A summer program that provides jobs, therapy, and mentoring for black teenage boys and young men, two-thirds of them with prior arrests,
helped reduce arrests for violent crime by 51 percent among the young men in the program, a University of Chicago study concluded. This did not come as a giant shock to community activists:
“I hope they didn’t pay a lot of money because we’ve been saying this forever,” said the Rev. Michael Pfleger, who has used recreation, counseling and jobs as antidotes to gang violence in St. Sabina’s Auburn-Gresham neighborhood.
“There’s never been a doubt in my mind that a major solution to ending this violence is jobs, education, opportunities. We always knew it in the street,” he said. “Now that we know it from a university study, let’s do it. Let’s have a country that puts its focus and its attention on jobs and education.”
Yes, if you give people jobs and support learning the skills needed to keep those jobs, they are less likely to commit crimes, more likely to thrive. I bet a study comparing people's responses to low-wage jobs with abusive bosses versus a living wage and being treated with respect would also find that people with good jobs have better outcomes, too. After all, if you send people the message that they will never get ahead, why would they try? But that's the message for too many in the United States; while some small programs may fund jobs and training, for most, austerity is the policy felt most strongly.