Community-Based Organizations and Crime Prevention

In criminal justice policy, crime prevention has expanded considerably over the past three decades in the United States and in several Western industrial countries (Tonry and Farrington 1995; Crawford 1999; Edwards and Hughes 2005; Farrington and Welsh 2007; Hughes 2007; Welsh and Pfeffer 2013). It is so prominent in the United States and United Kingdom that O’Malley and Hutchinson assert that it is has moved “from the sideline of crime control to being among its most prominent domains” (2007: 375). Also, those interested in crime prevention are no longer just government agencies, philanthropic “child-savers” (Platt 1969; Ward 2012), and the communities experiencing crime problem; rather, business interests are now heavily vested—and investing—in crime prevention.¹ Not surprisingly, crime prevention has followed to some extent the neoliberal way of doing social policy: shifting social crime prevention to the sideline and favoring the merging of individualized risk management, cost–benefit reasoning, situational crime prevention, and the promotion of nonstate efforts—overseen “at a distance” by the state (Rose 1996; Garland 2001; Carr 2003; Muncie 2006; Hughes 2007; O’Malley 2010). A cornerstone of this approach is the increased responsibility of local practitioners and community-based organizations to carry out the day-to-day operations of preventing wayward, delinquent, and serious youth offending (Garland 2001). These organizations are tasked with—but voluntarily take up—prevention efforts to reduce adolescent “problem” behaviors and the risk factors associated with youth offending.

This article charts this growing involvement of nonprofit, community-based organizations in crime prevention, primarily in the United States but similar to developments taking place in the United Kingdom and other Western industrial nations (Muncie 2006; Gray 2013). This article serves to better inform future research and the theoretical debates about community-based organizations’ impact on young people and the expanding privatization of crime prevention.

Importantly, but as an aside, though this “turn to communities” is framed as a recent occurrence, in the United States many community-based projects aimed at troubled youth have been part of the administration of juvenile justice and social policy generally throughout the twentieth century (Platt 1969; Katz 1996; Kempf-Leonard and Peterson 2000; DeFilippis, Fisher, and Shragge 2010; Ward 2012). For example, the Chicago Area Project of the early 1930s was conceived by Clifford Shaw and was considered the “progenitor of large-scale community-based prevention and delinquent intervention partnerships” (Krisberg and Austin 1993: 35). The mid-1960s saw the establishment of projects in the United States run by community-based organizations to not only provide remedial education and job skills to prevent delinquency and violence but also to raise the political consciousness of poor urban youth. These efforts included the New York City–based projects Mobilization for Youth and the Harlem Youth Opportunities—the latter based on the work of social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark who suggested that delinquency was rooted in the alienation and discontent engendered by urban poverty (Clark 1965; Currie 1993; Currie, Goddard, and Myers 2015). These organizations received financial support from governmental and philanthropic sources, and the Mobilization for Youth program model became a part of the US federal government’s War on Poverty’s community action component (Krisberg and Austin 1993). Well into the 1970s, the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services deinstitutionalized large training schools and placed the treatment of young offenders into small, community-based private agencies (Armstrong 2002). Thus the “community” has historically held a prominent position in preventive crime efforts, particularly in the United States.

Although contiguous with this history, the twenty-first century iteration of enlisting community-based organizations in crime prevention efforts has crucial differences—resulting in large part from the neoliberal privatization of social policy to third parties. Neoliberalism favors the mobilizations of community-based organizations to actively participate in the governance of their own actions and the communities in which they operate (DeFilippis et al. 2010); however, organizations experience through the public-parochial enterprise a heavy dose of government influence, regulation, and management. Specifically, through the control of material and informational resources, the state oversees core activities of organizations by defining the “problems” of young offenders, detailing the broad solutions organizations should take, requiring specific evidence-based practices, and mandating that organizations track specific outcomes. At odds with the contention that such privatization encourages local innovation and local governance, these elements are found, in fact, to be coercive and expand rather than reduce the state influence in the field of preventive crime control (Braithwaite 2000; Garland 2001; Hallsworth and Lea 2011; Gray 2013).

In summary, even though crime prevention by community-based organizations is built on a tradition in the United States, what is unique today is the ubiquity of multiagency, state and nonstate partnerships preoccupied with risk-oriented preventive efforts, which are governed by a host of techniques borrowed from the economic market. Not surprisingly, and for good reason, scholars are looking more closely at community-based organizations, which by all appearances will continue to be prized for preventing youth offending—and which are expanding to related policy fields (e.g., they are being rallied by the US federal government to help prevent homegrown terrorism and human sex trafficking).

