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Searching for the Best Mix of Strategies: Delinquency Prevention and the
Transformation of Juvenile Justice in the "Get Tough" Era and Beyond

Author(s): MICHAEL B. SCHLOSSMAN and BRANDON C. WELSH
Source: Social Service Review , Vol. 89, No. 4 (December 2015), pp. 622-652
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26463020
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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 . sc h l o s s m a n
William Paterson University of New Jersey
b ra n d o n c . w e l sh
Northeastern University and Netherlands Institute
for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement
a b s t r a c t At the same time as politicians were calling for and legislating “get
tough” policies that led to mass incarceration and increased rates of imprisonment
for juvenile offenders in the 1990s, many states and jurisdictions began adopting an
array of evidence-based therapeutic programs. Beginning with the Chicago Area
Project of the 1930s, we examine the historical development of delinquency pre-
vention in the context of broader shifts in the politics of crime and punishment. We
focus on the recent cases of Pennsylvania and Washington State in particular to il-
lustrate that prevention, beginning in the 1990s and continuing into the 2000s, is
now a formidable part of a mix of strategies for reducing delinquency. In spite of the
seeming transformation of the social and political context surrounding delinquency
prevention in the “get tough” era, we argue that there is more continuity than change
in the role of prevention in our society’s response to delinquency.
i n t r o d u c t io 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
Social Service Review (December 2015). © 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights
reserved. 0037-7961/2015/8904-0002$10.00
622

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Delinquency Prevention and the Transformation of Juvenile Justice | 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” ðRidge 2001Þ. 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” ðRidge 2001Þ.
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 ðpeople under age 18Þ
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-
ment occurring in the adult system over the past 30 years ðBarker 2009;
Campbell and Schoenfeld 2013; Clear and Frost 2014Þ. 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 important 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 ðCohen 1985; Fagan 2008Þ. 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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624 | Social Service Review
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 ðGreenwood 2006Þ.
t h e o r e t i c a l f r a m ew 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 ðMatthews 2005;
Gottschalk 2006; Phelps 2013Þ. 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 ðMaurutto and Hannah-Moffat 2006Þ. For example,
Paula Maurutto and Kelly Hannah-Moffatt ð2006Þ 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” ðSimon 1993, 200Þ, standardized
assessment tools can also be used in a way that is “ameliorative” and that
“reaffirms rehabilitation” ðMaurutto and Hannah-Moffat 2006, 449–51Þ.
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 ðNolan
2003; Tonry 2004Þ.
The braiding of punitive and therapeutic policies is, therefore, nothing
new in criminal justice ðand especially juvenile justiceÞ history. As Stanley
Cohen ð1985Þ argues, efforts to offer community-based services that are in-
clusionary ðor that attempt to rehabilitate offenders back into societyÞ often
end up widening the net of social control while also validating and contrib-
uting to exclusionary responses ðor punitive responses such as imprison-
ment that separate offenders from societyÞ 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 ðlong fixed sentences, deterrence, selective incapacitationÞ,
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’” ð1985, 172; see also Singer 1996Þ.
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
ðwhether through adult or juvenile courtÞ 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 predetermined criteria,
and 45 states ðand the District of ColumbiaÞ increased the severity of pun-
ishment for violent crime ðTorbet et al. 1996Þ. 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 ðZimring and Tanenhaus
2014Þ.
Instead, while adult incarceration rates continued to increase steadily
up until 2008 ðClear and Frost 2014Þ, 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 ðSnyder
and Sickmund 2006; National Juvenile Justice Network 2012; Butts 2013Þ.
The different patterns in juvenile and adult incarceration have led some,
like Franklin Zimring ð2005Þ, 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 what John DiIulio called “super-predators”
ðDiIulio 1995; Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters 1996Þ, 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 ðMihailoff 2005Þ. 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 of Control ð2001Þ, a classic work on punishment
in the post-1960s, sketches out what 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 ðGarland 2001, 110Þ. 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
ðGarland 2001, 113Þ.
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 ðwhich emerged in the 1970sÞ that were intended to be in the
best interest of the child were often stigmatizing and harmful ðAllen 1981Þ.
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 ðRothman 1980Þ.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
ðZimring 2005Þ. 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 ov e rv i ew
Perhaps ironically, it was in the get tough era of the 1990s that delin-
quency prevention programs like Communities That Care ðCTCÞ 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 ðCAPÞ 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 ch i c a g o a r e a p r o j e c t an d t h e or i g i n s
o f m od er n del i nq ue ncy p r ev en ti 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 ð1942Þ
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 ðShaw and
McKay 1942Þ. 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 ðScudder 1936; Mihailoff 2005Þ. 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” ðBurgess, Lohman, and
Shaw 1937, 15–16Þ. More generally, Shaw believed that the juvenile justice
1. According to Brandon Welsh and Rebecca Pfeffer ð2013, 537Þ, “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 mistrust and impeding the com-
munity’s ability to respond to its own delinquency problems. The seeming
ineffectiveness of previous efforts by the helping professions ðboth juve-
nile justice and social serviceÞ 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 ” ðBurgess et al. 1937, 23, 28Þ.
The importance of neighborhood ownership for the delinquency problems
and their solutions cannot be overstated. As David Wolcott and Steven
Schlossman note ð2006, 118Þ, “What 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 ðSchlossman and Sedlak 1983Þ. 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” ðSchlossman
and Sedlak 1983, 429Þ. 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 ðsee Schloss-
man and Sedlak 1983Þ.

