The Presley Center for Crime and Justice Studies is a research center at the University of California Riverside. The center is primarily designed to examine, evaluate and disseminate information about crime and justice in California and across the nation. The center provides opportunities to engage in research in a multicultural environment, and provide to the public good through impacting policy at local and national levels. This occurs through interdisciplinary collaboration with many of the other departments and research centers on campus.
Welcome to the Presley Center for Crime and Justice Studies! My name is Rob Parker, and I am the Co Director of the Center, and I want to thank you for visiting our web site. The Presley Center is engaged in a number of research and field projects with one over arching goal in mind--to improve the safety of Californians and their families by reducing and preventing violent crime in our state. One major focus of our efforts to is better understand the causes of youth violence, and based on that better understanding, to design intervention programs for youth that are effective in reducing and preventing such violence. A second focus of our research is on the effectiveness of interventions--in the past five years we have evaluated a number of interventions, including those in Juvenile Hall for detained delinquents, in a neighborhood center designed to provide services to an under served area of Riverside, in the Superior Court of Riverside where defendants with untreated mental illnesses were treated in a joint effort between the Court and the County Mental Health Department, and in the most dangerous neighborhoods in Riverside where a gang intervention program based on a national model was implemented to reduce gang violence. In this effort we can discover which programs work and which do not, so that we can ensure that when public money is involved, it is wisely spent on the programs that show evidence based effectiveness. We also examine the costs of these interventions to be certain that the benefits obtained are worth the public money expended in each case. You will find summaries of these and other studies on the web site, as well as information from a variety of sources about violence and its prevention in California. I hope you find this information useful, and if you have questions about anything you see here or about how we can help you more effectively prevent violence in California, please do not hesitate to contact us at presley_center@ucr.edu
Welcome to the Presley Center! We have just completed updating this web site and look forward to having it become a major interface between the Center and those interested in crime and justice issues.
The Center maintains a major emphasis on youth, ranging from early childhood through adolescence and early adulthood, with a primary focus on the prevention of youth crime, violence and associated behaviors (e.g., substance abuse, status offending, school failure, etc.). The range of behavioral issues addressed is broad, extending from bullying in schools and dating violence to gun carrying, gangs, and youth homicide. We are committed to the belief that an understanding of the causes and prevention of such behaviors cannot be achieved through the lens of a single academic discipline. The Presley Center, therefore, fosters an interdisciplinary environment, bringing multiple perspectives to bear on the problem of crime in our state and larger society.
Our activities are theory driven in that we believe empirically supported theory can provide the cornerstone of informed crime prevention policy and practice. Accordingly, we conduct research at the Center that tests theory through basic research or empirically examines the theory of change underlying crime prevention efforts. The Center also provides a training platform for both graduate and undergraduate students in the application of criminological theory to research issues central to our understanding of the causes of crime as well as its prevention. Student experiences in the Presley Center are designed to supplement the disciplinary training they receive in their home academic departments, with theoretical applications to real world behavioral problems.
We seek to make the Presley Center a forum for convening workshops involving experts in the field to brainstorm about research needs, best practices in preventive interventions, in addition to new policy developments. As we continue to develop, we plan to post papers, fact sheets, policy briefs, and annual reports of crime in California on our web site. Please join us as our Center unfolds, giving us feedback and contacting us with questions or suggestions about the Center and its activities.
