Book Review: Preventing and Reducing Juvenile Delinquency: A Comprehensive Framework
| DOI | 10.1177/147322540400400111 |
| Published date | 01 April 2004 |
| Author | Aidan Wilcox |
| Date | 01 April 2004 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
not only within Plymouth, but also in the UK generally has been lost as a consequence.
For practitioners and other readers however, there is a chance to listen to those voices
that are contained within the report.
James C. Howell, Preventing and Reducing Juvenile Delinquency: A
Comprehensive Framework, Sage Publications, London, 2003, £58.00 Hb,
£29.00 Pb, 0-7619-2509-0.
Reviewed by: Aidan Wilcox, Research Officer, Centre for Criminological
Research, University of Oxford.
Howell worked for many years at the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention (OJJDP) at the US justice department and his work there convinced him
of the need for a comprehensive and integrated approach to youth justice as an
alternative to reactive and ineffective policies. In this book Howell proposes a proactive
approach to incorporate both preventive interventions and a series of graduated
sanctions. He aims both ‘to familiarise readers with the strength and weaknesses of the
juvenile justice system and to suggest a comprehensive framework for improving it’.
The book is divided into three parts. The first sets the historical (North American)
context of youth crime. Chapters here include trends in youth crime as measured by
official statistics, self-report and victimisation surveys, and the development and
consequences of moral panics about youth crime, such as prison overcrowding and the
over-representation of ethnic minorities in the system. According to Howell, the United
States is in the grip of its eighth moral panic over youth crime, which has led, for example,
to laws permitting life imprisonment without parole and even the execution of juveniles.
The second part considers the evidence base, and begins with an exploration of
developmental theories of crime, based on longitudinal studies of delinquency, and
contains an interesting section on girls’pathways into crime. Howell also reviews the
research on youth gangs, risk and protective factors as they relate to serious and violent
delinquency, and the effects of transferring juveniles to the adult court system. The
most interesting and important chapter in this section summarises what is known about
what doesn’t work with young offenders. The author shows why some ineffective
punitive sanctions, such as boot camps and ‘scared straight’prison programme
continue to receive official support.
The third and largest section of the book is devoted to the comprehensive strategy
for serious, violent, and chronic young offenders, which consists of prevention and
early intervention programmes for ‘at risk’youth and graduated sanctions linked by a
‘seamless continuum of services and sanctions’. Drawing on reviews published by the
OJJDP, Howell outlines what is known about ‘what works’and translates this into
principles of effective interventions, and actions which can be taken to increase the
effectiveness of existing programmes.
The book provides a fascinating insight into the American youth justice system
which is both alien (juvenile executions) and familiar to the reader (prison
overcrowding) and will be useful for anyone interested in the debates and solutions
proposed by a jurisdiction which often influences policy makers in the UK. It contains
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