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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 ðMOBYÞ and Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited
ðHARYOUÞ, which sought to increase opportunities for youth in low-income
African American communities, received substantial federal and state fund-
ing ðWard 2012; Welsh and Pfeffer 2013Þ. 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 ðMartin-
son 1974; Curtis 1987; Visher and Weisburd 1998Þ. 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 ðGalvin and
Polk 1983; Ohlin 1983Þ. Their efforts led to the passage of the federal Juve-
nile Justice and Delinquency Prevention ðJJDPÞ 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 ðOJJDPÞ 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 ðe.g., New York and FloridaÞ—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 ðGuarino-
Ghezzi and Loughran 1996Þ. As Michael Tonry ð2004, 3Þ notes, “ ‘Soft on

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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 ðhere-
after, Violent Crime ActÞ 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 ðin the broadest senseÞ 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 ðGest 2001Þ. 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 ðMendel 1995Þ. 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” ð1994, 121Þ.
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 ate g i e s ap p r o a c h
o f t h e 19 9 0 s an 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

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justice system” ðOJJDP 1996, iÞ. 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” ðOJJDP 1996, 3Þ.
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 ðKrisberg
2005Þ. 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” ðOJJDP 1996, 7–9Þ.
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 ð1992Þ, 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 ðe.g., availability of drugs, family conflict, and aca-
demic failureÞ 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 what 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 what 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 ðall will be unpaidÞ 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. ðOJJDP 1996, 56Þ
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 ðwith a to-
tal of 511 funded communitiesÞ. 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 ðOJJDP
2004, 2005, 2011aÞ. 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 ðGarland
2001Þ. 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 ðGarland 2001Þ. 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 ðJAIBGÞ, may also have funded certain prevention programs. However,
JAIBG was primarily used to fund court-based interventions with delinquent youth, though
some money was allocated to restorative justice-oriented programming involving neighbor-
hood alliances and community service projects for at-risk youth ðOJJDP 1997; Griffin 1999Þ.

