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12 J. Res. Crime & Delinquency 1 (1975)

handle is hein.journals/jrcd12 and id is 1 raw text is: Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency JANUARY 1975 NUMBER 1 Foreword One prerequisite of the rotating editorship of this Journal is the pan- oramic view it offers of the state of criminology. Our contributions to the abatement of street crime in America may not be reflected in the Uniform Crime Reports or by other indicators, but we are accumulating instruments of increasing power for understand- ing the phenomenon. We have gone past the naive quest for etiology re- flected by the banal expression which used to be so common-a search for the root causes of crime. Whatever those root causes may be, and most of us know them all too well, we are now searching for a strategy of ef- fective prevention and minimum in- tervention. Most of the papers sub- mitted for publication by this Journal have been intended to contribute to a resolution of one or the other of these stubborn problems. There is no end in sight for this continuing ef- fort, but it is heartening to observe that not only has the quality of crimi- nological research improved but the opportunities for doing it have vastly increased. It is important to take note of the reasons for these favorable develop- ments. The massive investments by the major benefactors of American criminology are beginning to pay off. The National Institute of Mental Health, the Law Enforcement Assis- tance Administration, and the Ford Foundation have persisted long 1 enough to allow the development of a criminal justice research communi- ty. This important contribution would not have brought us as far as we have come, however, if it were not for the willingness of the legislatures of a few states to undertake major and radical innovations which have built on the concepts emerging from research. One article appearing in this issue results directly from coura- geous and massive statewide experi- ment. The famous closing of the youth training schools of Massachu- setts is a continuing experiment which, regardless of its eventual out- come, is generating studies which will eventually settle the role, if any, of youth training schools in industrial society. It can be plausibly argued that the Massachusetts exploration of community corrections for youthful offenders is the most ambitious pe- nological laboratory ever created. Some stress is placed on this experiment because much more of the same kind is going on. In the states of New York, Washington, Minnesotaand Florida, to bring a few more jurisdictions into the dis- cussion, research is playing an active part in the development of correc- tional change. It is not too much to say that we are moving into an era when the criminologist will be less oc- cupied with the explication of failure than with the design of modest suc- cesses. It is hoped that some of the VOLUME 12

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