Improving Programming in Juvenile Detention: The Impact of Project Safe Neighborhoods Youth Outreach Forums

A growing body of evidence suggests focused deterrence strategies successfully reduce youth involvement in violent crime. Very little of this evidence comes from randomized experiments. This paper takes a step toward filling this gap in the literature. The authors present the results of a randomized experiment evaluating a series of youth outreach forums that leverage several focused deterrence strategies. They find that participation in the forums corresponds to very valuable and proportionally large reductions in the social costs of crime and suggestive evidence that the forums increase attachment to school.