Hidden Brain - On The Knife's Edge

Episode Date: January 7, 2020

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. In this 2017 episode, we go inside a program that teaches Chicago teens to do just that. We also explore what research has found about whether this approach actually works.

Hey there Shankar here. A few weeks ago we were finishing up an episode called In the Heat of the Moment. It's about hot and cold emotional states and how certain situations can cause us to become strangers to ourselves. If you haven't heard it yet, check it out. We're really proud of it. Working on it also got us thinking about another episode we did a few years ago. It's about teenagers in Chicago and a program that tries to keep kids from acting in anger, from making mistakes that could affect the course of their lives. In other words, it's trying to help kids pull back from the brink when they're in a hot state. We thought that episode was worth another listen, so we're bringing it to you today. Hope you enjoy it.

The fight was over a pair of gym shoes. 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-serving 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 grieved 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. So what can be done? One community group has an unusual idea. It believes that perhaps violence can be stopped

with a breath of few moments and a tiny tweak to the way we think. Very, very often, you know, 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 caliber handgun in CISIS 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 sis 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 murders 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 Siss, 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 a two 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. When 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. 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, 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.

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 onj trial

before I respond, that's not gonna be very functional for me. In other words, we often act almost unconsciously. A 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. How old are members of an incident that occurred to him. He was in a burger 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. And 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. How did it 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 wondered 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 favorite 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. They 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 one of the highest rates of violent crime in Chicago. This is the home of the BAM program at Orr High School. 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 Wanderow. 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 it's now struggling. Vast sections sit 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 Parts, 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. It saw 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 having, 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 men file in, and then it's time for a check-it. 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 Chavante, and I'm checking in physically. I'm feeling good. All right, I'm checking in. My name is James. Physically, physically, I'm tired.

I 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 hard to push my seat up to a B and eat it better than to A, because I know Ducca will 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. It's again the trust of people. Teachers come to the school all the time. Principal's come to the school all the time and they're gone. And the the time, and they're gone. And the kids know this, and they have no one they 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 let around various obstacles in the classroom by a partner. Hold on, we're gonna wait. We got a little bit of traffic ahead of us.

Okay, we're gonna turn this way. 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. Go here, go here, go here. 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 so good, I was born doing it, but see, I visualized the room before I did it. So I already knew what I was at. I felt the sunlight on my ass. So I knew I was bad in winter.

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 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?

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 BAM 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 And which tool do you reach for first?

How it 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 BAM program

says he faces this dilemma all the time. I'm not in control, physically I'm happy, but the tense, pons waiting, you know, because I'm already old. Can Tron 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 angered too and then I told him by the sub and then 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 end up thinking 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...it's not a good thing to say, but I look at myself like a man

as my prideful 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, earned my pride back, and feel back honored, I want to teach them a lesson. Cantral Smolder 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 in these like three times, and I had 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. 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 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.

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 says Harold, 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 arrest rates. 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. Yens 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 their arrest rates in the year after they're done with the program, and I compare their arrest 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 Yens 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 Oroh High 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. Faith, and with that I'm out. Session, with that I'm out. Excited, excellent. Fantastic, you can come out. Love, and with that I'm out. I love it. Thank you.

Thank you. You know what I mean? Let it go. You know what I mean? You know what I mean? I'll tell you what I mean. This week's show was produced by Jenny Schmidt and edited by Tara Boyer. Our staff includes Rainer Cohen, Laura Correll, Parts Shah and Thomas Liu.

We had original music this week from Romteen Arableui. Our run song hero today is Alpha Drabo. Alpha was an IT specialist at NPR until not long ago, and he was 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, you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter. 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. I'm Shankar Vedantum, and this is NPR. Hey, trust in our mouth. Happy with that amount. Awesome. And with that amount. That's very funny. Really, guys, we got so many.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.