The principle mode of community-driven crime prevention is to promote collective action against identified needs by bringing individuals together and gathering resources for program implementation or to change the social conditions and institutions that influence offending in residential communities. Community-based organizations are at the heart of this approach. What makes organizations “community-based” is that they are founded, organized, and run by local residents or local practitioners (Schneider 2000), and their day-to-day operations are governed—at least ostensibly—internally. Organizations focused on crime prevention are not evenly distributed spatially throughout society. Community-based organizations are funded because they are located and operate in a particular geographic area of a city that has been identified as having high numbers of “at-risk” and “high-risk” youth (Goddard 2014). Note that, because crime prevention primarily involves youth, in this article we use the word “crime” in “crime prevention” to denote status, delinquent, and violent youth offending. Of course these acts are not the same and thus should not be understood empirically or theoretically in the same way; however, from community-based organizations’ perspectives, these acts are overlapping and therefore intervened on in a multimodal but simultaneous way.

There are several possible ways of classifying the range of crime prevention strategies run by community-based organizations (Tonry and Farrington 1995). Drawing on a public health approach classification, community-based organizations attempt primary, secondary, or tertiary crime prevention. Primary crime prevention focuses on preventing negative behaviors by improving the general well-being of, in this case, young people. Primary prevention projects focus on entire groups of young people without serious problem behaviors, which can include families or schools. Secondary crime prevention targets early-stage offenders or young people who are considered to be at an elevated risk for offending. Tertiary crime prevention is more rehabilitative in nature and targets youth returning from incarceration or who have been court-ordered to receive services from a community-based organization. Through diversion schemes, a significant number of juvenile offenders are required by juvenile courts to receive social services from community-based organizations, but this may be better categorized as “control” rather than “prevention” (Welsh and Pfeffer 2013). Still, community-based crime prevention programs and services are available to first-time serious offenders (Lipsey et al. 2010).

Although in theory community-based organizations engage in primary, secondary, or tertiary prevention, organizations most often end up focusing on secondary prevention; that is, they target early-stage offenders and young people demarcated as at risk for crime and problem behaviors. Depending on the structure, mission, and funding of the organization, it may do all three. Occasionally organizations refuse or are barred by their funding agencies from doing tertiary prevention because youth offenders are sometimes excluded from “mixing” with at-risk youth. Although imperfect categories, the primary, secondary, and tertiary forms of prevention nevertheless help describe categorically the range of services that community-based organizations provide to youth.

Within secondary prevention, community-based organizations offer a wide range of services in an attempt to reduce risk factors and promote protective factors among youth. Risk factors can be found at the various levels or domains of the socializing institutions, such as the individual, family, peer, school, and community levels (Tanner-Smith, Wilson, and Lipsey 2012). Due to the complex and interconnected nature of each domain as it relates to youth development and crime prevention (Bennett 1995; Visher and Weisburd 1998), organizations typically target various levels and multiple risk factors.

At the individual level, there are preventive interventions in which organizations attempt to alter young people’s behavioral patterns, decision-making abilities, or produce positive skills and competencies. Examples of such interventions include various educational awareness campaigns, life-skills training, social skills training, character building exercises, job training, and psychological services such as counseling, cognitive behavioral therapy, or aggression replacement training (Deković et al. 2011). The most common services include drug treatment, education assistance and, for older youth, assistance securing employment.

Family-level services or programs run by organizations encompass services that are parent and/or family focused in that they aim to provide parental training and positively shape the family environment. These services may include parent support groups, home visitation programs, family educational services, family counseling and therapy, parent-child interaction therapy, and infant health and development programs. Additionally, family support may be provided through community-based organizations such as monetary help, clothing, healthcare, nutritional services, and even help with applying for food assistance.

Peer-level services are those that are aimed either at fostering positive peer-relations, such as anti-bullying programs and mentoring programs, or providing opportunities for positive peer interaction and engagement, which may include recreational and sports activities (Kelly 2013). School-related programs run by organizations are those that primarily focus on promoting academic skills, academic achievement and attachment to school, and may include afterschool programs, early educational interventions, and tutoring.

Community-level services are broader neighborhood-focused interventions that aim to strengthen the communities and foster cohesion and collective efficacy, while decreasing social disorganization (Sampson 2012). These interventions may also focus on situational crime prevention and environmental design (Guerette 2009). Additionally, community-based organizations may be involved in neighborhood watches, neighborhood clean ups, or neighborhood development initiatives such as building community centers or parks (Smith, Novak, and Hurley 1997). Moreover, organizations may focus on crime reporting and providing educational services to residents about local crime and protective measures, such as encouraging residents to install security features on their homes and car (Skogan 1989).

Community-based organizations may employ various services that can be classified into one or more of the multiple dimensions listed above, thus it is possible for services to operate simultaneously at different levels. When providing some of these general services, organizations may employ evidence-based practices or model programs, such as those recommended by the Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development (Mihalic and Elliott 2015). Service programs may be more general as well: such as wilderness programs, drug abuse prevention, social development, and faith-based programs. Conversely, programs may focus on only one risk factor, such as, unemployment. Despite where these programs fall categorically, community-based organizations clearly perform a wide range of programs and services (see for example Farrington and Welsh 2007).