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and led to more youth being sentenced to life without parole ðTorbet et al.
1996Þ.
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 ðTorbet et al. 1996Þ. 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 ðe.g., Texas and New YorkÞ, 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 ðNCJJÞ, 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” ðTorbet et al. 1996, 53Þ. 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 treatment 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” ðTorbet et al. 1996, 55Þ.
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 ðLyons 1995Þ. 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” ð1985, 132Þ, in fact, the opposite has occurred in an important
sense: juvenile justice and youth incarceration rates have been on the de-
cline ðAbrams 2013Þ. 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.
two c ase s : p en nsy lva nia a nd wa shin gton stat e

p e n n sy lva n i a
In his closing remarks to the 1995 Special Session on Crime, Republican

Governor Tom Ridge declared: “Brazen, hardened criminals will be

41.89.10.241 on Mon, 27 Jan 2020 07:56:03 UTC
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” ðCommonwealth of Penn-
sylvania 1995b, 548–49Þ. 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 ðas Cohen terms it in the title
of his bookÞ been straightforwardly translated into practice ðCohen 1985Þ.
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 ðPennsylvania Commission on Sentenc-
ing 2009Þ. Between 2000 and 2008, Pennsylvania’s increase in incarcera-
tion ðboth federal and state prisonersÞ was more than twice that of the rest
of the country ðSabol, West, and Cooper 2009Þ. 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 ðCommonwealth Foundation 2009Þ.
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 ðDiIulio 1995Þ. 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 ðaccording to conversations with NCJJ
researchers and court officialsÞ.

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Senator Michael O’Pake ðDemocratÞ 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” ðCommon-
wealth of Pennsylvania 1995a, 305Þ.
The transfer legislation was expected to affect between 500 and 1,000
cases, according to Pennsylvania State Senator D. Michael Fisher ðRe-
publicanÞ, the sponsor of the bill ðCommonwealth of Pennsylvania 1995c,
227Þ. 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 ðCommonwealth of Pennsylvania 1995aÞ. When the prison finally
opened in 2001, there were only 160 juveniles in the 500-person facility
ð70 percent of whom were from PhiladelphiaÞ, and so they had to fill a
separate wing of the prison with adults. Presently, the prison serves mainly
young adults ð18 and overÞ, and only 10 percent of inmates are 16 and
17 years old ðWiggins 2001; Togneri 2010Þ.
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 ð22 out of 45 statesÞ, 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 ðOJJDP 2011bÞ. 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 ðSny-
der, Sickmund, and Poe-Yamagata 2000Þ. 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-

41.89.10.241 on Mon, 27 Jan 2020 07:56:03 UTC
clusion 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” ðSnyder et al. 2000, 38Þ.
While the new transfer provisions of Act 33 received the most media
attention, the law also mandated that Balanced and Restorative Justice
ðBARJÞ 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”
ðGriffin 2006, 1Þ. While Ridge publicly declared that “we redefined the
mission of the juvenile justice system, to protect the community, not just
the criminal” ðRidge 2001, 2Þ, 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 ðJCJCÞ, the Pennsyl-
vania Council for Crime and Delinquency ðPCCDÞ, and the Pennsylvania
Council of Chief Probation Officers ðPACJOÞ.
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 ðBazemore and Umbreit 1997Þ. Likewise, under BARJ’s
provision for court partnerships with the community, a number of counties
developed community-based alternatives to incarceration for delinquent
youth ðMaloney, Romig, and Armstrong 1988; Kurlychek 1998; DeAngelo
2005Þ.
When Governor Ridge came into office, one of the first things he did
was to create the Community Partnership for Safe Children ðChildren’s Part-
nershipÞ, 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 ðFagan et al. 2011Þ.
Between 1995 and 1999, Ridge allocated $7.5 million to CTC. By 2001, there
were 107 CTC sites in 55 counties ðout of a total of 67 countiesÞ, and 21 new
CTC sites were established later that year. In total, his administration spent

