ABSTRACT
Delinquency prevention programs have been hard pressed to present consistently convincing outcome results. Youth who persist in delinquent criminal activity also appear to be engaged in a number of antisocial acts other than crime. Thus, for every youngster who goes on to future antisocial behavior, there is a youngster who does not. Isolating the factors related to this developmentally consistent cessation, however, is a large and complex task. Studies from two potentially analogous areas—recovery from drug abuse and cessation of adult criminal activity—do provide some possible models for structuring the experience of cessation. The analogy of these two cessation processes to the cessation of delinquency is straightforward but two clear limitations of this analogy should also be recognized. Knowledge of the content of cessation could help identify those aspects of a youth's social world, which, if changed, could be most likely to have a beneficial, rippling effect.
