Abstract
Objective
Joan McCord was a very influential criminologist and strong advocate for measuring potentially harmful effects in well-meaning crime prevention programs. This paper demonstrates the continued importance of measuring adverse program effects by reviewing the available research evidence on classic and contemporary gang streetworker programs.
Methods
This paper draws upon the evaluation findings of existing gang streetworker evaluations and presents the unpublished results of a rigorous quasi-experimental evaluation of a contemporary gang streetworker program that directly measured whether the intervention impacted the violent gun behaviors of treated gangs relative to untreated gangs.
Results
Evaluations of classic pre-1970s gang streetworker programs generally found that these interventions increased gang delinquency by reinforcing group identity and enhancing gang cohesion. Evaluations of contemporary gang streetworker programs are mixed, with several studies documenting concerning increases in gang violence. An unpublished evaluation found that the streetworker program was well-implemented and executed. However, the intervention was associated with increased shootings by and against treatment gangs relative to control gangs.
Conclusion
These findings suggest that contemporary gang streetworker programs are at high risk of generating unintended adverse outcomes for treated gang members relative to their untreated counterparts. Existing and planned programs should be monitored with a high degree of vigilance and evaluated with controlled evaluation designs.
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Notes
Beyond the application of construct theory to understand the strong backfire effects of summer camp, McCord (1981) developed other hypotheses to explain the harmful effects of the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study on treated boys relative to untreated boys. Most notably, McCord (1981) suggested that the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study boys in the treatment group may have suffered a labeling effect. Other possible explanations included (1) the counselors imposed middle-class values on lower-class youth that simply did not work for them, (2) the boys in the treatment group became dependent on the counselors and lost a key source of support when the program ended, and (3) the support of the counselors raised the treatment boys’ expectations that could not be sustained, and disillusionment set in after the program was completed.
The well-known Chicago Area Project (CAP), designed by University of Chicago sociologist Clifford Shaw, was one of the earliest and most influential gang streetworker programs. The CAP model employed local adults to outreach gang youth with group activities and social service opportunities in order to drive down neighborhood crime. Spergel (2007) has noted that CAP’s outreach workers were among the first “curbstone counselors”—individuals with ties to both the neighborhood and gangs dedicated toward group and individual transformation. Unfortunately, CAP was never rigorously evaluated to establish its impacts on gang delinquency.
The scientific evidence reviewed here excludes the evaluation of the “Save Our Streets” (SOS) streetworker program in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn (Picard-Fritsche and Cerniglia 2013) due to a very weak evaluation design that did not adequately control for rival causal factors. The evaluation also made implausibly large violence reduction claims for a police district of some 96,000 residents given the scale of the program (only four outreach workers who managed just 96 clients—only 68 % of whom were classified as “high risk” for involvement in gun violence).
Using the Maryland Scientific Methods Scale (Sherman et al. 1997) as a standard, the SSB quasi-experimental design with matched treatment and control groups would be considered a “Level 4” evaluation as it measured outcomes before and after the program in multiple treatment and control condition units. These types of designs have better statistical control of extraneous influences on outcomes and, relative to lower-level evaluations, deal with selection and regression threats more adequately. The Scientific Methods Scale ranked scientific studies from Level 1 (weakest) to Level 5 (strongest) on overall internal validity. Properly implemented randomized experiments were rated highest on the scale and observational studies lowest.
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Braga, A.A. The continued importance of measuring potentially harmful impacts of crime prevention programs: the academy of experimental criminology 2014 Joan McCord lecture. J Exp Criminol 12, 1–20 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-016-9252-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-016-9252-4