8-Year Study Seeks Roots of Criminal Behavior

One balmy August evening, police say, 11-year-old Robert Sandifer gunned down a teen-ager. Days later, his own gang executed him for the heat the shooting generated.

Across the city, 16-year-old Corey Palmer--model student, athlete and hospital volunteer--eagerly prepared for another straight-A year.

Two poor neighborhoods, two radically different lives.

Why?

A $4-million, eight-year study of 11,000 young people living in low-, middle- and upper-income white, black and Latino neighborhoods in Chicago aims for an answer.

“We’re looking not only at how individuals shape their environments, but how their changing social and physical environments shape them,” said project director Felton J. Earls, a child psychiatrist and professor of human behavior and development at Harvard University’s School of Public Health.

It’s no ivory tower question, according to Robert Sampson, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago and one of the designers of the study.

“Prevention is the strategy we should be using when it comes to crime,” Sampson said. “Current policy is after the fact. More police, more prisons. If we can pinpoint the causes of crime and anti-social behavior we can act to prevent it.”

The Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, which began in September, scrutinizes the lives and surroundings of its randomly chosen subjects, who range in age from newborn to 24. Half are male, half female.

Once a year, interviewers will visit the subjects, or their care givers, to query them on their beliefs, conflicts, influences, peer pressures, role models, health and relatives.

The 52 interviewers will also examine housing in each of the 80 neighborhoods, along with streets, parks and recreational facilities, the condition of schools and such signals as the presence of crack houses or uncollected garbage and whether children play in the streets.