by incapacitation. It first develops models of the criminal history accumulation process of a sample of prison releasees using their official recorded arrest histories prior to incarceration. The models yield individual offending trajectories that are then used to compute the number of crimes these releasees could reasonably have been expected to commit had they not been incarcerated—the counterfactual of interest. The models also afford the opportunity to conduct a limited set of policy simulations. The data reveal a fair amount of variation among individuals both in terms of the number of crimes averted by their incarceration and the responsiveness of these estimates to longer incarceration terms. Estimates were found not to vary substantially across demographic groups defined by offender race, gender, or ethnicity; variations across states and offense types were more pronounced. Implications of the findings and promising avenues for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural crime victimization--including theft of farm crops, livestock, pesticides, and equipment--and efforts to address it remain largely ignored despite the potential of such crime to adversely affect the lives and businesses of farmers and increase the costs of food to consumers. The Agricultural Crime, Technology, Information, and Operations Network (ACTION) initiative, located in California's central valley, was recently developed to combat such crime. The authors present findings from a process and outcome evaluation of this program. The findings are limited by the design of the study but nonetheless suggest that efforts to increase guardianship measures among farmers (e.g., marking equipment and livestock and using surveillance equipment), to "harden targets" (e.g., locking tractors and storing chemicals in locked storage sheds), and to arrest and prosecute offenders may help reduce agricultural crime victimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The link between resource deprivation and urban violence has long been explored in criminological research. Studies, however, have largely ignored the potential for resource deprivation in particular communities to affect rates of violence in others. The relative inattention is notable because of the strong theoretical grounds to anticipate influences that extend both to geographically contiguous areas and to those that, though not contiguous, share similar social characteristics. We argue that such influences—what we term spatial and social proximity effects, respectively—constitute a central feature of community dynamics. To support this argument, we develop and test theoretically derived hypotheses about spatial and social proximity effects of resource deprivation on aggregated and disaggregated homicide counts. Our analyses indicate that local area resource deprivation contributes to violence in socially proximate communities, an effect that, in the case of instrumental homicides, is stronger when such communities are spatially proximate. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories focused on community-level social processes and violence, and for policies aimed at reducing crime in disadvantaged areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we describe a semiparametric information-theoretic framework for modeling the determinants of rare events aggregated at intracity areal units while allowing for various forms of error correlation structures. The approach is applied to an examination of the effects of socioeconomic and demographic macrocharacteristics of communities on the amount of violence they experience. We investigate and find evidence of some instability in these processes across types of violence and level of areal aggregation. However, we also find evidence of a stable predictor—resource deprivation—for all the types of violence analyzed and at both levels of areal aggregation considered. In addition, we find evidence of a spillover effect of a community's resource deprivation on the level of violence its neighboring areas can expect. We discuss our findings in light of their substantive, methodological, and practical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]