41.89.10.241 on Mon, 27 Jan 2020 07:56:03 UTC
$30 million on CTC and other child-focused, evidence-based prevention

programs between 1995 and 2001 ðPennsylvania Commission on Crime
and Delinquency 1999; Juvenile Court Judges’ Commission 2001Þ. 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 treatment programs ðGreenwood and Welsh 2012;
Welsh and Greenwood 2015Þ.
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 ðJJSESÞ, to implement evidence-
based policy to reduce delinquency ðJuvenile Court Judges’ Commission
2012, 2014Þ. Presently, there are 70 active CTC communities ðhttp://www
.episcenter.psu.edu/ctcresourcesÞ. 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 ðhowever New York and Florida
saw increases in incarceration because of laws passed in the 1980s; Zim-
ring and Tanenhaus 2014Þ. 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.
was hi ng t o n s tate
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

41.89.10.241 on Mon, 27 Jan 2020 07:56:03 UTC
rising juvenile violent crime rates in the early 1990s and declining faith
in the juvenile court by passing legislation that led to harsher treatment
for the most serious offenders and by including provisions for punishing a
greater number of youth in the adult criminal justice system ðsee Garland
2001Þ. 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 ðBarnoski 2003Þ. 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 ðLieb, Fish, and Crosby 1994;
Barnoski 1999Þ.
In the late 1990s, the state legislature commissioned the Washington
State Institute for Public Policy ðWSIPPÞ, 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” ðAos, Barnoski, and Lieb 1998, 1Þ. 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 ðDrake, Aos, and Miller 2009Þ. 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 ðFFTÞ and Aggression Replacement Therapy
ðART; Barnoski 1999Þ.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
treatment for serious and violent juvenile offenders ðDrake et al. 2009Þ.
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 ðserved by 14 courtsÞ,
and 743 youth were expected in ART ðserved by 23 courtsÞ within 6 months of their adoption
ðBarnoski 1999Þ.

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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 ðe.g., teen pregnancy
and substance abuseÞ through research-based programming ðWilson and
Howell 1993; Lieb et al. 1994, 15Þ. 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 ðGookin and Aos 2001Þ.
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 ðfor a total of 7,000 new bedsÞ, with a price tag of
$250 million apiece for capital costs and an additional $45 million annually
per prison for operating costs ðAos, Miller, and Drake 2006Þ. 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 ð juvenile and adultÞ, 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” ðAos et al. 2006, 1Þ.
The WSIPP’s findings were nothing short of groundbreaking. Based on
a moderate-to-aggressive portfolio of evidence-based programs ði.e., a $63–
$171 million expenditure in the first yearÞ, a significant amount of future
prison construction costs could be avoided, about $2 billion saved to tax-
payers, and crime rates lowered slightly ðAos et al. 2006, 16Þ. 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 ð$48 million
per annumÞ on evidence-based delinquency prevention and intervention
programs ðDrake et al. 2009Þ. This was by no means the end of the story.
Risk assessment ðto ensure programs were matched with an individual’s
risk level and treatment needsÞ and quality assurance ðto ensure fidelity to
the modelÞ 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 ðrepresenting various ranks and geographic regions
of the stateÞ, community and program experts, and regional consultants, and

41.89.10.241 on Mon, 27 Jan 2020 07:56:03 UTC
tasked with the development of quality assurance plans for all evidence-
based programs operating in the state ðDrake 2008Þ. According to the Func-
tional Family Therapy ðFFTÞ plan, “Ensuring model fidelity in a commu-
nity based system of care requires an ongoing systematic system of both
quality assurance and quality improvement” ðCJAA Committee 2010, 1Þ.
As David Garland ð2001, 114Þ 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 ðWelsh and Far-
rington 2012Þ. Through issuing comprehensive evaluation reports, WSIPP
provided a systematic analytical model for deciding what was a good return
on their crime fighting dollars ðDrake et al. 2009Þ.
While evaluation research suggests that the state’s reductions in ju-
venile crime generated by evidence-based programs have been modest
ðgenerally between 5 and 15 percentÞ, 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 ðLee
et al. 2012Þ. 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.
discussion
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 ðKrisberg et al. 2010; Abrams 2013Þ. 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

