Why should youth violence prevention be a high priority for community efforts?

Effective tools exist to address youth violence

We can identify the youth who would most benefit from prevention and early intervention. Moreover, many currently operating prevention and intervention programs have been evaluated and proven to be effective with these same individuals. Because we can target resources to those who most need them, and provide known, effective programs, we can provide assurance to the community that public resources are being used cost-effectively.

We know with a high degree of accuracy who our future public offenders are. A 2005 Texas A—M Institute for Public Policy Research study⁸ found “Juveniles’ behavior at school proved to be the most influential determinant of first contact with the justice system…students involved in one or more disciplinary incidents were 23.4 percent more likely to encounter a referral than those with no school disciplinary contact.” These characteristics describe 18,797 students in AISD alone, for the 2006-2007 school year.⁹

Another research review by Olweus, Limber, and Mihalic¹⁰ found that 60% of bullies in middle school will have at least one criminal court conviction by age 24; 40 % of bullies will have three criminal court convictions by age 24.

Programs exist to successfully prevent youth violence. These have been documented by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention in “Best Practices of Youth Violence Prevention: A Sourcebook for Community Action” and in the Department of Education and Justice publication “Annual Report on School Safety.” See summary descriptions of a few of the programs described in these resources.

CARY’s program evaluation results are very positive. Attachment C provides a summary of the findings from three independent program evaluations.

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