Dec. 15, 2014 – One of the more promising areas of inquiry at the intersection of education and crime reduction is “soft skills.” In education, it might be traits like persistence, in the research of James Heckman; in crime-reduction, it might be “non-cognitive” skills like self-control, as in the promising results from the cognitive-behavioral-therapy approach applied through the Becoming a Man initiative. They’re two sides of the same coin—explicitly teaching life skills that kids are expected to pick up implicitly as they grow up.