How Do Summer Youth Employment Programs Improve Criminal Justice Outcomes, and for Whom?

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 600-628
Author(s):  
Alicia Sasser Modestino
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Youth Employment ◽  
Employment Programs

Learning From Youth: Using Positive Outcomes to Evaluate Summer Youth Employment Programs

2021 ◽  
pp. 074355842110432
Author(s):  
Jordan Greene ◽  
Kristin Seefeldt
Keyword(s):  
Youth Development ◽  
Transition To Adulthood ◽  
Youth Employment ◽  
Deficit Thinking ◽  
Knowledge Resources ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Evaluation Strategies ◽  
Washtenaw County ◽  
Employment Programs ◽  
Crime Risk

Summer Youth Employment Programs (SYEPs) help connect youth to opportunities for career exploration, skill development, and mentorship. Despite heightened investment in SYEPs, research regarding positive impacts is limited. Most of the common SYEP evaluation strategies are rooted in deficit thinking and focus on outcomes such as reducing violent crime, risk behaviors, gaps in unemployment, and increasing educational attainment. Despite recent shifts toward approaches that acknowledge structural oppression in adolescent research more broadly, evaluations of SYEPs often perpetuate a discourse of deficiency about marginalized communities by emphasizing disparities without acknowledging the systemic forces that create them. In this article, we utilize the Five Cs of Positive Youth Development to present an alternative set of outcomes identified from focus groups and surveys with youth ages 16 to 24 who participated in SummerWorks, a 10-week SYEP located in Washtenaw County, Michigan. Specifically, we find that SYEPs may help youth make the transition to adulthood, build community and increase their social capital, and access knowledge, resources, and opportunities. Through this approach, we hope to expand the literature on the impacts of SYEPs and encourage antiracist evaluation strategies that build on these findings and challenge deficit thinking.

scholarly journals Do Youth Employment Programs Work? Evidence from the New Deal

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Aizer ◽  
Shari Eli ◽  
Adriana Lleras-Muney ◽  
Keyoung Lee
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Youth Employment ◽  
Employment Programs ◽  
The New Deal

The Effects of Youth Employment: Evidence from New York City Lotteries *

2015 ◽  
Vol 131 (1) ◽  
pp. 423-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Gelber ◽  
Adam Isen ◽  
Judd B. Kessler
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Work Experience ◽  
New York State ◽  
The United States ◽  
Youth Employment ◽  
Program Participation ◽  
Employment Program ◽  
Employment Programs

Abstract Programs to encourage labor market activity among youth, including public employment programs and wage subsidies like the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, can be supported by three broad rationales. They may (i) provide contemporaneous income support to participants; (ii) encourage work experience that improves future employment and/or educational outcomes of participants; and/or (iii) keep participants “out of trouble.” We study randomized lotteries for access to the New York City (NYC) Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP), the largest summer youth employment program in the United States, by merging SYEP administrative data on 294,100 lottery participants to IRS data on the universe of U.S. tax records; to New York State administrative incarceration data; and to NYC administrative cause of death data. In assessing the three rationales, we find that (i) SYEP participation causes average earnings and the probability of employment to increase in the year of program participation, with modest contemporaneous crowdout of other earnings and employment; (ii) SYEP participation causes a modest decrease in average earnings for three years following the program and has no impact on college enrollment; and (iii) SYEP participation decreases the probability of incarceration and decreases the probability of mortality, which has important and potentially pivotal implications for analyzing the net benefits of the program.

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