Matthew Wilson, the associate director for economic and workforce development at UIC’s Great Cities Institute, discusses a new UIC study that reveals how crime goes up when youth unemployment spikes on WTTW News.
“There’s been a lot of evaluations of summer youth employment programs and very robust research designs that have tried to get towards causation,” said Matthew Wilson, associate director for economic and workforce development at UIC’s Great Cities Institute. “And they’ve found that when program participants are working and they’re a part of programs that provide their mentors and counseling, that crime actually drops 50%. If they’re not engaged in those types of programs, there actually is no more effect of that program. … So there’s, I think, a very strong correlation. But I think even we can say from these types of research designs that there actually is a cause of having a job and being enrolled in these types of programs and them reducing crime.”
Read the Full Article on WTTW News.
