Therapy Helps Troubled Teens Rethink Crime

“Therapy Helps Troubled Teens Rethink Crime” by Shankar Vedantam

To read this article on the NPR website, click here.

Late one night in November 2007, a student at the University of Chicago named Amadou Cisse was accosted by a young man named Demetrius Warren. Warren demanded Cisse’s backpack and water bottle — at the point of a .22-caliber gun. When the bag and bottle were not forthcoming — or not forthcoming quickly enough — Warren shot Cisse at point-blank range, killing him. The 29-year-old Cisse was a month shy of completing his Ph.D. in chemistry. In 2011, Warren was sentenced to 120 years in prison. The spurred the University of Chicago to establish a center to study how to prevent homicide, using the tools of empirical science. Now, in a issued by the , investigators from the university’s say they have identified an intervention that could help reduce violent crime.