Taking the US Justice Department's "Comprehensive Strategy for Serious, Violent and Chronic Juvenile Offenders" as a starting point, a group of the most respected experts in the field set out an approach to preventing, treating and controlling serious juvenile criminal behaviour.

This handbook promotes a comprehensive strategy founded on evidence-based programming for juvenile justice systems to adopt or enhance their current system. The comprehensive strategy is supported strongly by the broad research base that is now available. This strategy recognizes, first, that a relatively small proportion of the juveniles who initially enter the juvenile justice system will prove to be serious, violent, or chronic offenders, but that group accounts for a large proportion of the overall amount of delinquency. An important component of a comprehensive evidence-based juvenile...