Midterm Exam Preparation Flashcards
developmental crime prevention
def) interventions designed to prevent development of criminal potential in individuals, especially by targeting risk factors and protective factors for deliquincy / criminal offending
DCP postulates that criminal offending in adults/adolescents is influenced by behavioral and attitudinal patterns that have been learned during an individual’s development
risk factor
def) prior factors that increase the risk of occurrence of events such as the onset, frequency, persistence, or duration of criminal offending/delinquency
examples of individual risk factors
- impulsivity, hyperactivity
- low IQ, poor school attainment
- substance abuse
- poor mental health
- lack of empathy / remorse
examples of family risk factors
- child abuse / neglect
- exposure to violence in home
- parental deviants / criminality, antisocial parents
- family disruption (death, divorce, imprisonment, etc)
- poor parental supervision
- generational trauma
- young mother (nurse family partnership aimed to address this)
- inconsistent discipline
protective factor
def) variable that interacts with a risk factor to minimize the risk factor’s effects
examples:
- good parenting
- positive role models
- good education / positive school experience
- good public safety
- supportive colleagues
- economic stability
- high level of attachment
obstacles of DCP
- politicians don’t want to be perceived as being “soft on crime”
- ethical dilemma of identifying at-risk kids
- stigma associated with participating in DCP programs
- high initial costs but long delay for crime prevention benefits
- high initial costs make it hard to scale, but might be considered unfair to only offer to subset of people
- hard to measure DCP effectiveness because of attenuation of program effects and attribution of effects
- need to replicate RCT experiments at new sites
community crime prevention
def) actions intended to change the social conditions that are believed to sustain crime in residential neighborhoods/communities
- changing community in some capacity may change the behavior of the people who live there
- often CCP is combination of DCP and SCP
- often focuses on ability of local social institutions to reduce crime in residential communities (ex: schools, community centers, libraries, churches, clubs, gyms, shelters, gardens)
internal validity
def) how well evaluation study demonstrates that intervention had effect on outcome
- ability to rule out alternative plausible explanations, and therefore provide strong evidence that intervention (independent variable) really did produce the outcome that is asserted
external validity
def) the generalizability with internally valid results
- main threat is causal relationships (effect sizes) with types of persons, settings, interventions, and outcomes (ie may work with some people in some places but not others)
threats to internal validity
- history: effect is caused by some event occuring at the same time as the intervention
- selection bias/effects –> need T/C to be equivalent (need random selection)
- regression to the mean (crime fluctuates, might be taking advantage of larger changes and over/underestimating effect of intervention, important to do long duration analysis to address this)
- maturation: effect reflects a continuation of preexisting trends
- instrumentation: effect is caused by a change in the method of measuring the outcome
- testing effects: pretest measurements causes a change in posttest measure
- causal order –> unclear whether prevention preceded outcome
- differential attrition: effect is caused by differential loss of units (people) from E compared to C condition
scientific method scale
- random control trial
- pre/post with comparable control with statistical analysis (trying to find/eliminate confounding external factors)
- pre/post with comparable control
- pre/post measures of crime, non-comparable control condition
- correlational study, can’t resolve threats to internal validity
ranking methods for carrying out reviews of literature
- systematic
- vote count
- narrative
- single study
systematic review method
- most rigorous / highest quality method
- uses rigorous methods for locating, appraising, and synthesizing evidence from prior evaluation studies
Perry Pre-School background and intervention method
- precursor to Headstart, LBJ’s war on poverty
- hypothesis: good preschool programs prepare kids for entering the world, thereby set more of them on paths to becoming economically self-sufficient, socially-responsible adults
- N=123, children ages 3-4, mostly randomly distributed b/w control and treatment
- multi-modal intervention:
(1) high-quality, active-learning preschool programming administered by professional teachers for 2 years (1 teacher to 7 students; teachers plan lessons/play time, do the day, then review/reflect on the day)
(2) teachers carried out home visitations with parents for education purposes
vote count review method
- statistical significance test (quantitative analysis)
- tally up positive, null, negative votes
- limitation: doesn’t explain negative votes, doesn’t give objective way to justify positive result conclusion
narrative review method
- most commonplace method for reviewing literature
- more comprehensive than single study, includes several evaluations
- less-than-rigorous methodology for searching for studies
- potential for researcher bias and cherrypicking bias (accident or intentional)
- may only look at published studies, reinforces publication bias (which prioritizes eye-catching headlines, ones that show really pos or neg results instead of neutral)
single study review method
- main drawback is researcher bias, cherrypicking
- benefit: specialized results, richness in detail & context because small size
importance of randomized control trial
- random experiments help get unbiased estimates of treatment impact without requiring knowledge of every possible confounding factor
- knowing and controlling every confounding factor is infeasible
- positive bias in nonexperimental evaluation of crime prevention programs (nonexperimental research is more likely to conclude that programs worked and less likely to find backfire effects)
features of effective DCP programs
- multi-modal: interventions have multiple features targeting multiple risk factors, important b/c risk factors have compounding effect
- long duration: interventions last at least one year, important to show effects aren’t just temporary, but programs often limited by cost
- childhood years: interventions implemented prior to adolescence, important b/c young children have the most neuroplasticity (still forming habits, beliefs, values)
Perry Pre-School findings
- by age 27, mean # of lifetime arrests was 2.3 for T group, 4.6 for C group
- fewer in treatment group were considered chronic offenders
- T had higher monthly earnings, percentage of home ownership, level of schooling completed
- T had lower percentage receiving welfare benefits/social assistance at some point in last 10 years
- benefit-cost: $1 spent for preschool, saved/received $7.16 later in life
crime prevention definition
attempts to eliminate crime prior to first occurence or before further activity
crime control definition
maintaining given/existing level of crime and managing that amount of behavior (imprisonment, separating from society, “warehousing”)
challenges to CCP
- need high degree of community participation
- don’t know a lot about effectiveness
- stigma surrounding participation in programs
- high cost / funding
- sustainability of resources / partnerships
reasons for growth in alt. crime prevention strategies
- Robert Martinson in 1970s: nothing works in offender rehabilitation
- traditional policing practices ineffective, Kansas City Police Patrol experiment
- increase in spending, growth in prisons, little to no effect on reducing crime rates in the 70s to early 90s
