Saving Children from a Life of Crime: Toward a National Strategy for Early Prevention

A great deal has been learned about childhood risk factors for offending and about effective interventions targeting these risk factors that reduce later delinquency and criminal offending. The time is right to implement a risk-focused, evidence-based national strategy for early prevention in the United States. A National Council on Early Prevention could provide technical assistance, skills, and knowledge to state and local agencies in implementing prevention programs; could provide funding, continuity, coordination, and monitoring of local programs; could provide training in prevention science for local people; could commission systematic reviews of the effectiveness of interventions; and could maintain high standards for evaluation research. The main aim of this article is to outline a national strategy for the prevention of delinquency and later offending. It identifies and discusses critical lessons learned from Western countries, such as Canada and Sweden, about the development of national crime prevention agencies.     

Valuing Massachusetts' Fixed Assets: A Contemporary Solution To An Historical Problem

The "Miracle of Massachusetts" is a slogan of the past. The FY 1992 deficit was projected to be over one billion dollars. In this article the authors describe the efforts of a dedicated group of government employees who created innovative solutions to long-standing problems. Massachusetts' financial statements could not obtain a "clean" audit opinion because the state's fixed asset records were unauditable. The group developed and implemented an acceptable method for valuation of those assets. This required inventorying all the fixed assets of the state, then valuing each of these items in accordance with either an historical cost or an acceptable surrogate.     

Adolescents' use of socially disvalued media: Towards a theory of media delinquency

This article essentially addresses one specific question: Why do some adolescents actively and sometimes flauntingly use socially disvalued media contents? Using the empirical examples of use of heavy metal rock and video violence, particular emphasis is first placed on the role of the school as a generating context for both delinquency and (popular) cultural dispositions. Second, by combining these parallel fields of inquiry, a theory of “media delinquency” is proposed that places the use of socially disvalued media within a wider theoretical context of adolescent development.