Hidden Brain - Episode 62: On The Knife's Edge

Episode Date: February 21, 2017

What would drive someone to take another person's life? When researchers at the University of Chicago asked that question, the answer was a laundry list of slights: a stolen jacket, or a carelessly lobbed insult. It made them wonder whether crime rates could be driven down by teaching young men to pause, take a deep breath, and think before they act. We'll go inside a program that teaches Chicago teens to do just that, and explore the research on whether this approach actually works.

The fight was over a pair of Gymshoes. At night, on the south side of Chicago, and this is what came of it. One teenager faces years in prison. Another, a boy of just 15, is dead. The incident might not have even made the news, except the victim was the grandson of a long-saving congressman. At a press conference, that congressman, Danny Davis, did something unusual. He grieved, not just for his own grandson, but for his grandson's killer. I grieve for my family. I grieve for the young man who pulled the trigger. I grieve for his family, his parents, his friends, some of whom will never see him again. It is so unfortunate when these tragedies continue to occur and re-occur, and somehow or another,

our society has not been able to find and exact the answers and solutions. The solutions we do have often produce more disputes than results. Conservatives call for harsher sentencing and better policing. Liberals want gun control and more social service programs. One thing's clear, even as we argue, people are dying. In 2016, Chicago had the highest number of killings in two decades, 762 people were murdered. What can be done? Well one community group has an unusual idea. It believes perhaps violence can be stopped with a breath, a few moments, and a tiny tweak to the way we think. Very, very often, if they could only take back five minutes of their life, a lot of these kids, a lot of the people that are locked up would have a very different life.

Thinking our way out of crime, this week on Hidden Brain. Our story begins with another death on the south side of Chicago. One night in the fall of 2007, Amadou Sis, a young PhD student from Senegal, was walking home after a gathering on the University of Chicago campus. He was confronted by a stranger, 17-year-old Demetrius Warren. Warren stuck a stolen 22-calibre handgun in Sissis chest and tried to take his water bottle and backpack. And I don't think anyone knows exactly what happened. Maybe Amadoucis didn't let

go of his backpack or his water bottle quite quickly enough and then Demetrius Warren pulled the trigger and shot him basically at point blank range in the chest and killed him. This is Jens Ludwig. He's an economist at the University of Chicago, focusing on social policy and crime. He says the murder of Amidu Siss was a very definition of senseless. If they thought about it for even one second, it is very hard to imagine that anyone would think that it was a good idea to shoot someone at point blank

range in exchange for a book bag and a water bottle that would surely have a resale value of not more than a couple bucks at best. If they thought about it for even one second, it turns out many motors in Chicago occur because someone didn't stop for that one second. We went to the medical examiner's office and we just reviewed quite a number of case files in which young men had been murdered. Harold Pollack is a public health researcher who works with the end of the University of Chicago Crime Lab.

Not long after the killing of Amidu Cis, Harold decided to figure out what was behind the many homicides in the city. And so many of these incidents, you just read the story, you know, medical examiners report is typically, you know, pretty brief. You know, there would be, you would get a lot of details about what happened to the physical body, but usually there would be, you-paragraph report about what happened. And many of these cases you would just read it and say, wow, I just can't believe that someone ended up dead. And there was nothing at stake here that was anywhere near the stakes of a human life. Where most people might imagine that killings occur because of a gang hit or cold-blooded revenge or premeditated murder, the records reveal the laundry lists

of slights, someone stepped on someone else's shoe or stole a coat or lobbed an insult, and from that tiny spark, things escalated into violence and murder. Harold is interviewed incarcerated young men who tell him that regret comes almost as fast as anger. The kid who committed the homicide, five minutes later, himself, he's thinking about, wow, this was over a jacket. You know, very, very often, you know, if they could only take back, you know, five minutes of their life, a lot of these kids, a lot of the people

that are locked up would have a very different life. As Jens and Harold puzzled over how minor incidents could spiral out of control, they realized they were asking a question that was fundamentally psychological. Why do people do irrational things? Why do people act so unthinkingly? And then they had a flash of insight. Teenage boys on the south and west sides of Chicago are not the only ones who act without thinking. We all do it.

Psychologists even have a term for this behavior. Automaticity. A lot of our thinking that we do in life is very scripted and is very automatic. And we couldn't go through life if we didn't have very quick reactions to things that we don't give a lot of thought to, partly because it just takes too much time. If someone gets in my face right away and there's an immediate threat to my safety, I have to respond automatically

if I sort of stop and conduct a little mental oj trial before I respond, that's not going to be very functional for me. In other words, we often act almost unconsciously. Our door is in front of us and we open it. We don't think how do I open this door? We just do it. If someone hits us, we might also, just as fast, hit back. Harold remembers an incident that occurred to him. He was an aburga king and someone else in line shoved him. Harold's not a fighter, but for a moment he felt a primal urge to lash out.

