Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has shown promise in decreasing violent crime involvement for disadvantaged youth enrolled in public high schools and those who are incarcerated in juvenile detention facilities (Heller et al., 2017). However, these promising programs are missing an important group of at risk young people, those who are in the process of disconnecting from school, but have not yet been incarcerated. Engaging these youth can be particularly challenging given their tenuous connection to the very institutions most likely to provide the supports that they need.

We evaluate a promising new intervention, Choose to Change: Your Mind, You Game, which combines intensive support services with trauma-focused CBT to improve life outcomes for at-risk youth to target just this population. The five month program, delivered by Youth Advocate Programs and Children’s Home + Aid, targets youth considered higher-risk for violent encounters: gang affiliated, on juvenile probation, guilty of weapons offenses, disruptive or disengaged from school, or having a past history of being victims or witness of trauma. We hypothesize that the combination of the individualized support offered by the advocate with group and individual CBT by a trained therapist will engage these young people and provide them with the coping mechanisms that they need to face the multiple challenges in their lives.

Our presentation will share initial results from a randomized control trial designed to study the effectiveness of providing this intervention to 440 youth in Chicago’s Englewood and West Englewood neighborhoods from October 2015 to October 2017. Drawing on administrative data from Chicago Public Schools and Chicago Police Department, we report initial results on whether this program led to reduced arrests and violent crime as well as whether the program increases youth connection to school. Furthermore, since crime is concentrated within social networks and juveniles most often offend in groups, we predict that positive social behavior changes could spread to peers of youth participating in the intervention. To measure these peer effects, we proxy social networks with co-offending and co-suspension networks using administrative data. The additional spillover analysis will ensure we are not only capturing the full benefits of the program, but also learning for future work which youth could possibly be targeted to maximize crime reduction.