Are you getting your money's worth for your crime-prevention tax dollars?

New research says gang-suppression strategies are unsuccessful (and sometimes counterproductive). As reported on Yahoo! News, "Mass arrests, stiff prison sentences often served with other gang members and other strategies that focus on law enforcement rather than intervention actually strengthen gang ties and further marginalize angry young men, according to the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington DC think tank that advocates alternatives to incarceration." The report, Gang Wars: The Failure of Enforcement Tactics and the Need for Effective Public Safety Strategies, outlines a review of the research literature: It identifies a weak evidence base supporting conventional approaches, pinpoints opportunities to improve cost-benefit ratios, and reveals some unintended consequences.

The press release says the intent was to "examine the effectiveness of common gang control strategies. According to the report, in cities like Los Angeles where gang activity is most prevalent, more police, more prisons and more punitive measures haven’t stopped the cycle of gang violence. Most surprising are conclusions that gangs are responsible for a relatively small share of crime; gang activity has not grown in the U.S.; whites make up a large –if largely invisible– proportion of gang members; most gang-involved youth quit before reaching adulthood; and heavy-handed suppression tactics can increase gang cohesion while failing to reduce violence." Better cost-vs-benefit. As shown above, the report claims one alternative approach, Functional Family therapy, offers taxpayers and crime victims $15 of benefits for each dollar spent -- but concludes that placing juveniles in county detention provides less than $2 in benefits. [page 96]

Evidence-based recommendations. Chapter 8, Real Solutions to Youth Violence: Evidence-Based Practices [pdf], opens by saying that "Although there is no clear solution for preventing youth from joining gangs and participating in gang-sanctioned violence, there are evidence-based practices that work with at-risk and delinquent youth, the same youth who often join gangs. Whether these programs work with gang members depends more on the individual youth than on whether he or she belongs to a gang. Evidence-based practices are practices that have undergone rigorous experimental design, have shown significant deterrent effects on violence and serious delinquency, have been replicated, and sustain their effects over a period of time. For example, an intervention like multisystemic therapy (MSt) provides intensive services, counseling, and training to young people, their families, and the larger network of people engaged in young people’s lives through schools and the community. ...While the United States surgeon general has named only three “model” programs for treating violent or seriously delinquent youth—multisystemic therapy, functional family therapy, and multidimensional treatment foster care... policy makers continue to fund ...programs that either have not been adequately evaluated or have been evaluated and found to be ineffective or even harmful (Greenwood 2006)."

Now what? This leads us to the same problem we have in health care, business management, and many other fields: How can we get this information into the hands of people who make decisions about crime-prevention strategies? What's the best delivery mechanism, and what's the best presentation format? I fear this information won't make a difference unless advocates continually promote its findings to influential people.

P.S. Other resources on evidence-based government administration include “What Works? Evidence-Based Policy and Practice in Public Services,” by Davies et al. (2000), and “Evidence-Based Crime Prevention” by Sherman (2006).