When early crime prevention goes to scale: a new look at the evidence

It is a widely held view--in both research and policy communities--that desirable effects on delinquency and later offending from early prevention trials will attenuate once they are "scaled-up" or "rolled-out" for wider public use. Some of the main reasons for this include a reduced level of risk, a more heterogeneous population, insufficient service infrastructure, and loss of program fidelity. If attenuation of program effects is not only possible but is highly probable, then the issue for researchers and policymakers should be how to preserve or even enhance effects in moving from efficacy trials to community effectiveness trials to broad-scale dissemination. This paper surveys the knowledge base in an effort to contribute to an improved understanding of the theoretical and empirical dimensions for successfully taking early crime prevention programs to scale. It also outlines some proposals for how future research can make progress on this critical policy issue.