I felt that burning sensation and then I kind of reminded myself that I'm a nerdy middle-aged professor and I should just throw my tray away and move on, but it was, you know, I thought about it. And I think if I were, if the 17-year-old me might well have ended up, you know, with the gash in his head. Harold didn't get into a fight because before he acted, he thought for one second about the situation and the consequences. Could it be Harold and Jens Wunderd that this simple step, think before you act, could be a solution to violent crime in Chicago? A lot of the violence problem, at least this was our hypothesis doing the study.

A lot of the violence problem on the streets of Chicago is not necessarily driven by bad people. It results from bad decisions that people make in the moment. And our hypothesis was if we could identify some promising intervention that could help people avoid some of these common kind of judgment and decision-making errors, that that might be helpful in producing the violence problem. Researchers have spent years studying ways to get people to behave less automatically, to change the scripts in their head. One technique that's often used is called CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. The idea is to develop new scripts and new habits to address problems.

An alcoholic, for example, might need to practice taking a different route home from work, a route that doesn't go by their favourite bar. Someone with anger problems might need to practice counting to 10 before responding. A person prone to depression might need to talk to themselves about how feelings of sadness can be transient. Changing the way we behave can change the way we think, and changing the way we think can change our lives. Mostly, this kind of therapy takes place one-on-one with a trained expert.

How do you do this on a large scale with thousands of kids from some of the poorest and most violent neighborhoods in Chicago? You can't bring them all in for one-on-one psychotherapy. As it turned out, Yens and Harold found a local group called Youth Guidance that was already trying something similar. It was offering kids a kind of low-budget psychotherapy within their neighborhood schools. There was nothing fancy about the program. Kids checked in with counselors regularly, talked about issues, tried to develop new habits.

Jens and Harold wanted to find out if this low budget effort might be effective on a mass scale in combating crime. They wanted to test the program rigorously. They wanted to conduct a randomized controlled study the same way it's done in medicine. They didn't want to be misled by their hopes and intuitions. We basically have a bunch of well-intentioned city and state governments and a bunch of well-intentioned

NGOs out there, innovating and trying lots and lots of different things over time, but not doing that in a way where we can actually rigorously study and evaluate which things are working. And without good feedback about which of our innovations are actually helpful. It's very hard to move in the right direction. Performing a randomized controlled study in the real world is very difficult, but Harold and Yens teamed up with Youth Guidance to study the program.

Now, the specific program is called BAM, short for becoming a man. The researchers compiled a list of young men living in some of the most dangerous parts of Chicago. There were thousands of teenagers to choose from. We basically flipped the coin to decide which of the kids would get offered the program and which wouldn't. Before I tell you what they found, I want to take you into the program so you can see

how it works. BAM brings together young men who are barely scraping by, most have a de-average. Nearly 40% have been arrested. Their chances of dropping out of school and ending up in prison are extremely high. And they live in neighborhoods like West Garfield Park. It has the highest rate of violence crime in crime-ridden Chicago. In just one random 30-day period recently, there were 34 robberies in West Garfield Park, 18 batteries, 15 assaults, 6 sexual assaults, and one homicide. This is the home of the BAM program at Orhyschool. Stay with us. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Or high school feels like a place that was

built on big dreams. It was designed in the early 1970s by the firm of the legendary architect Mies van der Rohe. It's huge, but interconnecting clusters were supposed to make it less overwhelming for the 2000 students expected to attend. Maybe it worked at first, but that dream school no longer exists. Or is now struggling. Vast sections said empty. Enrollment is dwindled as kids flee to charter schools. The empty hallways echo. A police cruiser idles outside.

Kids walk through a metal detector to enter school. In one classroom, Larry Pots, a BAM counselor, waits for students to arrive. Larry thinks of his job as a calling. I'm bored into this. I mean, I've been in this community for 45 years. I used to be a police officer in this community. And there's nothing for me to gain, but to help reach every kid. Larry says part of what motivates him now is what he saw as a cop when he could look

into the lives of the people around him. There's a lot of mental illness in the families. When you would make domestic calls, you would see mental illnesses in the homes. You would see a lot of addictions. You would see people going to jail and being torn apart without having a mother and father. You would see a lot of poverty. People not having jobs, not having skills,

not being able to work and take care of their families. But one of the worst things that I've seen is that when people do make mistakes, there's no way to rewrite that mistake. So that's what Larry's doing now, trying to keep kids from making those mistakes, they won't be able to correct. Each week, 11 young men come in for a counseling session that he helps to lead.

