Effective Correctional Intervention Programmes for Juveniles: Review and Synthesis of Meta-Analytic Evidence

Abstract

In juvenile justice, there has been an increasing demand for evidence-based research which has resulted in more meta-analyses of juvenile correctional interventions. Although these meta-analyses have made significant contributions to our understanding of ‘what works' with juvenile offenders, researchers often find considerable variation in outcomes among studies and, as a consequence, fail to reach firm conclusions about the overall effectiveness of the interventions. Lipsey and Cullen (2007) found the positive effects of rehabilitation interventions by synthesising extant meta-analytic findings across diverse correctional intervention programmes [Lipsey, M. W., & Cullen, F. T. (2007). The effectiveness of correctional rehabilitation: a review of systematic reviews. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 3, 297–320]. Using the effect sizes from 85 previous meta-analytic studies of correctional interventions for juveniles during the last 30 years (1980–2010), this paper carried out a partial replication of the Lipsey and Cullen study. We view it as a partial replication because it included only correctional intervention programmes for juveniles (ie, there were no correctional intervention programmes for adults). This study moves to a more extended assessment of the effects of interventions by adding more meta-analyses of intervention programmes for juveniles in prison, jail, probation or parole settings. Specifically, it is of interest to examine and compare effect sizes across differing intervention programmes in order to determine how interventions have performed across populations. The study reports findings that are highly concordant with the earlier study. Some interventions are not effective in reducing recidivism rates among juvenile offenders, while overall mean effect size across diverse samples of studies of different correctional interventions reveals less recidivism for the intervention condition. The authors explore possible explanations for this finding. Implications for policy and research are discussed.