Though patterns and themes are evident in the crime prevention activities of community-based organizations, reviewing the evidence of their effectiveness is a challenge. The types of services can be operationalized in a myriad of ways, such as recreational, boot camp, or military-oriented formats, faith-oriented approaches, or even mobilizing youth for social change. The almost limitless choice of approaches that community-based organizations can pursue to prevent crime has advantages and disadvantages. Community-based approaches like community policing “can be custom-tailored to the problems and needs of specific communities” (Worrall 2013: 107), but this feature also makes it highly difficult to generalize to other contexts. Moreover, community-based organizations run a wide array of programs, some being general and others being tailored specifically to meet the needs of a given neighborhood or youth population, with complex, often piecemeal, funding sources. For evaluators, this makes it difficult to test outcomes.

Meta-analysis provides some insight into crime prevention taking place in a community-based setting (Jolliffe and Farrington 2007). However, contrasting and combining results from different studies is problematic because community-based organizations are so diverse, have different degrees of capacity, select different programs to run, operate in unique places, and serve unique populations. Thus, assessing what works is complex and difficult—and assuming a priori that a program that works in one setting will work as well in another is naïve, at best. The effect of this is that, similar to community-oriented policing, the literature about effectiveness has a more micro-level orientation (Worrall 2013). In other words, research is usually about on how effectively a particular program works in a particular community-based organizational setting. Researchers rightly point out that with community initiatives “[i]t is difficult to establish causality; experiments are difficult to conduct because finding comparison sites is troublesome and randomization often is not feasible; and, finally, it may be impossible to persuade community-based program leaders that impact evaluation is even desirable” (Kelling et al. 1999: 7). These methodological challenges notwithstanding, in what follows, we review available studies on effectiveness of organizations and of programs run by community-based organizations.

While there are various community-based organizations that operate in the crime prevention context, many of the effectiveness studies use small samples or focus on a single organization. There are, however, some exceptions. For example, the Boys & Girls Clubs of America (2004) has been evaluated nationally and found to be effective on several measures. The organization has a very structured set of programs that include education and career programs, character and leadership programs, health and life skills programs, and arts and recreation programs. The organization has accountability measures and evaluative procedures in place to ensure its success as a youth development organization. Beyond auditing, to help ensure effectiveness, local chapters are required to actively partner with local government, civic, social, fraternal, and labor organizations. The most valuable partnership, however, is between the organization and the youths’ parent(s) (Anderson-Butcher, Newsome, and Ferrari 2003). Furthermore, the programs provided by the Boys and Girls Clubs of America serve as a comprehensive approach to promoting positive youth development in that the range of services provided varies extensively (Gist 2000)—for example, they offer structured programming, unstructured programming, and recreational activities for youth in order to occupy their time and help prevent them from engaging in problem behaviors (Anderson-Butcher, Newsome, and Ferrari 2003). Another effective national organization run at the community level in the US is Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, a mentoring organization focused on promoting positive youth development. Grossman and Tierney (1998) evaluated Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and found that participating youth were significantly less likely than a control group to have hit someone, initiated illegal drug use, initiated alcohol use, or truanted from school (Welsh and Farrington 2011). Big Brothers Big Sisters of America has well-structured, high quality operational and management procedures that contribute to the organization’s effectiveness. This includes the strict guidelines surrounding screening, matching, orienting and training, supervising, and monitoring adult mentors. Mentors undergo background checks, reference checks, and other screening procedures to ensure the safety of the mentees, availability, and overall fit—and there are ongoing trainings that include seminars from understanding the developmental stages of youth to diversity trainings. Furthermore, the organization has received stable funding (Grossman and Tierney 1998; Tierney, Grossman, and Resch 2000) due, in large part, to its demonstrated effectiveness via randomized controlled trials and quasi-experimental designs, which have been conducted at various locations and among a variety of demographic groups. We should note, however, that although these two organizations are founded and run by local practitioners—and therefore included here—the Boys and Girls Clubs of America and Big Brothers Big Sisters of America are national organizations with a set design and program model. Therefore the two organizations do not fit entirely into the category of being “community-based.”

