Can A Violence Interrupter Program Reduce Arrests By 73 Percent?

Highlights

Criminological literature can be challenging to read and interpret. Interestingly, Gallup cited far more American support for a social programs approach (67 percent) versus an emphasis on law enforcement (29 percent) to combat crime.

Hope and help seem to sell better than locking them up. 

With that in mind, I write about a community program in Chicago that claims to be massively impactful. Most programs for offenders in communities have failed or produced minor results based on a literature review of 600 programs (link below). 

If you are interested in community-based programs for offenders, this article is for you.

But it’s interesting that these programs (i.e., credible messengers, hand-picked participants, provision of social services) are the essence of a police-based program deemed successful (Project Safe Neighborhoods) by the US Department of Justice. Baltimore’s program is similar.

Are cities reframing a police program under the guise of a social services endeavor? Does that allow cities to hand-pick “dangerous” or high-risk people when a USDOJ evaluation of risk assessment instruments is deemed biased with false positives (link below)? 

The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (the official scientific journal of the NAS), and the methodology appears acceptable; thus, it deserves the attention of anyone interested in reducing crime and violence within communities. The program offered an impressive array of services to potential or existing offenders. A common criticism of offender-based programs is their lack of comprehensiveness or implementation. 

However

However, I challenge the program results based on existing research literature and my own justice-related experience. I will let readers (and podcast consumers) make up their own minds about the worth of the program or my observations.

There has been considerable difficulty for programs trying to assist people in need. More than three years have passed since Gov. Gavin Newsom introduced the concept of CARE Court. Standing at a lectern in front of a San Jose treatment center in March 2022, he described a new court system that would steer hard-to-treat individuals down a pathway of housing and services. He called it “a completely new paradigm, a new approach, a different pathway.” It failed to deliver the promised results.

There are many more like it, especially West Coast cities and states trying alternatives for drug use.

What Is The Chicago CRED Program?

Chicago CRED (Create Real Economic Destiny) is a community-based effort to reduce gun violence by working directly with men who are most at risk of being involved in shootings—either as offenders or as victims.

The program starts with “credible messengers,” often men from the same neighborhoods who have turned their own lives around. They reach out to high-risk individuals, build trust, and invite them to join CRED. Participants receive a mix of intensive mentoring, counseling, education, and job training. They also get help finding employment, managing anger, and dealing with trauma—issues that often play a role in violent behavior.

The program isn’t a quick fix. It can last months or longer, and the great majority do not complete the program. But those who stuck with it, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were far less likely to be arrested for a violent crime afterward than similar men who didn’t participate.

Briefly stated, it’s probably the most complex delivery of services to people in high-crime communities I’ve seen.

What Do The Authors Mean When They Say That Participants Were 73 Percent Less Likely To Be Arrested? 

When researchers say that men who completed the Chicago CRED program were 73% less likely to be arrested for a violent crime in the two years after joining, they’re talking about a difference between groups, not an individual result.

Here’s what that means in plain terms. The study compared men who finished the program with similar men from the same neighborhoods who didn’t take part. If, for example, 100 out of every 1,000 men in the comparison group were arrested for a violent crime, only about 27 out of 1,000 CRED graduates were.

So “73% less likely” describes a relative reduction in risk—CRED graduates had about one-quarter the risk of arrest that others did.

It doesn’t mean that 73% of participants avoided arrest or that violent crime citywide fell by that amount. It simply means that, compared with people like them (a control group), program graduates were arrested for violent crimes far less often for a violent crime.

As stated, the evaluation is based on those who completed a very lengthy and complex program. Most of those chosen dropped out or did not complete the effort.

This wasn’t a randomized study (the gold standard for social science programs) where participants were assigned to join or not join CRED by chance. Instead, researchers compared participants who entered the program with similar people from the same neighborhoods who didn’t. That approach, called a “quasi-experimental” design, doesn’t prove cause and effect, but it gives a strong indication that the program itself, not just personal differences, helped reduce arrests for violent crimes.

Do Studies Show Lasting Benefits for Anti-Crime Programs?

The National Criminal Justice Association offered an article titled, Do Studies Show ‘Lasting Benefit’ of Anti-Crime Programs (it’s now unavailable). Summation:

“A new paper by University of Virginia law Prof. Megan Stevenson surveys more than 50 years of “randomized controlled trials” (RCTs) in criminal justice research and argues that almost no interventions have lasting benefit, and the ones that do don’t replicate in other settings.”

“RCT, a form of experiment used to control factors not under the direct control of researchers, is often called the gold standard of research methods.”

“Writing in the Boston University Law Review, Stevenson says that the relatively few RCT studies of anticrime efforts that survive the academic review process “are biased toward showing that the intervention evaluated was more successful than it actually was.”

“This article is built around a central empirical claim: most reforms and interventions in the criminal legal space are shown to have little lasting impact when evaluated with gold-standard methods of causal inference.”

“This claim will not be controversial to anyone immersed in the literature (emphasis added). But, like a dirty secret, it almost never gets seriously acknowledged or discussed. Nor is it widely known beyond the small circle of people trained in statistical methods of causal inference. The research that people hear about shows the rare cases of success; the remainder gets filtered from public view.”

“When it comes to the type of limited-scope interventions evaluable via RCT  and other quasi-experimental methods, the engineer’s view appears to be mostly a myth. More than fifty years of RCT evidence shows the limits in our ability to engineer change with this type of intervention (emphasis added).”

The essence of her argument is that it’s tough to engineer social change through programs, and crime evaluations based on random assignment of participants routinely fail.