A new study found that providing summer jobs to high school students can help reduce the incidents of violent crime arrests by 43 percent.
"Violent crime is incredibly regressive in its impact-it takes the greatest toll on society's most vulnerable," Roseanna Ander, executive director of the Crime Lab, said in a university news release. "There is far too little policy and research attention as well as precious few resources focused on adolescents, especially those from disadvantaged neighborhoods who are really struggling."
Researchers at the University of Chicago Crime Lab and the University of Pennsylvania looked at the effect of Chicago's One Summer Plus Program, a program that provides employment and internship opportunities to youth and young adults, especially during summer, with a minimum wage of $8.25 per hour.
Study author Sara Heller from the University of Pennsylvania worked with her colleagues by randomly assigning summer jobs to 1,634 students in the 13 most violent neighborhoods in Chicago. The students' average age was 16, and 90 percent of them came from low income families. The participants were divided into three groups: summer jobs only, summer jobs with social-emotional learning, and a control group that was not accepted in the Chicago program.
The summer jobs group was paid for a total of 25 hours per week, while the summer jobs with social-emotional learning group was paid for 15 hours of work, plus another 10 hours' worth for attending the social-emotional learning sessions. The third group was asked to look for summer jobs on their own.
During the 16-month study period, researchers found that students who were accepted into the summer job program were 43 percent less likely to be involved and arrested for violent crimes such as murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, as compared to the control group. The same result was maintained even after the eight-week summer job period.
"The city of Chicago was courageous enough to put its One Summer Plus program to the test, and turns out that just eight weeks of summer programming decreases violent crime arrests by a huge amount for over a year after the job ends," Heller said. "This is an incredibly encouraging finding."
The results of the study provided evidence that interventions can help children who are on vacation, along with out-of-school youths, to avoid getting themselves into trouble by providing them with skills that can help them manage their behavior and find a job.
"It's a great study," Steven Raphael, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, said to Science Mag. "It shows that a short, concentrated positive experience can have a long-lasting effect on this population."
This study was published in the Dec. 5 issue of the journal Science.