Given that the majority of studies of effectiveness of community-based organizations use small samples or focus on a single organization, we need to look to other areas of research in the hope of making broader conclusions about the crime reduction capacity of community-based organizations. One line of research has suggested that community-based organizations contribute to crime reductions through efforts that encourage social ties between neighbors and that work to reduce physical disorder. In what Carr (2003) has described as “new parochialism,” community-based organizations that received public funding to reduce social disorder and make physical improvements have been shown to also decrease crime. In this intervention strategy, the causal mechanism between improvements in social ties and physical disorder and crime reduction is the increased capacity for neighborhoods to maintain social control. Testing this concept, Ramey and Shrider (2014) found that a publicly funded neighborhood improvement fund (i.e. the Neighborhood Matching Fund) in the US city of Seattle was associated with a significant reduction in crime, particularly in the poorest neighborhoods. Importantly, even though the projects that were underwritten by the Neighborhood Matching Fund were aimed at increasing community ties and making physical improvements—and not directly linked to crime prevention—the projects resulted in meaningful crime reductions.

This research has great importance for community-based organizations. In the US, the neoliberal privatizing of public services forces organizations to participate in these public-parochial partnerships. Most organizations receive much of their funding from public investment and other external investors—usually philanthropic foundations, but more recently private investment firms as well. Through these funding sources, community-based organization not only run individual-level programs, but often host or collaborate in neighborhood events such as community gardens, neighborhood clean ups, festivals, and youth-oriented evening events—all of which are aimed at community building and physical improvements. For these organizations, they are (or likely are) successfully increasing social interaction, maintaining social bonds, fostering cohesion, and improving community stability (Sampson 2012). This suggest that community-based organizations likely contribute to reducing crime—and therefore should be considered “promising” or even “evidence-based”—when they carry out projects that improve the physical structure of a neighborhood and increase social ties. While some scholars debate the number and types of organizations that must be present within economically disadvantaged neighborhoods to significantly facilitate social control, there are indeed signs that organizations improve social conditions, mitigate social and economic isolation of poor neighborhoods, and can reduce crime by mobilizing resources and providing family and youth services to economically devastated neighborhoods (Slocum et al. 2013).

Researchers have also isolated best practices in community-based organizational settings. Organizations were found to be more effective when they were able to identify and respond to the specific needs of youth and their community (Bennett 1995), and utilize prevention strategies that have been previously tested and proven successful (Hawkins, Catalano, and Arthur 2002). There is also evidence of significant reductions in rates of youth violence, crime, alcohol, and tobacco use when organizations participated in prevention coalitions such as Communities That Care or Communities that Care-UK (Fagan et al. 2008; Hawkins et al. 2014). Thus, an organization’s effectiveness is influenced by the amount of funding and outside support it receives (Ramey and Shrider 2014), and the number of collaborations and partnerships it is able to develop and maintain (Bennett 1995; Rosenbaum and Schuck 2012).

A typical method used to evaluate community-based organizations is to assess how effectively a particular program worked within a community-based organizational setting. The problem with this is that we tend to know more about which programs work and less about the organizations they work best in. Nevertheless, since community-based organizations run programs, it is important to review the latter to further our understanding of the former. Generally, the most effective programs run by community-based organizations are multimodal programs (Visher and Weisburd 1998; Deković et al. 2011)—those that are comprehensive in nature (Rosenbaum and Schuck 2012) and focused on multiple risk factors (Tanner-Smith et al. 2012). Scholars agree, however, that the ideal prevention efforts are those that prevent youth from engaging in any type of criminal behavior at all (Greenwood 2008; Mackey 2013). Such programs are typically categorized as early prevention programs, which focus on engaging parents and intervening during the earlier years of childhood (Manning, Homel, and Smith 2010). Projects of this kind include prekindergarten educational services, nurse–family partnerships, home visitation programs, parent training and parent–child interaction therapy—all of which have demonstrated effectiveness in reducing crime (Visher and Weisburd 1998; Farrington and Welsh 2003; Drake, Aos, and Miller 2009; Piquero et al. 2009; Eckenrode et al. 2010). Exemplary evidence-based programs include LifeSkills Training, Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care, Multisystemic Therapy, Functional Family Therapy, Nurse Family Partnership, and Strengthening Families—more information on these programs is available on the Blueprints website (http://www.blueprintsprograms.com/).

Some studies have shown that tertiary-level interventions, which engage youth who have been involved in delinquent or criminal behaviors, have been demonstrated to be effective (Limbos et al. 2007; Lipsey 2009; Lipsey et al. 2010). When intervening in a delinquent youth’s trajectory, programs that have been proven effective were those that engaged families and emphasized skill building; incorporated aggression replacement training, restorative justice initiatives, educational, or vocational programming (Przybylski 2008); and offered various therapeutic intervention services that matched the specific needs of the offender to the intervention, such as Multisystemic Therapy or Functional Family Therapy (Greenwood 2008; Lipsey 2009). Additionally, mentoring has proven to be an effective strategy for community-based organizations intervening in the lives of those who are at risk or have already been involved in delinquency (Jolliffe and Farrington 2007; DuBois et al. 2011; Sullivan and Jolliffe 2012).

