sure, change ownership of top directory and make it different than the user that will be using the directory below:
example:
root owns /home/test
user owns /home/test/*-------user cant go higher than /home/test........make sure read,write,and exec for /home/test is turned off for the user in question
use chown to do that
use chmod to change the rwx(read write exec) privileges if you want even more control