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In this time of preventable death, a sobering statistic I learned today. We are tracking a group of young men surveyed 10 years ago in Liberia. Mostly youth involved in crime, violence, drugs. We are still going, but so far about 7% have died, most before the age of 35.
Likewise, I am working on a Chicago gun violence reduction program. In the roughly 2 years we've been working with a few thousand of the city's most violent young men, about 7% have been killed as well.
By comparison, the rate of death for young men in the US in general is about 0.1% each year. Your rate of death is 7% if you're in your 70s or 80s.
My friends and neighbors in their late 70s or 80s tell me that their friends are dying all the time. Funerals are a huge part of their life. That's exactly what these young men tell me in Liberia and Chicago.
The good thing is that we have some promising "vaccines". A hopeful one is CBT and employment. We tested it in Liberia a decade ago and the 1-year results were really promising. We're doing the 10-year follow up now. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/04/15/jobs-and-jail-might-not-keep-young-men-out-of-crime-but-how-about-therapy/
The READI Chicago program is similar, and ongoing. We'll see if it can save lives. I'm hopeful. But these are hard cases--some of the men in the world most likely to pull a trigger, in difficult environments, on the lookout to save their lives every day. https://www.heartlandalliance.org/readi/
For other quick medicine, a little plug for my friend @Abt_Thomas and his book, Bleeding Out. https://amzn.to/3iWk1FZ
The world is FAR from "violence vaccines" with 95% efficacy. But then, compared to R&D for other medicines, we spend the tiniest fraction on testing violence prevention. If you live in some of the neighborhoods, that's the deadliest killer when this covid crisis is over.
Meanwhile, we spend ridiculous sums of money locking people up, at least in the US. Part of that is extreme and biased sentencing, plus racism. But it's also a sign of our failure to target violence and to head it off before it happens.
What both these programs have in common, though, is that they're in large part designed, run, and staffed by men and women from these neighborhoods, often from this life themselves, though their hair is grayer now. This tells me where we should look for solutions to test & scale.
If you want to read about the origins of these studies, and a little about the programs, see this thread. Ironically, for me, it all began with a nasty covid-like virus. https://twitter.com/cblatts/status/1238219546978324482?s=20