As valuable as it is to know what works—even if limited to individual-level interventions—it is equally valuable to know what does not work. Lipsey (1992), for example, found that 29 percent of juvenile programs had negative effects. Scared Straight is one of the more popular programs still in operation today that does not work: Experimental groups reoffend between 1 percent and 30 percent more than control groups (Petrosino, Turpin-Petrosino, and Finckenauer 2000). A national evaluation of Community Learning Centers—an afterschool program that offers recreational activities, enrichment activities, and leadership and conflict-resolution workshops—“found higher rates of negative behaviors (suspensions, disciplinary actions, calls to parents about bad behavior) in the treatment group, along with no differences in academic performance and mixed findings on developmental outcomes” (Mihalic and Elliott 2015: 126). There are also programs with mixed evaluations where initial findings indicated that the program worked, but follow-up studies showed no effects or negative effects. For example, this occurred with Quantum Opportunities and CASASTART, two case management programs for preventing drug use and delinquency for high-risk socioeconomically disadvantaged youth (Mihalic and Elliott 2015). In the United Kingdom, multiagency Youth Offender Teams were set up following the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, but evaluations of these programs have been mixed as well. Still operating today, Youth Offender Teams provide holistic youth interventions that target the complex social welfare difficulties of young offenders in order to reduce their risk of reoffending (Gray 2013). Research, however, has repeatedly found that, although Youth Offender Teams were successful in challenging and changing young offenders’ inappropriate thinking and behavior, they were less successful at meeting offenders’ social welfare needs. This suggests that, in a limited way, the Youth Offender Teams worked; however, from a wider perspective, they fell short, since young offenders’ needs in such areas as housing, mental health, substance abuse, education, training, and employment were not addressed (Gray 2013).

The UK experience with Youth Offender Teams reinforces the reasoning that community-based organizations’ projects and programs need to not just provide individual coping strategies but also address the glaring social deficits and systemic inequalities in the communities most often subject to crime prevention and intervention policies (Currie 2013b). Certainly programs should address the needs of youth, such as aggression or the lack of job skills, but they cannot be only about “train[ing] vulnerable people to navigate what are often chronically marginal lives and stunted opportunities; and then measure the ‘success’ of these efforts in very minimal and essentially negative ways: they commit fewer crimes, do fewer drugs or different drugs, maybe get, at least briefly, some sort of job (Currie 2013a: 5). Rather than training youth to suppress feelings of anger (as many conventional programs implicitly suggest), Currie et al. (2015), drawing on the work of Kenneth B. Clark (1965), have reasoned that programs may be better off harnessing the antipathy and anger of young people in order to mobilize them to participate in social change efforts. Recent research has unearthed organizations that are putting this idea into practice. Dozens of US-based grassroots and community-based organizations in economically devastated urban cities have actively addressed social problems by mobilizing young people who are high-risk and system-involved (Goddard and Myers 2011; Myers and Goddard, forthcoming). These organizations tend to adopt a more social justice approach to prevention and work on practices related to youth leadership, activism, and raising social consciousness (Myers and Goddard 2013). Unfortunately, we have far fewer studies of the effectiveness of such community mobilization efforts than we do of narrower interventions that focus on changing the individual youth offender.

As is now apparent, the flexibility and diversity of services and programs that community-based organizations can offer makes them well suited to target the multidimensional problems that youth experience (Rosenbaum and Schuck 2012). Unfortunately, this feature also makes them difficult to evaluate.

Crime-prevention researchers have advanced our knowledge about successful and promising programs for reducing antisocial behavior and promoting a healthy course of youth development (Welsh and Farrington 2012)—and in the process have reinvigorated less punitive responses to delinquency and youth violence. Clearinghouses now exist that list prevention programs, many of which community-based organizations can adopt. For example, the experts at Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development identified more than 1,250 evidence-based and promising prevention programs, made them publically available, and provided a user-friendly digital guide for locating the programs. Thus we are now learning a great deal about which prevention programs work, are promising, or make things worse and—considerably different from incarceration in both economic and human costs—can generate benefits that outweigh the costs (Aos et al. 2004; Currie 2013b; Wakefield and Wildeman 2013).

For most of us in the field, these developments are good news. Nonpunitive evidence-based programs and practices are not only theory-driven and the right thing to do (Currie 2013b), but they are a welcome shift away from the reactive and punitive responses that stubbornly remain active in the United States (Tonry 2011). To some extent, government agencies, and increasingly politicians, support these developments—albeit the reasons for their enthusiasm may be more about cost saving and ensuring good investment on taxpayer dollars than about what works (Sherman et al. 1998; Drake et al. 2009).

