NCJ Number
123616
Editor(s)
A J Reiss Jr
Date Published
1989
Length
377 pages
Annotation
A workshop held in Florida in January 1988 examined recent research findings on community crime control and discussed major programs and issues related to program evaluation and future research.
Abstract
The workshop was attended by 70 researchers, policy makers, and leaders of community-based anticrime programs. The discussions reflected two major perspectives on crime: the perspective focusing on the individual behavior of offenders and victims and the perspective focusing on aggregate crime patterns across time and space. Common themes emerging from the discussions included the impossibility of explaining the variability in community crime rates by the ethnic heritage of the people living in them, the difficulty of establishing anticrime programs in communities with high rates of serious crime, and the modest correlations among the different outcome measures used to evaluate community anticrime programs. Priorities for future research include the factors promoting the effectiveness of community crime control organizations, ways to help indigenous organizations work effectively with formal government organizations, and ways for nonprofit organizations to mobilize the private and governmental sectors for local crime control. Texts of individual presentations are included.