The United Nations' 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development recognizes violence as a threat to sustainability. To serve as a context, we provide an overview of the Sustainable Development Goals as they relate to violence prevention by including a summary of key documents informing violence prevention efforts by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Violence Prevention Alliance (VPA) partners. After consultation with the United Nations (UN) Inter-Agency Expert Group on Sustainable Development Goal Indicators (IAEG-SDG), we select specific targets and indicators, featuring them in a summary table. Using the diverse expertise of the authors, we assign attributes that characterize the focus and nature of these indicators. We hope that this will serve as a preliminary framework for understanding these accountability metrics. We include a brief analysis of the target indicators and how they relate to promising practices in violence prevention.

Multilevel, comprehensive prevention approaches that: emphasize making available to violent individuals the kinds of tools they need in order to develop non-violent skills and reality-based sources of self-esteem; increase their capacity to experience feelings of empathy and remorse; and provide opportunities to take responsibility and amend the injuries they have inflicted on others and on the whole community, may play an important role in reducing the cycle of violent crime.

No abstract

The public mental hospital system was created in part because many mentally ill people were being held in prisons and jails. Support for those hospitals waned over time, however, and by the time they had degenerated into "snake pits" a consensus was reached to close them down. Unfortunately, they were not replaced with adequate community mental health resources, so as the hospitals have emptied, the prisons and jails have filled, partly with the mentally ill. That is the destructive reason for the growth of prison psychiatry in this country: the prison has become the last mental hospital. The constructive one has been a new emphasis on bringing psychiatric treatment to a previously neglected population: people who have committed serious violence, whether because of Axis I mental illnesses or Axis II character disorders. Unfortunately, four inter-related, mutually reinforcing nationwide trends threaten to reinforce that destructive development and vitiate the constructive one.