Family Relationships and Crime

Because studies of the causes of crime implicate parents, treatment strategies have been aimed at changing parental behavior. Alan Kazdin summarized research on parent management training by noting that it "has led to marked improvements in child behavior" (p. 1351). One long-term follow-up study of home visiting during the first pregnancies of women suggest that such visits produce reductions in juvenile crime (Olds et al.). Unmarried pregnant women were randomly assigned to have a visiting nurse or to be in a comparison group. Those whose mothers received the home visits had less than half as many arrests fifteen years later. Evidence is mounting that training in parental skills can be successful, although more work is necessary both to develop effective strategies across a variety of cultural environments and to assure that the most dysfunctional families receive the training.