A study gave cash and therapy to men at risk of criminal behavior. Ten years later, the results are in.     Liberia found a stunning effective way to reduce violent crimes. Now the US is trying a similar experiment. Research by Chris Blattman, Margaret Sheridan, Julian Jamison, and Sebastian Chaskel, provides experimental evidence that offering at-risk men a few weeks of behavioral therapy plus a bit of cash reduces the future risk of crime and violence, even 10 years after the intervention.                          We desperately need new solutions to the problem of violence. Therapy plus cash was a surprisingly successful combo. The 999 Liberian men were split into four groups. Some received CBT-control based therapy), while others got $200 in cash. Another group got the CBT, plus the cash, and finally, there was a control group that got neither. A month after the intervention,  both the therapy group and the therapy-plus-cash-group were showing positive results. A year after the intervention, the positive effects on those who got therapy alone had faded a bit, but those who got therapy plus cash were still showing huge impacts:  Crime and violence were down about 50 percent. Experts Blattman surveyed predicted that the effects would steeply diminish over the years, as they do in many interventions. So it was a great surprise when, ten years later, he tracked down the original men from the study and reevaluated them. Amazingly, crime and violence were still down by about 50% in the therapy plus cash group. Blattman estimates that there were 338 fewer crimes per participant over 10 years. Given that it had cost just $530.00 per participant to implement the program, that works out to $1.50 per crime avoided. Also, of the 999 men initially recruited into the study, 103 had died by the time of the 10 year follow-up. By interviewing friends and relatives of each participant who died, the authors also determined the cause of death. They identified only 26 violent deaths, upending the mainstream approach to crime:  Inspired by the program in Liberia, Chicago had been implementing a simular but more intensive program called READI. Over the course of 18 months, men in the city's most violent districts participate in therapy sessions in the morning, followed by job training in the afternoon. The rationale for the later is that in a place with a well developed labor markets like Chicago, the best way to improve earnings is probably to get people into the market, whereas in Liberia, the labor market is much less efficient, so it made more sense to offer people cash. "It's all about a progressive, rational policy for social control. Social inclusion is the most productive means of social control," David Brotherton, a sociologist at the City University of New York, explained in 2019. Brotherton has long argued that mainstream US policy is counter-productive, coercive and punitive. His research has shown that helping at-risk people reintegrate into mainstream society-including by offering them cash-is much more effective at reducing violence. To give one striking example from Brotherton's research:  In 2007, the crime-riddled nation of Equador legalized the gangs that had been the source of much of the violence. The country allowed the gsngs to remake themselves as cultural associates that could register with the government, which in turn allowed them to qualify for grants and benefit from social programming. Can you guess what happened to the murder rate over the next few years?  That's right. It plummeted.    -VOX