How Do Summer Youth Employment Programs Improve Criminal Justice Outcomes, and for Whom?

Abstract

Cities across the U.S. have turned to summer youth employment programs (SYEPs) to improve the behavioral, economic, and academic outcomes of inner‐city youth. This paper evaluates the impact of the Boston Summer Youth Employment Program using both experimental and non‐experimental variation. Similar to previous studies of summer jobs programs in other cities, I make use of an embedded randomized controlled trial and find that the program reduces violent crime by 35 percent, as measured by the number of arraignments from administrative records during the 17 months after participation. In contrast to prior work, I also find a similar reduction in arraignments for property crimes (−29 percent). This study also provides exploratory evidence on the mechanisms driving these reductions in crime using self‐reported responses of participants from a pre‐/post‐program survey. The results provide suggestive evidence that the beneficial impacts on violent and property crime are largely driven by improved conflict resolution skills versus other factors that would increase the opportunity cost of crime. These findings give researchers some insights into the behavioral changes that occur during the program while also providing a look inside the “black box” as to how SYEPs affect youth outcomes in the long run.

The Effects of Youth Employment on Crime: Evidence from New York City Lotteries

“…Nearly 20 percent of youth analyzed by Heller (2014) had been arrested prior to the program, and all of the youth in that study were drawn from high‐violence high schools. In the population studied by Modestino (2019), rates of pre‐program arraignment are also low (around 4 percent), and that paper only finds treatment effects for the group that had a pre‐program arraignment.…”

“…Results from early evaluations of SYEPs have found support for this rationale. Analyses of SYEPs in Chicago and Boston have found relatively large reductions in the number of times at‐risk youth are arrested for violent and other serious crimes in the year or two after the program ends (Heller, 2014; Modestino, 2019); an analysis of the SYEP in New York City found a decrease in incarceration in New York State prison, an outcome associated with serious crimes or repeated contact with the criminal justice system, in the years after the program (Gelber, Isen, & Kessler, 2016). These results suggest that SYEPs have medium‐term effects on youth behavior and criminal justice outcomes.…”

The Slow Violence of Contemporary Policing

“…A recent evaluation of the Safe Passages program in Chicago, which funds adult "guardians" for defined routes to and from schools and parks, shows that Safe Passage locations saw reduced violent crime, reduced absenteeism, and no evidence of crime spillover elsewhere (McMillen et al 2019). Similarly, youth summer employment programs reduce criminal arraignments, especially among low-income youth of color, and this effect lasted for at least 17 months (Modestino 2019). As police contact is commonplace for so many, we next turn to consider how that routinized contact affects concepts of community, the state, and citizenship.…”

Appropriate Measurement and Use of “Costs of Crime” in Policy Analysis: Benefit‐cost Analysis of Criminal Justice Policies Has Come of Age

“…Welsh and Farrington first reviewed the literature in 2000, and located 15 such studies, while that number increased to 23 by 2015 (Welsh & Farrington, 2000; Welsh, Farrington, & Gowar, 2015). Recent benefit‐cost analyses incorporating monetary estimates of intangible crime costs published in this Journal have focused on such disparate policies as housing subsidies (Carlson et al., 2011) and summer youth employment programs (Modestino, 2019).…”