Reducing risks and protecting our youths: a community mission.
Corrections Today › Vol. 56 Nbr. 5, August 1994
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Summary
Stemming the Violence
Risk-focused crime prevention is presented as a solution to the growing crime problem in the US. It is a proactive social development strategy which focuses on reducing adolescent problem behaviors and involves the community as a major component. Risk-focused crime prevention is a better alternative to tough anti-crime laws, which have only succeeded in filling up prisons and adding to the costs of prison maintenance, but have failed in the more important goal of preventing violent crime.See the full content of this document
Extract
Reducing risks and protecting our youths: a community mission.
By any measure, Americans excel in hurting one another. Violence has tragically become a part of our daily lives. We are told about it. It occurs just down the street. We cannot look at a newspaper or turn on a radio or television without being confronted with the fact that we are a violent society.
The media-fueled hue and cry over violence and crime has led to a very narrow definition of the problem--the acts of individuals gone bad--and an equally narrow definition of the solution: more prison cell space. The response has been more and more get-tough rhetoric by elected officials, a shift in sentencing responsibility away from judges to mandatory sentencing laws enacted by federal and state legislatures and a prison-building binge that promises to do no more than bankrupt states. Do we have the political will to turn away from our narrowly focused reactive response to our problems to a preventive, proactive strategy that will ...See the full content of this document
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