41.89.10.241 on Mon, 27 Jan 2020 07:56:03 UTC
passed laws making it easier to prosecute juveniles in the adult justice

system ðTorbet et al. 1996Þ. 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 ðMatthews 2005; Good-
man 2012Þ.
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 ðGarland 2001Þ. 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 ðCommonwealth of Pennsylvania 1995bÞ. As
Cohen ð1985Þ 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 ð1985, 132Þ.
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 ðGar-
land 2001Þ. 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 ðZimring 2002, 2005; Ruth
and Reitz 2003Þ.
Other aspects of the get tough reforms affected public policy toward ju-
venile crime in potentially more long-lasting ways. For example, mandatory

41.89.10.241 on Mon, 27 Jan 2020 07:56:03 UTC
juvenile sex offender registration laws proliferated in the 2000s, and 1990s
laws making juvenile records easier to access remain on the books ðSaha
Shah, Fine, and Gullen 2014; Zimring and Tanenhaus 2014Þ. Youth are still
far too often confined in large and crowded facilities. and a large number
experience solitary confinement ðACLU 2014Þ.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
ðMiller 1991; OJJDP 2010; Krisberg 2011Þ.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 ðSentencing Project 2014; Cox 2015Þ. 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 ðrela-
tively fewÞ 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
ð2002Þ, 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 ðOJJDP 2010Þ.

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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 comprehen-
sive effort to implement a cost-effective, research-based approach to reduc-
ing delinquency that relies less on imprisonment.
Our research asks what 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 rhet-
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 ðe.g., probation and out-of-home placementÞ, 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 ðMOBYÞ and Harlem Youth Opportunities
Unlimited ðHARYOUÞ. While these programs were influential, they were

41.89.10.241 on Mon, 27 Jan 2020 07:56:03 UTC
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 ð1967Þ 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 ðMorris 1968Þ.
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 ðGreenwood
2006; MacArthur Foundation 2006Þ. Given the decentralized nature of
American juvenile justice ðBishop 2006Þ, 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 treatment 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 ð2013Þ 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.

41.89.10.241 on Mon, 27 Jan 2020u, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
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 ðFixsen et al. 2013Þ. 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 ðGreenwood and Welsh
2012Þ.
c o n c lu 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 ðNational Juvenile Jus-
tice Network 2012Þ. 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.
note
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 for Advancing Science and Public Policy ðCambridge University Press, 2013Þ.
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.

41.89.10.241 on Mon, 27 Jan 2020 07:56:03 UTC
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Searching for the Best Mix of Strategies: Delinquency Prevention and the

Transformation of Juvenile Justice in the "Get Tough" Era and Beyond

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26463020

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In his farewell speech upon resigning from the Pennsylvania governorship

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There is a growing body of literature that recognizes the multiplicity of re-

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bifurcated, or divided, use of inclusionary and exclusionary forms of social

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outside of the formal system ðMihailoff 2005Þ. Prevention programs and

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of get tough strategies and delinquency prevention should not necessarily

The history of delinquency prevention as a unique social concept in the

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system unintentionally stigmatized youth by labeling them as delinquent

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The CAP’s community-based approach was appealing to liberal reform-

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While the 1994 Violent Crime Act focused predominately on punishment,

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Originally, all states received a minimum of $100,000, with a total of

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two c ase s : p en nsy lva nia a nd wa shin gton stat e

In his closing remarks to the 1995 Special Session on Crime, Republican

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Senator Michael O’Pake ðDemocratÞ urged support of Act 33 because “we

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$30 million on CTC and other child-focused, evidence-based prevention

By every indication, Washington State today is the embodiment of a mix-

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Washington State’s approach to delinquency prevention consciously

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passed laws making it easier to prosecute juveniles in the adult justice

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of prevention-based approaches, evidence-based programming, and alter-

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It is also unclear whether, in practice, new forms of community and so-

We believe that continuing to invest in community-focused delinquency

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