New research: Choose to Change® (C2C®)

The Research Study

In 2015, researchers at the Crime Lab partnered with YAP and Brightpoint to design and implement a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) of the C2C® program to evaluate the program’s impact on criminal justice engagement and academic outcomes. Between 2015 and 2019, 2,074 eligible youth were identified for the program and were referred from community service providers and schools from the south and west neighborhoods of Chicago. Youth who are actively affiliated with a gang or at risk of engaging, on juvenile probation, previously found guilty of weapons offenses, disruptive in school through chronic truancy, serious misconduct and/or frequent suspension, or the direct victim or witness to traumatic violence are eligible for C2C®.

There were not enough program spots for all candidates to be served, so a lottery was used to determine who was offered C2C® versus services that are normally available. Since the only difference, on average, between the youth with and without a C2C® offer is the C2C® offer, comparing the outcomes of youth in both groups isolates the impact of C2C®.

Who C2C® Serves

C2C® was able to successfully engage youth facing many intersecting challenges, such as prior criminal justice involvement and school truancy. Youth in the study were, on average, almost 16 years old and in the first few years of high school. About 95 percent of the youth in the study are Black and almost all youth qualify for free or reduced lunch. A significant percentage had been previously arrested (35%), and 20 percent had a gap in enrollment at some point during the prior school year. Compared to the broader Chicago Public Schools (CPS) population, C2C® youth are much more likely to be previously victimized and previously arrested.

C2C® participants stay engaged. Despite facing many barriers to participating, 62 percent of youth offered C2C® participated in programming (defined as attending at least one therapy session and/or five hours of mentoring). Conditional on being a C2C® participant, C2C® youth attended, on average, nine CBT sessions and received about 176 hours of wraparound services over the course of the program. This high level of engagement is especially notable given many of the young people in the study had only a tenuous connection with school when they were recruited for participation.

Summary of Research Findings

To understand how the program impacts contact with the criminal justice system, we use administrative Chicago Police Department arrest data.

C2C® participants were substantially less likely to be arrested in the 24 months after randomization. We find that engaging in C2C® resulted in a 31 percent reduction in the probability of any arrest in the 24 months after randomization, a statistically significant decrease. Three years after randomization, we find sustained impact with C2C® reducing the likelihood of any arrest by 23 percent. We find that C2C® leads to no significant reductions in the number of arrests post-randomization.

Breaking these arrests down by the charges associated with them, we find large reductions in violent offense arrests. During the course of programming (6 months), C2C® reduces both the number of violent arrests and the likelihood of arrest for a violent offense by 47 percent. We see similar persistence in impact: at 24 months post-randomization, C2C® reduces the likelihood of a youth being arrested for a violent offense by 39 percent. These impacts are statistically significant even after adjusting to reduce the risk of false positive results.

To better understand the impacts of C2C®, given an arrest is a proxy for criminal behavior, we create a supervised machine learning algorithm from arrest narratives that determines if an arrest was initiated more or less at the discretion of police. We find that the program’s impacts are concentrated in arrests where officers have less discretion in initiating contact, while having little impact on more discretionary contact arrests (e.g. a young person exhibiting “suspicious” behavior). This analysis suggests the effects of the program are being driven by a reduction in actual youth offending behavior rather than by avoiding police contact.

Looking Ahead

This study finds that C2C®, a youth behavioral health intervention in Chicago, can effectively engage harder-to-reach youth, substantially reduce violence involvement, and reduce the probability of arrest in the short and longer term. In the context of other successful CBT-based programs in Chicago, C2C® highlights the possibility of engaging a harder-to-reach population of youth outside of school without having to wait until someone reaches adulthood or is detained.

These results highlight the promise of behavioral health interventions in developing meaningful and sustained impacts for youth by providing them with tools to navigate challenging environments that are often plagued with a lack of safety and economic opportunity. The longer-term impacts of this program are especially promising as many youth programs see fade-out shortly after the program ends.

Future work on the C2C® research study will incorporate the impact of the program on youth education outcomes including impacts on graduation. The results of these efforts will continue to be disseminated on an ongoing basis.

This study received support from Arnold Ventures, the AbbVie Foundation, Arnold Ventures, Chicago Sports Alliance (comprised of the Chicago Bears, Chicago Blackhawks, Chicago Bulls, Chicago Cubs, and Chicago White Sox), Crown Family Philanthropies, National Institutes of Health, Get In Chicago, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, National Science Foundation, Pritzker Pucker Family Foundation, and Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

Research reported in this publication was additionally supported by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) National Center for Injury Prevention and Control under award number 1-R-01-CE002971 and by the National Institutes of Health under award number 5P01HD076816. Nour Abdul-Razzak gratefully acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, NSF, other funders, data providers, or implementing agencies.