Priority prosecution of high-rate dangerous criminals should help reduce crime, either by making sure that serious offenders are incarcerated, or by lengthening their sentences. But priority prosecution programs can't always focus on high-rate dangerous offenders. Sometimes offenders' instant offenses or prior records do not clearly indicate the nature of their actual criminal behavior. The concrete advice offered in this report will be useful to every DA who wants to improve office practices for selecting high-rate dangerous offenders for priority prosecution.

By focusing attention on individuals rather than on aggregates, this book takes a novel approach to studying criminal behavior. It develops a framework for collecting information about individual criminal careers and their parameters, reviews existing knowledge about criminal career dimensions, presents models of offending patterns, and describes how criminal career information can be used to develop and refine criminal justice policies. In addition, an agenda for future research on criminal careers is presented.

What should we do with teenagers who commit crimes? In this book, two leading scholars in law and adolescent development argue that juvenile justice should be grounded in the best available psychological science, which shows that adolescence is a distinctive state of cognitive and emotional development. Although adolescents are not children, they are also not fully responsible adults.

This important and original new book reports on a major investigation of the outcomes of probation supervision, is concerned with the key question of what works in probation, and comes at an important moment of change and development for the probation service in the UK. Unlike previous studies which have relied mostly on official data, this book makes use of over 200 interviews with men and women on probation, and their supervising Probation Officers. Rethinking What Works with Offenders has the following objectives: to understand probation work from the perspectives of those who deliver it and those to whom it is delivered to study probation intervention as a whole (in particular the probation order) rather than specific aspects to locate probation work in the wider social contexts of those on probation to analyse how probation works, and to reconceptualise probation outcomes in terms of degrees of success rather than as 'successful' or 'unsuccessful' to assess the policy implications of these conclusions This book presents an important and challenging range of findings on 'what works' in probation and with offenders, and will be essential reading for anybody professionally concerned with the present and future of probation. raises central issues at a critical time for the reorganised National Probation Servicebased on extensive research, including 200+ interviewsessential reading for anybody interested in 'what works' in probation