As part of this preventive turn, public and private funding agencies now highly recommend that community-based organizations run evidence-based programs and related best practices (Greenwood and Turner 2009) and increasingly mandate that to even qualify for funding community-based organizations must use evidence-based programs. In what has been described as the “imposed use” of evidence-based policy (Weiss, Murphy-Graham, and Birkeland 2005), funding agencies ask the applicants to prove in their grant applications that the program they plan to run has been scientifically evaluated and demonstrated to be successful. In other words, funding seems to be increasingly biased toward—indeed contingent upon—organizations using evidence-based programs (Weiss et al. 2008).

Fagan and colleagues note, however, that “despite the availability of programs identified as effective, there remains a substantial gap in communities’ likelihood of adopting and effectively replicating such innovations [and] communities that have implemented these innovations have often failed to replicate them with fidelity” (2008: 235–236). Certainly there are motives for this, but rather than offering recommendations for improving program fidelity, in the next section we unpack the diverse ways in which organizations reformulate and revise practices mandated by state funders and offer possible reasons that explain the extent of this practice. Our goal in doing this is not to suggest techniques to eliminate this practice. Rather, we propose a different perspective that turns a critical lens on the widespread recommendation by scholars that community-based organizations’ practitioners be better trained and monitored to ensure appropriate delivery of services in appropriate and prescribed matters (Greenwood and Turner 2009; Greenwood and Welsh 2012).

Evaluators of evidence-based prevention programs run by community-based organizations have observed that local practitioners adapt program design, content, or manner of delivery to fit their organization or the population receiving the intervention (Gottfredson and Gottfredson 2002; Wandersman and Florin 2003). In other words, organizations have not always accurately followed the instructions and application of programs as delineated by developers. Although we lack clear data on the extent of veering from program fidelity, this practice is not uncommon in crime prevention carried out by community-based organizations.

At the heart of the issue of program fidelity lies the issue of program adaptation (Castro, Barrera, and Martinez 2004; Mihalic, Fagan, and Argamaso 2008). While community-based organizations may adapt a program for various reasons, one key reason might have to do with attending to the specific needs of the population being served. Funders often mandate programs be evidence-based; however, most programs have not been tested with every population or in every environment. Therefore, there is often a mismatch between the tested population or setting and the actual setting or population where the program will be implemented. At the same time, it is essential that any administered program be culturally relevant to the specific community (Castro et al. 2004). Thus, from this perspective, program adaptation may seem acceptable or appropriate. Additionally, sometimes problems arise due to the simple nature of scaling-up programs and bringing a program to a wider audience (Welsh, Sullivan, and Olds 2010; Dodge and Mandel 2012). When a program is scaled-up, reasons to adapt a program design may center on the organization’s structural constraints, such as lack of funding, lack of qualified staff, limited time and resources, or lack of adequate supervision and oversight (Fagan et al. 2011).

Furthermore, community-based organizations that claim to provide the same program or practice do not necessarily implement the practices in identical ways. In fact, more often than not, there are differences among different organizations identified as using the same program (Fagan et al. 2008; Fagan et al. 2011). Therefore, it is difficult to gauge whether or not a specific program model or evidence-based practice actually works when disseminated for public use. Nevertheless, when the fidelity of any program is weak, it can diminish the measured and experienced outcomes of its benefits (Mihalic et al. 2008; Lipsey et al. 2010).

Mandated programs are also revised in different ways other than veering from program fidelity. Some organizations that receive grants or contracts that require evidence-based programs have repackaged practices using the latest discourse of best practices or what Greenwood and Welsh (2012) brand “best principles.” Often these best principles are linked to the Positive Youth Development model (Roth et al. 1998). In contrast to conventional prevention models, the focus of the Positive Youth Development model is on increasing youth competencies, skills, and strengths rather than on preventing problematic behaviors by decreasing risk factors. The model is meant to promote positive behaviors and outcomes, as well as healthy development of youth, by targeting protective actions. Some of the core components associated with positive youth development include, but are not limited to, promoting social, emotional, behavioral, and academic competencies; fostering resilience, self-determination, and self-efficacy; and providing opportunities for prosocial engagement (Roth et al. 1998; Catalano et al. 2004). Practitioners, however, sometimes have used “the language of government-supported approaches to simply re-label or re-name old practices and reframe them as violence prevention pursuits” (Goddard 2012: 353). For example, an activity like “job training” has been relabeled by community-based organizations as “vocational competence,” tutoring as “academic competence,” providing fun activities for youth as “providing opportunities for prosocial engagement,” and Bible study as “fostering spirituality” (the latter terms in each of these examples represent elements of the Positive Youth Development model). Adopting new language, regardless of whether the organizations actually implemented new techniques and practices, appeared to serve the function of displaying to funding agencies that the evidence-based principles were in place.

