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This Element examines an increasingly important community crime prevention strategy - focused deterrence. This strategy seeks to change offender behavior by understanding crime-producing dynamics and conditions that cause recurring crime problems, and implementing a mixed set of law enforcement, community mobilization, and social service actions.

During the 1990s many countries around the world experienced the beginnings of what would later become the most significant decline in crime ever recorded. Through the lens of developmental and life-course criminology, this Element compares the criminal offending trajectories of two Australian birth cohorts born ten years apart in 1984 and 1994.

To better understand school violence this Element provides a comprehensive meta-analysis of the school violence and victimization literature. Using 761 studies, the relative effects of 30 different individual, school, and community level correlates are assessed, concluding with recommendations for theory, future research, and policy.

This Element demonstrates the need for criminology to integrate further into economics, political science, urban planning, and history to improve crime control policies.

This Element presents the history, research, and future potential for an alternative and effective model of policing called 'legitimacy-based policing'. This model is driven by social psychology theory and informed by research findings showing that legitimacy of the police shapes public acceptance of police decisions, willingness to cooperate with the police, and citizen engagement in communities. Police legitimacy is found to be strongly tied to the level of fairness exercised by police authority, i.e. to procedural justice. Taken together these two ideas create an alternative framework for policing that relies upon the policed community's willing acceptance of and cooperation with the law. Studies show that this framework is as effective in lowering crime as the traditional carceral paradigm, an approach that relies on the threat or use of force to motivate compliance. It is also more effective in motivating willing cooperation and in encouraging people to engage in their communities in ways that promote social, economic and political development. We demonstrate that adopting this model benefits police departments and police officers as well as promoting community vitality. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

"This comparative empirical study of policing in the United States and France draws on the authors' ten years of field work to contend that the police in both countries should be thought about as an amalgam of five distinct professional cultures or "intelligence regimes" - each of which can be found in any given police department in both the United States and France. In particular, it is contended that what police do as knowledge workers and how they make sense of the social problems such as collective offending by juveniles varies with the professional subcommunities or "intelligence regimes" in which their particular knowledge work is embedded. The same problem can be looked at in fundamentally different ways even within a single police department, depending on the intelligence regime through which the problem is refracted"--

Most criminological theories are not truly scientific, since they do not yield exact quantitative predictions of criminal career features, such as the prevalence and frequency of offending at different ages. This Element aims to make progress towards more scientific criminological theories. A simple theory is described, based on measures of the probability of reoffending and the frequency of offending. Three offender categories are identified: high risk/high rate, high risk/low rate, and low risk/low rate. It is demonstrated that this theory accurately predicts key criminal career features in three datasets: in England the Offenders Index (national data), the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) and in America the Pittsburgh Youth Study (PYS). The theory is then extended in the CSDD and PYS by identifying early risk factors that predict the three categories. Criminological theorists are encouraged to replicate and build on our research to develop scientific theories that yield quantitative predictions.