Shortly after noon, the young man file in, and then it's time for a check-in. The sessions always begin with this check-in, a brief summary of what's going on in everyone's life. People have to talk about how they feel physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. The young men give raw and honest answers. My name is Shavante, and I'm checking in physically. I'm feeling good.

I'm checking in my name, James. Physically, physically, I'm tired. Didn't get that much sleep last night carrying boxes all night. It's election, I've been thinking about this math test on Friday, I've been studying the hard to push my seat up to a B and eat a better dent to A, because I know Ducca bring my grade up a lot. The check-in takes a lot of time and I find myself glancing at my watch, but then I realize

these are kids without a lot of emotional support in their lives. Larry says they need space to talk, to be heard, and most of all, to feel they're not alone, that someone is listening. Someone has their back. That's one of the things that we really value here in our groups is again the trust of people. Teachers come to the school all the time, principals come to the school all the time. Prince always come to the school all the time

and they're gone. And the kids know this and they have no one that can depend on every day. After the check-in, the young men usually tell stories, role play, and then do various exercises. On this day, they do a trust walk where one student closes his eyes and is led around various obstacles in the classroom

by a partner. I noticed something as the students are walking around the classroom. The young men who have their eyes closed start out looking tense, but then they relax. All they have to do is focus on what their friend is telling them. Their partners meanwhile focus on what their friend is telling them. Go here, go here, go here. Their partners, meanwhile, focus on protecting them. For a brief moment, they're not looking out for themselves, but for someone else. It's a forced kind of intimacy, but very quickly, it becomes real.

When it's over, there's a real happiness in the air and a sense of pride. It's all good, because it's over, there's a real happiness in the air and a sense of pride. It felt good because I was doing it, but see, I visualized the room before I did it. So I already knew what I was at. I felt something like I'm in my ass. So I knew I was at a window, I smelled the pizza, I knew I was over here. Another bad exercise is the fifth. Students again are divided into pairs. One of them is given a ball. The other is told he has 30 seconds to go get the ball. Almost always the second student tries to wrestle the ball away. When times up a counselor asks,

did you ever consider they might have been an easier way? What about just asking for the ball? What about just asking for the ball? On one level, these exercises seem almost hokey. They're teaching age-old lessons. Trust your friends, look out for each other, think before acting. But these are lessons we all forget. We all need reminding, especially maybe if we happen to be 17, to slow down. The band program tries hard not to be preachy and tell the young men what to do. It's mostly trying to show them that they have options.

If we tell these kids you're never fight, that's just so unrealistic for the world in which they live. What we have to help them with is the idea, you know, you may have to fight sometimes. But what else you got in the toolkit and, you know, which tool do you reach for first? How are a lays out a dilemma that a young man at or might face? Well, if you're a 17-year-old kid and you have a really nice jacket and you're walking home from school with it, you can't be the kind of kid that other kids think they can just come and take your jacket. You have to be tough. And so there's a very practical need that they have to deter the predations of other people around them.

How do you avoid fights without communicating weakness? One of the students in the band program says he faces this dilemma all the time. I'm on an incontrary, physically I'm happy tense, pons waiting. You know, because I'm already a... Cantrell and I stepped outside so he could tell me his story. He's been in and out of trouble. For a while, he was sent to a residential behavioral health program to help him get his anger on the control. Even there, Cantrell says, he sometimes lost it.

I had a roommate, and he was like, he was real nice. He used to pee on the toilet seat and they want to clean it off. So I guess he had anger too and then I told him about it so he kept doing it. So then we used to argue fighting not just blank out and just start fighting and stuff like that. And then every time that happens I never think about the consequences. Cantrell strikes me as a curious mixture of toughness and vulnerability. He slender and stares at the ground a lot, but there is a coil inside him. That coil can unspring in an instant. Like the time some kids try to steal his jacket outside school.

To Cantrell it was more than just about the jacket. It was a sign of disrespect. The other kids were saying, you're a punk, we can push you around. To me, like as a man, all I was, it's not a good thing to say, but I look at myself like a man as pride, my prideful and myself, and I feel like they downgraded my pride and they respected me. and myself, and I feel like they downgraded my pride and they respected me. When they did that to me, and they heard my pride real bad, and to like, give, like, earn my pride back and feel back honored, I want to teach them a lesson. Cantrell smoldered all night about the incident.