In another study of more social justice–oriented community-based organizations, Myers and Goddard (2013) similarly observed that, for strategic reasons, organizations relabeled “homespun” activities with the language of the dominant discourse, or assembled the language of evidence-based practices to label more social justice-oriented interventions. For example, a “youth leadership” program was a more neutral way of describing “developing activists.” While many organizations were completely transparent about, for example, describing “community advocacy” as “youth leadership development,” some did it because they understood that state funders would not pay for organizing or advocacy but they would pay for building community ties, collective efficacy, and developing leadership characteristics of youth (Myers and Goddard 2013). Although the extent to which organizations reformulate and revise practices mandated by funders needs more investigation, there are signs that suggest its ubiquity. Often, crime control technologies of the funding bodies operate more in principle than in practice (Kemshall 2003; Miller 2001; Worrall 2013), and favored strategies exist more at the level of policy and leadership but less so at the level of implementation (Lynch 1998).

Why do organizations reformulate and revise evidence-based practices? It may be simply because some personnel lack the skills or training, but we sense that something deeper is likely at work. A core feature of the turn to community-based organizations is the devolution of some degree of program control and responsibility to local residents and community-based groups (Kelling et al. 1999). Clearly this principle was in tension with the aforementioned “imposed method,” whereby to even qualify for funding, community-based organizations had to use evidence-based programs. The imposed method seems to also diverge from the discourse of local innovation commonly referenced by funding agencies and governments. Of course we do not advocate an “anything goes” approach; however, mandating a narrow catalog of programs penalizes local innovations and local choices and hence undercuts the core principle of turning to community-based organizations.

Another factor explaining why organizations reformulate and revise evidence-based programs is related to the types and source of their funding. Crime prevention and intervention programs run by community-based organizations are financially supported by a market-based arrangement whereby, in the United States, grants and contracts are made available by federal, state, county, and local governments or by foundations and philanthropic groups. Organizations then compete with one another by responding to solicitations for proposals. In practice, however, the recommended programs and activities outlined in a solicitation for proposal shift and change frequently—as do the indicators (i.e., the “reportables”) that must be tracked. To illustrate: After a shift in party affiliation in the US government, federal monies moved away from the support of “faith-based” programs and toward “community-organizing” ones. Organizations that were previously funded because of their faith-based orientation had to change to an orientation of organizing their community, even if the actual programming and goals remain unchanged. Similarly, private and philanthropic monies shift and change, and often follow popular trends in “child saving.” For example, Myers and Goddard (forthcoming) observed practitioners in several states describe how foundations have recently begun to support (i.e., fund) youth leadership development programs over programs related directly to youth violence prevention. A dilemma that routinely arises from this is that for the community-based organizations to survive, they must change (or appear to change) to meet these new funding preferences—even when they do not have the expertise or the funding to actually train staff or provide the infrastructure to support the new programmatic flavor of the day. Thus organizations adapt the language of their existing skill sets, expertise, and programs to fit current trends.

Most community-based organizations operate a handful of different programs and activities during a fiscal year—and they piece together grants, contracts, and other funding sources to achieve them (Kelly 2012). So a change in one funding stream can significantly and negatively impact the organization. This can require an organization to change what it delivers—or to not be paid for what it delivers—to young people with whom the organization, as a service provider, has a relationship. It is within this institutional arrangement that organizations reformulate and revise evidence-based programs; these are, we think, important considerations for researchers who make recommendations to policymakers or conduct evaluation studies. Moreover, community-based organizations must be relevant to the needs, values, and cultural backgrounds of local residents, particularly the youth. It has been observed that minority residents in highly economically disadvantaged neighborhoods often favor social crime prevention and tackling structural problems (Skogan 1989; Schneider 2000; Goddard 2012) over individual-level interventions. This approach to crime prevention is consistent with criminological research focused on social risk factors and improving material conditions, because each can greatly enhance several other individual- and family-level forms of crime prevention (Weisburd, Groff, and Yang 2012). Thus challenging economic and structural conditions and promoting social equality represent, at the very least, a promising approach (Currie et al. 2015). Alternatively, some community-based organizations approach delinquency and youth violence as having a source in some dysfunction of the individual spirit, while others take a less “spiritual cleansing” approach and opt for enhancing religious notions as protective factors against problem behaviors. In part, these organizations grew out of the US federal government’s efforts to support faith-based community organizations during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Regardless of their origins and the approaches that have emerged, promoting local innovation and methods that serve the needs, values, and cultural backgrounds of neighborhood residents is strained when evidence-based programs are imposed. We believe this relevancy factor also explains, in part, why organizations often reformulate and revise evidence-based practices. Or, from the perspective of community-based organizations, it explains why they are pressed into being “creative” (Goddard 2012). Community-based organizations must be concerned with both the needs of local residents (including young people) and the expectations of those in power—and to lose the support of one can be disastrous.

