Community‐based partnerships and crime prevention

• Author: Wesley G. Skogan
• Published date: 01 November 2011
• Date: 01 November 2011
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9133.2011.00782.x

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

COMMUNITY-DRIVEN VIOLENCE

REDUCTION PROGRAMS

Community-based partnerships and crime

prevention

Wesle y G. Skoga n

Northwestern University

In their article, Jeremy M. Wilson and Steven Chermak (2011, this issue) provide

an evaluation of a community-based youth violence prevention program, Pittsburgh’s

One Vision One Life (OVOL). Facing a record-setting rise in homicide, a local

coalition of organizations launched a street-work program that intervened to defuse

impending disputes and identified high-risk youth who could be connected with services.

Three clusters of neighborhoods were targeted by the program, whereas others served as

comparison groups in the evaluation.

Why should this journal, and the research community,devote attention to OVOL and

programs like it? First, and foremost, in my view,it promises a nonenforcement alternative to

violence prevention. If we are going to maintain democracy in a world that is increasingly

governed through fear and punishment, it behooves us to err on the side of paying close

attention to approaches to peace and stability that rely on civil society rather than on

criminal justice institutions. Research on hot spot interventions and problem-oriented

criminal justice programs, to pick examples of the latter, is more than “promising.” We

know a great deal about why,and how, they work. However, the contrast between the vigor

and the rigor of research in those fields and this one is striking. So too are the theoretical

perspectives from which they operate, with those on the civil society side worrying about

individual and collective norm change and harm reduction, not about fear and deterrence.

Second, we should pay attention because OVOL is representative of how services are

delivered inthe United States. Community-based partnerships—coalitions among grassroots

organizations, nonprofit service providers, local government agencies, and funders—are to

a significant degree replacing the older model of creating public agencies and staffing them

Direct correspondence to Wesley G. Skogan, Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University,

2040 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208–4100 (e-mail: skogan@northwestern.edu).

DOI:10.1111/j.1745-9133.2011.00782.x C2011 American Society of Criminology 987

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 10 rIssue 4