This post is part of a three part-series based on Salzburg Global’s “Global Innovations on Youth Violence, Safety, and Justice Program.” Part one. Part three.
Politicians and policymakers look to solve problems more broadly than police officers. Particularly when allocating resources or considering new laws, issues tend to fall in certain baskets.
Crime seems straightforward: a violation of norms, a black and white issue of right versus wrong. Since childhood, most Americans are taught good versus evil in some form; be it through religious ideas like sin or heroes and villains. Reality isn’t this simple or straightforward, particularly when dealing with young people who act out impulsively in ways that may put others in danger.
Crime is a hot button issue, in part because crime victimization plays on some of the basest instincts humans possess: fear and retribution. Add social biases like race or nationality—which may affect other aspects of their lives in access to basic services, through segregation or other means—and policymakers have a recipe for politically popular vindictiveness as crime-fighting mechanism. Unfortunately, not only do tough-on-crime policies usually fail, they can make problems worse, especially for young people at the highest risk.
Academics know this because, across many disciplines, researchers have studied the adolescent brain, various interdictions to anti-social behavior, and the effects of incarceration and, lo and behold, relying too much on incarceration is a long-time loser for both young offenders and society at large. Indeed, some research indicates that the earlier a person has contact with the justice system, the more likely they are to reoffend.
Academics, of course, don’t implement policy: criminal or otherwise. Policy analysts and researchers can develop and present evidence, but they need audience who want they information they present. Even when the evidence is rather one-sided, researchers must overcome many obstacles to get their research into practice.
In the United Kingdom, the Home Office has established What Works Centers that compile and evaluate the best research in different policy areas including education, housing, and violence reduction. Salzburg Global Fellow Dr. Laura Knight runs the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) Toolkit, a government-supported program to reduce youth violence, given a mandate and a £200 million budget to halve juvenile violence—specifically knife crime—within ten years.
The YEF Toolkit runs systematic reviews of the available research evidence, then summarizes and grades it on several metrics including research rigor, cost, and how confident they are a given intervention would reduce violence among young people. As Knight explained, “Something that’s based on a higher number of studies is going to be more reliable than ratings based on a lower number of studies. And we also look at essentially the quality of that review: how confident can we be that no bias that has crept into that process.”
As of January, the Toolkit had reviewed 37 different approaches to youth violence prevention. They were able to apply their findings in tandem with violence reduction units that had been established in 20 of the most at-need areas across England and Wales. Knight told me:
“When we were set up and started summarizing the effectiveness of various approaches, the Home Office mandated that those violence reduction units spend at least 30 percent of their budgets on approaches to violence prevention that are YEF rated as on average having a high impact. So, it immediately meant that across England and Wales, the areas that have the highest amounts of violence were looking at our evidence for what they should be funding, what interventions they should be delivering, so our research was having direct policy impact from day one. So, from there, we’ve built up those relationship and most of them are spending well over 50 percent of their budgets on things that we’ve got good evidence for: a built-in evidence-to-practice pathway.”
One of the great ironies is that the United States provides a lot of the academic research that YEF uses in its recommendations to British policymakers, but America lacks the political will to implement anything like what the U.K. is doing. While some of the reluctance can be attributed to both the immense size of the United States and also its highly decentralized criminal justice and welfare systems, the full retreat from criminal justice reform on the American right-of-center has made any national effort a pipe dream for the near future. Even more troubling, the Trump administration’s haphazard cancellation of federal funding for research using alleged “DEI” principles such as racial disparities will almost certainly impair effective crime prevention research for no good reason.
Nevertheless, state and local officials—as well as nations around the world—should look to the What Works Centers as models for translating field work into best practices not only for youth safety, but in any policy area that requires institutional intervention in the lives of the most vulnerable in society.
Of course, with any government or public policy program, implementation problems remain. Institutions and politicians have preconceptions and guiding assumptions that will influence what ideas are most appealing to them, whether or not they have an evidence base to support them. The flip side of that is even the best research can show something that can work; it cannot predict whether something will work in an area or country that has different underlying problems. Policymakers crave replicability and simple fixes, but important policy decisions are rarely so neatly available.
That said, as we wrapped up our conversation, Dr. Knight told me about what may be a breakthrough for reducing youth violence in the future: getting better food to young people who need it. She said, “I was surprised about the level of impact on nutrition intervention. This is a hugely important issue and potentially a very low cost approach that could be highly impactful, similar to reducing the use of lead and the impact that had on reducing aggression and violence. We only learned that retrospectively; I think nutrition is the next lead.”
Of course, time will tell whether policymakers here and elsewhere follow where the research takes them. “Again,” Knight said, “it comes back to who is willing to take some responsibility and put some money into it.”