Government policies of privatization and devolution of social provision to nonprofit community-based organizations uses local innovation as part of its justification—suggesting that these organizations to a certain extent should act independently and serve, when possible, the interests of the community, as well as the needs of the “clients,” and reflect local culture. This in turn also makes them somewhat indeterminate. Thus their freedom to design, choose, and implement crime prevention creates a “natural” condition to resist state mandates or expert-mandated programs. Lipsey (2009) argues that, instead of listing the names of programs shown by researchers to be effective, it is better to identify factors that characterize the most effective programs and the general principles that, for example, characterize what works to reduce the recidivism of juvenile offenders. We think this principle is not only sound but should be applied to community-based organizations conducting crime prevention. In addition, we suggest that evidence-based programs should be one in a handful of elements in the toolbox of crime prevention—but not the only one—nor should organizations be assessed according only to programmatic outcomes that characterize what works; outcomes of general principles—grounded in criminological theory—should be considered as well. Not only is this consistent with an integrated criminological approach, but it places value on the full range of work done by community-based organizations and especially the approaches designed and run by local practitioners. Thus we support a similar conclusion reached by evaluation researchers Weiss et al.:

The professional judgment of the people on the scene is influenced not only by self-interest and constrained values; it is also grounded in practical wisdom and tacit knowledge. They know the local history, the people involved, the interpretations that participants provide, and all the other experiences that frame a given program. Their perspective would seem to be worth a place in decisionmaking. Rather than accept the current version of imposed use as the best we can hope for, let us study the consequences of alternative requirements for integrating evidence into policy.

(2008: 44)

To conclude, we briefly turn to some of the implications of this shift to community-based organizations. Community-based organizations now carry out crime-prevention initiatives that had formerly been conducted through public agencies. On a practical level, without the benefits associated with a public bureaucracy, this can result in a general lack of coordination and an unnecessary duplication of services. In other words, doing crime prevention within a market-based funding structure can mean that practitioners end up “working in silos,” even though they are pushing for similar goals. This competitive arrangement may work against the sort of relationships needed to support coordination of services and collaboration on projects (Goddard and Myers 2011). The timeline to deliver results is also short. Often the funding cycles coincide with the election cycles of politicians. When organizations do not deliver, they quickly risk being defunded. At a deeper level, organizations are entrusted with a degree of discretion over young people and therefore can be seen as agents of state control, yet much of the accountability for failing to reduce youth crime is placed on the community. Not only is the community approach replacing state functions with cheaper alternatives; community-based organizations serve as a buffer against public criticism, although government financial support allows it to take credit for success (Goddard 2012: 351). Finally, and probably most impactful, since the scale of any one organization is usually relatively small, community-based organizations are in a weak position to change the underlying material conditions associated with much of the delinquency and youth violence that we see in urban America and elsewhere (Currie 2013b; Gray 2013).

Another consequence of the growth of community-based organizations running crime prevention programs and projects is a potential net-widening effect. Similar to the view that all drug users need treatment—contributing to increased arrests and prosecutions of drug users (Gardiner 2014)—we seem to be heading in the direction that all at-risk young people need intervention. The consequence is that those labeled as “risky” may be forced to seek community-based services. The potential negative consequence is that minor offenses, which may have gone unnoticed or been passed on as youthful indiscretions, may be scrutinized by local practitioners, and youth may find themselves subject to formal juvenile justice adjudication. Like community corrections, it is not unreasonable to contend that the expansion of community-based organizations in crime prevention may bring more young people under some form of control—albeit the control may take the form of supplementary monitoring and surveillance. At first blush it seems unlikely that seemingly benevolent community-based organizations could have undesirable consequences, but even welfarism can draw more young people into the net of juvenile justice while also providing care and services (Muncie 2009: 227). Net-widening amounts to political risk aversion (Tonry and Lynch 1996), and thus community-based organizations may inadvertently be expanding state control. Additionally, the net-widening effect may not only have adverse consequences on the youth being drawn into the pool of at-risk individuals, but it may also deplete community-based organizations’ resources. If youth who do not necessarily need support receive services, those same services are diverted away from others whose circumstances are more severe. The problem of prediction is still present, and it is difficult to identify which individual youths will be serious offenders. Some scholars have argued that potentially nondelinquent youth may increasingly be labeled and stigmatized due to the services they receive by community-based organizations, which may promote their future involvement with the juvenile justice system (McAra and McVie 2010; Goldson 2011).

Although these potential negative consequences are important to consider, it is equally important to include the entire range of outcomes that come with community-based organizations implementing crime prevention—many of which appear to be positive. As with any emerging policy approach, there are gaps in knowledge, and more research is needed, but that does not mean community-based organizations are not effective. They do, at the very least, seem to have the potential to soften the damaging impact of larger economic and social forces that make young people and their parents at risk in the first place.