Publications on Delinquency & Crime

This report presents interim findings of the Urban Institute's evaluation of the Gang Reduction Program (GRP), a $10 million, multi-year, federal initiative to reduce gang crime in Los Angeles, California; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; North Miami Beach, Florida; and Richmond, Virginia. The evaluation found substantial variation in collaboration levels among partners in each site, but each site achieved significant implementation successes. The effects of GRP in each site were mixed, and only one site, Los Angeles, showed a significant reduction in crime levels. By late 2007, however, three sites had undertaken significant steps towards sustaining GRP beyond the federal funding period.

The Moving to Opportunity program targeted families living in some of the nation's poorest, highest-crime neighborhoods and offered them a chance to move to lower poverty areas. One hope was that, away from concentrated poverty and the risks associated with it–including poor physical and mental health, risky sexual behavior and delinquency–families would fare better. This brief examines how adolescent girls benefited from moving out of high poverty and discusses why girls might have fared so much better than boys.

In this Washington Examiner commentary, John Roman explains why automatically putting juvenile offenders in adult detention is a mistake: it can turn the teenagers into hardened criminals and sends the message that society has written them off.

Most publicly funded adolescent substance abuse treatment is provided and managed by the juvenile justice system, and juvenile courts and allied agencies are often the first responders to teen drug problems. But is this the right approach?

In this letter to The Charlotte Observer editor, Caterina Roman explains that the recent surge in drug use and other high-risk behaviors among young Latinos can be a sign of their adjustment to the American culture and that the only way to prevent this is to understand the process of acculturation.