Arrests for violence committed by disadvantaged urban adolescents decrease by as much as 43 percent when the young people have summer jobs, according to new research from the University of Pennsylvania.

The study was conducted by Sara Heller, an assistant professor of criminology in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences.

While completing her Ph.D. in public policy at the University of Chicago, Heller conducted a randomized controlled trial involving 1,634 adolescents from violent neighborhoods in Chicago, and concluded that youth who were offered 25 hours of employment each week during the summer saw fewer arrests for violent crimes over the course of 16 months.

The study, published in Science, examined young people who applied to a seasonal work program, Chicago’s One Summer Plus. It employs young people in nonprofit and government jobs, such as camp counselors, community garden workers and office assistants for an alderman, paying them the minimum wage and pairing adult mentors with small groups to teach young people how to be successful employees.

In an analysis of administrative arrest records longer than a year after the One Summer Plus program concluded, Heller found that students who were offered the program were 43 percent less likely to be arrested for a violent crime, but not necessarily other types of crimes, when compared to the control group.

“People often ask whether the violence drop is only because youth were busier over the summer. The answer turns out to be no; the decline in violent crime occurred largely after the One Summer Plus program ended, meaning that just eight weeks of programming changed their future behavior as well,” Heller said.

Designed to teach youth to understand and manage their emotions and behavior, social-emotional learning was also a part of the program for some participants. Heller noted that students who spent all their time in a job showed roughly similar declines in violence as those who spent some of that time in social-emotional learning, implying that both jobs and social-emotional learning can lower levels of crime.

Heller said this finding suggests that summer employment has the potential to teach youth some of the same skills as social-emotional learning: to process social information, manage emotions and handle conflict successfully. She said these are all processes that are central to violent incidents.

The study’s findings demonstrate how targeted, low-cost policies and work-related programs can have a substantial impact on complex problems like urban youth violence.

This project was supported by the U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. Department  of Justice.