BREAKING THE CYCLE OF DRUGS AND CRIME: FINDINGS FROM THE BIRMINGHAM BTC DEMONSTRATION

Research Summary: We compared 137 felony defendants arrested before the implementation of Breaking the Cycle, a pretrial intervention with felony defendants that included drug testing, supervision, and drug treatment as needed, to 245 BTC participants. We found Significant lower rates of arrest and self-reported drug use and crime among BTC participants during the next year.
Policy Implications: Systematic intervention aimed at all drug-involved felony defendants, not just selected defendants, is effective, but may encounter substantial challenges in achieving collaboration across criminal justice agencies, services providers, and levels/branches of government.     

FAMILY ORIGINS OF VIOLENT DELINQUENTS*

Family is central to contemporary theories of delinquent and violent behavior. Yet, the processes by which families shape violent behavior in their children are not well understood. In the past, structural views posited that a weak family exposed a child to the evils of the street. More recently, functionalists have suggested that the family plays an active role in socializing youths to violent behaviors through supervision and discipline practices and modeling and reinforcement of antisocial behaviors. Integrated theories presume that socially disorganized families weaken children's conventional bonds and attachments, leading to associations with delinquent peers and in turn antisocial behavior. However, the influence of the family as a socializing environment may shift over time, and some suggest that its influence is overshadowed during adolescence by that of other social domains—schools, neighborhoods, peers, and work. This study describes the family processes and environments of (n = 98) chronically violent delinquents. Interviews with youths and their mothers assessed family social process and environments and the social domains and institutions with which they interact. Analyses of youth reports of family environments and processes yield three family types: “interactionist” families exhibiting a high degree of internal interaction and bonding; “hierarchical” families characterized by parental dominance and the presence of family bond and interaction patterns; and “antisocial” families marked by criminality and family violence. Family variables have weaker explanatory power than do other social influences on violent delinquency. The relative contributions of family supervision practices and school environment varied by crime type. Social influences outside the family appear as stronger contributors to delinquency and violence during adolescence, regardless of early childhood experiences. The results underscore the importance of integrating social policies regarding family, crime, and neighborhood.     

CRIME DIVERSITY*

Large geographic areas should host a greater diversity of crime compared with small geographic areas. This proposition is reasonable given that larger geographic areas should not only support more crime but also contain a greater diversity of criminogenic settings. This article uses a neutral model to characterize crime richness as a function of area. The model starts with two neutral assumptions: 1) that all environments are statistically equivalent and exert no influence on what types of crimes occur there; and 2) that different crime types occur independently of one another. The model produces rigorous predictions for the mean and variance in crime richness with increasing area. Tests of the model against a sample of 172,055 crimes occurring in Los Angeles during the year 2013 are qualitatively consistent with neutral expectations. The model is made quantitatively consistent by constant scaling. Resampling experiments show that at most 20 percent of the mean crime richness is attributable to nonrandom clustering and assortment of crime types. A modified neutral model allowing for variation crime concentration is consistent with observed variance in crime richness. The results suggest that very general and largely neutral laws may be driving crime diversity in space.