Strategies for preventing crime, drug misuse and other antisocial behavior among young people should be designed to counter specific risk factors and, where possible, to enhance known protective factors. A combination of interventions might be more effective than a single method. On the basis of well-designed experimental research – currently implementing at the United States and Canada – the most convenient methods of preventing youth crime are outlined below. Frequent home visiting by health professionals to women during pregnancy and early stages of pregnancy provide advice about antenatal and postpartum care of the child, neonate improvement, appropriate nutrition, and avoiding smoking, drinking and drug use in pregnancy. Analyses upon studies states that this might lead to a reduction in child abuse by parents as well as a longer term reduction in delinquency among the children concerned.
Pre-school ‘intellectual enrichment’ programs are designed for stimulating, thinking and reasoning capability at young children, and hence to expansion of their success at school. The High/Scope Perry Preschool Program in Michigan provided high quality nursery education for an experimental group of children in a impoverished African American community, including a curriculum that encouraged children to plan, implement and review their playing activities. A long-term follow-up of former participants at the age of 27 found that they were less likely to have been arrested than a control group of similar children, and more imminent to have been completed their secondary education, to have acceptedly well-paid jobs and to own their homes.
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Parenting education programs encourage parents to notice that what their children are doing, to praise good behavior, to state house rules perfectly, and to make rewards and punishments contingent on children’s behavior. A number of programs have demonstrated success in reducing children’s antisocial behavior, although reductions in stealing and other delinquent activities have in some instances proved short-lived. Cognitive and social skills training teaches children to stop and consider for a while before acting, to consider the consequences of antisocial behavior, to understand other people’s feelings, and to solve interpersonal problems by negotiation rather than aggression. Some of these techniques, intended to strengthen children’s own inhibitions against antisocial behavior, have also been used to reduce re-offending among juvenile offenders. Peer influence strategies offer young people advice on how to resist pressure from friends to engage in antisocial behavior ranging from under-age drinking and smoking to drug abuse and other crimes. Research suggests that advice is most likely to be heeded when given by specially trained, high-status peers rather than by parents or teachers.
Management of classroom and other trainings might help teachers to communicate clear instructions and expectations, to notice and reward children for socially desirable behavior and to be consistent in their use of discipline. Anti-bullying initiatives in schools consist of implementing certain rules that encourage children to report bullying occacions and offer help to the sufferers. Playground monitoring and supervision may also need to be ameliorated. Programs in Norway and Britain have substantiated success in reducing bullying, which is itself related with an increased risk of delinquency. Efforts to modify the risk factors related with delinquency have also included community crime prevention programs, with a focus on achieving physical improvements in disadvantaged neighborhoods and providing recreational facilities for young people.
Unfortunately, there is a shortage of convincing evidence for the effectiveness of these programs. Crime prevention in the United Kingdom has, meanwhile, tended to emphasize measures designed to reduce the opportunities for crime in particular situations. Techniques include increased surveillance by closed circuit cameras, improving physical security, and protecting individuals against re-victimization. The major difficulty with such programs is that they may merely displace crime to other places or victims rather than preventing it altogether. .
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