Intervention (Hidden)
Across the country, and indeed the world, crime is concentrated in poor communities and among young people. In Chicago, in 2013 alone, more than 17,000 youth aged 10 to 17 were arrested for a range of violent and nonviolent offenses in low-income communities on the city’s South and West Sides. Typical policy approaches to reducing crime have often been built on the assumption that criminal activity stems from deliberate calculation by those who commit crimes. This assumes that offenders weigh the costs and benefits of a crime before deciding to commit it. As a result, crime policy typically relies on two levers: making it more likely that offenders will be caught, and increasing the costs of getting caught. But we suggest that many crimes, particularly among youth, are not the result of careful deliberation. A number of young people who commit crimes may not have been actively planning to do so. Rather, we suggest that many crimes occur because often young people do not actively plan to avoid committing them.
To support our hypothesis, we offer this example: the City of Chicago recently conducted a survey with over 1000 local youth. Nearly one-third said they make plans only hours before they undertake an activity or go out, or even on the spur of the moment. Instead of carefully planning out their days, these and many other youth often default into activities and situations simply out of habit. Unfortunately, particularly for youth in disadvantaged neighborhoods, many of these defaults can be dangerous. Over one third of respondents to the Chicago survey had also witnessed or heard about violence or criminal activity in places they tend to spend their free time. We hypothesize that giving at-risk youth access to a programming and plan-making app could be an effective intervention to help them avoid risky situations that may lead to crime and/or violence.
Plan-making interventions have proven effective across a variety of contexts, including preventative health behaviors, academic behaviors, and voter mobilization. These interventions are often effective because they help people anticipate potential obstacles that would prevent them from translating their intentions into actions. Planning for these obstacles makes them more easily surmountable. However, plan-making has primarily been effective in changing small, one-time behaviors where people already have the intention to accomplish a particular thing (e.g., getting a flu shot). Plan-making is the final nudge to overcome hurdles. Could plan-making also curb something as complex as youth violence, which seems driven at times by broader factors and, perhaps, misguided intentions?
We find promising evidence for this possibility in work completed by our partner, ideas42, the world’s leading behavioral economics design lab and research center based in New York City. In pilot work in Cape Town, South Africa in 2014, ideas42 found that in times when violence was most likely—evening and weekends—youth often didn’t have any plans, and they tended to default into spending time in unsafe environments. To address this challenge, ideas42 designed a computer-based activity-planning tool that encouraged youth to make plans during these critical time periods. A small randomized controlled trial showed that youths who used the planning tool were half as likely (relative to the control group) to participate in unsafe weekend activities, to report feeling very unsafe, and to report having experienced violence in the previous week as well. This research suggests that simply taking the time to plan safe activities had a significant impact—it made youth feel (and be) safer.
Based on these promising findings, in 2016 our University of Chicago Crime Lab research team worked with ideas42 to develop and pilot a mobile plan-making app called ChiPlan. The current version of the app provides youth with a streamlined way to find safe events. Based on youth feedback, we plan to improve the app by including additional levers such as commitment devices in advance of our randomized controlled trial of the app in 2017.
The intervention will consist in giving youth who participate in the city of Chicago's summer employment program access to ChiPlan.