Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

High levels of both crime and incarceration remain key urban problems that plague already economically disadvantaged communities, especially in Chicago. Recent evidence has shown that interventions informed by behavioral science that focus on decision-making for youth in communities where rates of violence are high - and so the consequences of making a mistake are particularly severe - can reduce violent crime arrests among youth by 45-50% (Heller et al., 2017). However, a key remaining challenge is how to enroll and engage those youth who are at highest risk for violence involvement, many of whom may no longer be attending school, which is a natural setting for such interventions. Detention facilities are another obvious “touch point,” but it is harmful and costly to wait for young people to be detained before intervening – prevention should be the goal.

This project studies a new intervention informed by behavioral science that seeks to effectively target and engage those adolescents at highest risk for violence involvement in Chicago’s most economically and racially segregated neighborhoods. Choose to Change (C2C): Your Mind, Your Game is a community-based intervention that aims to reduce criminal behavior and improve academic outcomes for vulnerable young people. This five-month program combines a behaviorally-informed intervention (a version of trauma-informed cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT) with holistic mentorship and advocacy, which seeks to recruit and retain youth to maximize participation in the C2C’s programming.

Preliminary data from our ongoing randomized controlled trial (RCT) suggest that participation in C2C reduces total arrests by 51% and arrests for violent crimes specifically by 50%. We also measure impacts on peers by combining our ability to construct offending networks using Chicago Police Department arrest records with exogenous variation in peer treatment status induced by the RCT, and find initial evidence that C2C reduced arrests among the peers of study youth by 48%.