* Sun-Times…

Crime and violence cost Chicago billions each year: Lost lives and hospital costs for victims; lost tax revenue from falling property values and residents leaving the city; economic growth when businesses choose to locate someplace safer.

And the city spends a lot on crime fighting. The Chicago Police Department annual budget is just under $2 billion. Cook County budgets $1.4 billion for the Sheriff’s department, jail, and criminal court system. The state prison system, which gets nearly half its inmates from Cook County, costs another $1.5 billion.

The cost to address this ain’t a huge amount when looked at in the broader context…

A report by the privately funded anti-violence program Chicago CRED estimates the city would have to spend $405 million per year for five years — in addition to what it currently spends — to reduce crime to the levels of big city peers New York or Los Angeles.

In a speech to the City Club of Chicago last month, University of Chicago Crime Lab Director Jens Ludwig suggested an even higher number: $1 billion per year for violence prevention spending and increased policing, to reduce crime in Chicago by 50%. […]

CRED estimates that combined [2022] funding from foundations, the city, state and federal government for violence prevention programs will total $184 million — double the spending in 2021, and roughly what CRED estimates needs to go to anti-violence spending annually.

But not all of that money will be well-spent, just like much of the money that’s currently spent on the “traditional” system.

* Sun-Times editorial…

Three years ago, we were hopeful about the early success of READI Chicago, a relatively new anti-violence outreach program that targets high-risk men on the South and West sides. […]

The study of READI, which stands for Rapid Employment and Development Initiative, used what’s considered the “gold standard” for scientific research: a randomized controlled trial that compared men who enrolled in the program with a control group of men who were turned away.

The U of C study is the first of its kind to evaluate a large group with the same statistical rigor and method used to evaluate medical treatments.

Altogether, 2,500 men were tracked. The findings were striking.

The men enrolled in the 18-month READI course were two-thirds less likely to be arrested for a violent crime and nearly 20% less likely to be shot compared with the men who weren’t taking part in the program.

The men who were recruited by outreach workers — rather than community members or through other means — showed even more promise: Their arrests dropped by almost 80% and they were nearly 50% less likely to be shot.

Those statistics are especially noteworthy, given that a third of the men in READI had been shot at before they joined the program and racked up an average of 17 arrests.

* How it works…

The level of [Chicago] violence stunned Sylvester, a 36-year-old Chicago native, when he returned to to the city in 2020 after serving a 13-year prison sentence. He figured he’d soon be in the middle of combat in his West Side neighborhood. With few job prospects and a rap sheet that stretched back to his early teens, Sylvester — who asked to be identified only by his first name — expected he’d hit up old gang contacts to get back into selling drugs to make ends meet. Instead, a friend recruited him for READI.

For 18 months, Sylvester could get paid $15 an hour to participate in daily job training and counseling sessions, including cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. The five one-hour CBT sessions each week helped rewire his thought processes and examine “risky thoughts,” he said, unwinding the reflexes his years on the street had built up.

Sylvester was drawn in by the wages, but the CBT is what kept him coming back. […]

The key components of READI’s program — cognitive behavioral therapy, a type of counseling focused on re-ordering participants’ thought patterns, had proved effective with school-age children and teens — and, in Blattman’s case, former child soldiers in Liberia. Studies had also long correlated employment, a benefit of READI’s job and educational training, to declines in criminal behavior.

But there were few programs that featured both those interventions at the same time, and most target younger men and teens who were not as deeply embroiled in urban violence, Blattman said. READI was designed to target an older demographic — the average age of homicide victims in Chicago is 27 — and enroll them in a program that would pay them to attend the daily therapy and job training, supported by “relentless engagement” from staff.

“CBT and employment are different medicine for the same people … interrupting a feud is like first aid or the emergency room, where you’re patching things up in an emergency,” Blattman said. “READI is like the vaccine. Before you go shoot someone, we’re going to equip you with the skills to keep you from ever getting in that situation.”

Violence interruption is a stopgap, crisis-based measure. Much-needed, but not the answer in and of itself. This READI program looks like outpatient rehab, and it appears to be working. Maybe the concept could be expanded to the incarcerated as well.

…Adding… WBEZ…

Pritzker’s administration set aside more than $50 million from the COVID stimulus funds for violence prevention in the budget that passed last year. The funding, to be administered through the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, offered a unique opportunity to flood resources into neighborhoods impacted by violence. But with the fiscal year almost over, the state has spent only $56,764, one-tenth of 1% of the money, as Illinois experiences its worst gun violence in decades. […]

Leo Smith, policy director for the anti-violence organization Chicago CRED, said the Illinois residents should actually be excited about the amount of planning and coordination between government agencies happening around the ARPA money.

“We’re seeing a major shift from funding individual programs to investing in a comprehensive public health system for violence intervention,” Smith said. “Almost anyone who is helping out with that shift is frustrated with the speed of it, but I think people are also encouraged by how deliberate it is.”

Smith said this is a critical time for community-based violence prevention in Illinois. Support has been building in the state for spending taxpayer money on non-policing solutions to gun violence. He worries if they rushed out these ARPA dollars, without the right amount of planning and without making sure the small groups could meet the stringent reporting requirements, it could make it harder to get public funding once the ARPA money runs out.

That last comment by Smith is very true. You can throw tons more money at enforcement and no mainstream media outlet will bat an eye. But give a few dollars to a small anti-violence group which can’t justify its expenses and all heck breaks loose.