The next day at school, he attacked a student he thought was part of the group that had jumped him. And I was mad, so I just ran into him, hit him in his face like I had him at least like three times, now buses look. It turned out Cantrell got it wrong. The student he attacked hadn't been involved. He realized this was the kind of behavior he needed to change. He needed to make better decisions, to slow down, to think. a decision to slow down, to think. Cantrell told me his anger surged when he recently saw a guy talking to his girlfriend. Again, he saw it as disrespect. In his mind, the other student was saying, you aren't man enough to keep your girl.

But instead of punching the other student as he had wanted to do, Cantrell went up and talked to him. The other student said he had no interest in Cantrell's girlfriend. They were just chatting. That was it. All of a sudden, something that could have ended in blows, ended with a nod. I got to break myself down. I know it gets me, but in my man, I got to think of the consequence

I thought I'd do something. I think far ahead. When I say goodbye to Cantrell, I feel uneasy. I have the sense he's on a knife edge. I can see him graduating and doing well in a couple of years, but I can also see him getting into trouble. And that brings us back to Jens Ludwig and Harold Pollack, the researchers who were studying the effectiveness of the BAM program. What they found precisely mirrors what I saw in Cantrell. Does BAM work? Will it keep young men like Cantrell out of jail? Well, the answer is yes and no. Let's start with the good news. Remember the idea of controlling automatic behavior? Well, it's as herald that works. When kids are participating in BAM, they're responding less automatically to dangerous situations.

In fact, the results of the control study of BAM showed that it worked jaw-droppingly well. While students were in BAM, arrest rates plummeted by 44%. Here's Yens. I fell off my chair when I saw the initial set of results, indicating that the arrest rates for kids in the becoming a man program were 44% lower than the non-participants.

These are massive reductions in violent crime arrests. Yens calls the results stunning, almost miraculous. And there was more good news. Bam even seemed to help with school. Kids were more likely to come to school. They were more likely to be enrolled at the end of the school year. There's less likely to have dropped out. And they are less likely to fail their classes. Jens and Harold can now say with certainty that the BAM program works. It's a huge success for young men without many good options. But sadly, there is a catch.

The reduction in violence doesn't stick once young men lack control are done with school and done with BAM. They are offending at the same rates as the control group after the program is over. So if I look at there are rest rates in the year after they're done with the program, and I compare their rest rates with kids in the control group in the same year after the program is over, I really don't see differences there. Harold and Jens don't know why what's taught in BAM doesn't last once the program ends,

but it actually makes sense. All of us need reminders of advice we've gotten many times in the past. Take a breath, look at things in perspective, talk to a friend if you're feeling down. Yen says it's hard to change behavior, especially for kids who've led traumatic lives. But he still feels the program offers more reason to be optimistic than pessimistic. I'm an economist by training and the way that I think about whether a social program is worth doing or not is I think about what the program costs and then I think about what it does to help kids and society as a whole. And whether the value of the social impact is enough to justify the program cost, and a 44%

reduction in violence involvement for at-risk kids for one year, generates benefits to society that easily outweigh the program costs. So we've estimated that the benefit cost ratio might be as high as 31 for this inter-rengeon. And there are tangible benefits to the young men who stay crime-free even if it's just for a year. If I have a year where I have fewer offenses then even if I commit offenses after that it's still you know it's accumulating into a less destructive record for me if people are talking about does this person need to be held in a secure facility or something like that. Of course when you've met

young men like Cantrell on the knife edge, you want more for them. A less destructive criminal record isn't enough. These scenes haven't failed in any irreparable way as yet. I see it like this. A scientific study has found that you can build a new kind of bridge, one that is good and strong. It could

take these young men to a successful adulthood. But that bridge is only halfway done. At the end of every bam session at Orhai School, the students have to check out to say one word that is on their minds. When I hear those words, I want that bridge completed. This week's show was produced by Jenny Schmidt and edited by Tara Boyle. Our staff includes Maggie Penman, René Clarre, Reyna Cohen and Chloe Connelly. We had original music this week from Rampteen, Arab Louis. Our Ranzang hero today is Alpha Drabo. Alpha is the IT specialist for our department and he's a voice of reassurance when our computers inexplicably behave like computers. Thank you Alpha for sharing your

tech savvy and your kindness. For more Hidden Brain, follow us on Facebook and Twitter and listen for my stories on your local public radio station. If you liked this episode, please tell one friend who doesn't know about Hidden Brain about our show. Tell us on social media whom you've tapped. We're always looking for new people to find our show. I'm Shankar Vedantum and this is NPR. Okay. Trust in our mouth. Happy with that amount.

Awesome. And with that amount. We're here to get out of here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. you