ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys the evolving connection between public health and criminology with serious youth violence as its focus. It concerns both research and practice and how these efforts are contributing to improved public health-criminology collaborations or public health-influenced programs that have a discernable impact on youth violence. Over the last 30 years, policy-oriented criminologists of many disciplinary backgrounds have made important scientific contributions to policy debates on crime and justice issues. The chapter presents a well-known public health model of the scientific approach to serious youth violence prevention. It describes innovative primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention methods to reduce serious youth violence. In recent years, the fields of violence prevention and criminology more generally have begun to place a greater emphasis on evidence-based decision-making. Localized violence problems have been the subject of a great deal of inquiry and analysis by both academics and police agencies.
