Title: The Detroit Handgun Intervention Program: A
Court-Based Program for Youthful Handgun Offenders.
Series: Research in Progress Preview
Author: Jeffrey Roth
Published: National Institute of Justice, November
1998
Subject: Gun violence, juvenile violence
11 pages
17,000 bytes

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U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
National Institute of Justice
Jeremy Travis, Director

Research Preview
Research in Progress Seminar Series
November 1998

------------------------------

The Detroit Handgun Intervention Program: A
Court-Based Program for Youthful Handgun Offenders

Summary of a Presentation by Jeffrey Roth, The
Urban Institute

Concern about the proliferation of handguns among
young black men led Judge Willie G. Lipscomb, Jr.,
of Detroit to launch a program designed to change
attitudes and behavior in the hope of preventing
gun violence. In the Handgun Intervention Program
(HIP), offenders who had been arrested for
carrying concealed weapons were required, as a
condition of pretrial release, to attend a class
in which they would learn the negative
consequences of gun use and be challenged to take
personal responsibility for reducing those
consequences. Begun in 1993, HIP has had upwards
of 6,000 participants, more than 90 percent of
whom were African-Americans.

In an NIJ-sponsored study, researchers from The
Urban Institute found that, as a result of HIP,
attitudes toward gun use improved significantly in
the short run. However, many participants
questioned whether their behavior would change
because they felt the dangers of the street
required them to carry a gun. 

Program elements

The rationale behind HIP is that attitudinal and
behavioral changes might prevent the young men who
have been carrying weapons from carrying them or
actually using them. Thus, the program is designed
to underscore the consequences of weapons use. It
attempts to awaken the participants to issues of
personal choice, individual responsibility, and
the role of nonviolence in African-American
history. The 4-hour Saturday classes, which are
held in a courtroom, consist of the following
components:

  --Slide presentation of gun murder victims,
  designed to make the threat real and personal.
  The message is that the class participants
  could also be killed in this way. 
  
  --Information packet of facts about handguns and
  discussion of handguns.
  
  --Peer presentations by older felons. The
  participants hear, from men not much older than
  themselves, about the dangers of handgun use,
  how to avoid violent situations, and similar
  topics.
  
  --Socratic dialog led by Judge Lipscomb. Three
  topics in particular are presented as subjects
  for debate or discussion: the heritage and
  responsibilities of African-Americans, the
  responsibility for being a role model for
  younger men, and the special burdens of gun
  violence on the African-American community.
  
  --Optional vow of nonviolence. On average, 80 to
  90 percent of the group agree to take this vow,
  which pledges them not to initiate violence.
  
  Measures of change
  
  The evaluation measured changes in seven
  categories of gun-related attitudes and knowledge:
  
  --Risks vs. benefits of carrying a handgun: Are
  people in dangerous situations safer if they
  carry a weapon? 
  
  --Alleged inevitability of gun violence: Can gun
  violence be prevented?
  
  --Ethics of the situation: Is it acceptable, for
  example, to seek revenge with a gun?
  
  --Status: Does carrying a gun increase a person's
  status in the community?
  
  --Personal responsibility: Are people accountable
  for their own life and for violence in their
  neighborhood?
  
  --Situational avoidance of violence: How can
  various threatening situations be handled
  without a gun?
  
  --Knowledge: Do participants know such facts as
  blacks' high rate of homicide victimization? 
  
  Methodology
  
  The sample consisted of 446 people, divided about
  equally into a test group that attended the class
  and a control group that did not. The mean age of
  both groups was 26, and both were the same in
  employment status and other demographic
  characteristics. Both groups were reportedly at
  high risk for violence: 75 percent reported that
  at some point in their lives they had been shot
  at; 80 percent said that friends or family members
  had been killed by guns.
  
  Attitudes were measured twice for the entire
  sample. The initial measurement was taken in
  lockup just before arraignment. The second was
  conducted 12-14 days later just before the second
  court appearance. The test group was assigned to
  attend HIP on one of the Saturdays between the two
  appearances. Researchers were unable to obtain a
  statistically valid sample for a third measurement
  6 months later.
  
  Early effects of the program
  
  The attitudes of the HIP group improved on nearly
  all measures of each of the seven concepts:
  
  Risks vs. benefits: Between the first and second
  measurements, the HIP group registered
  increasingly less belief that possessing a gun put
  one in control of a threatening situation. An even
  larger percentage came to feel that carrying a gun
  was not worth the risk of arrest.
  
  Inevitability of gun violence: The percentage who
  believed the axiom, "Sometimes you just can't
  avoid a gun fight," decreased between the two
  measurements.
  
  Ethics: The percentage attending HIP who believed
  it was acceptable to use a gun in various
  circumstances declined, and the percentage who
  believed that nonviolence historically has
  improved black peoples' lives increased. 
  
  Status: The proportion who believed guns improved
  one's standing decreased.
  
  Personal Responsibility: Reactions were mixed,
  depending on the particular subissue, although for
  the most part the shift in attitudes was positive.
  
  Situational avoidance: Among HIP attendees, there
  was a shift toward the beliefs that if you need a
  gun for some activity, you are better off staying
  home and that if you need a gun to fit in with
  your friends, it might be better to make different
  friends.
  
  Knowledge: For HIP attendees, there were large
  increases in the percentages who correctly
  answered three questions about gun homicide risks.
  
  In the short term (first two stages of testing),
  attitudes toward the negative consequences of gun
  violence improved significantly. Long-term results
  were available only for defendants diverted from
  adjudication--a small, nonrepresentative
  subsample. No statistically valid conclusions
  could be reached about the third stage of testing
  6 months after the class.
  
  Attitudinal vs. behavioral change
  
  Preliminary analyses indicate that despite HIP's
  positive effects on attitudes, effects on behavior
  were small at best. This is not surprising in view
  of the outcome of focus groups held among the
  participants immediately after the class to obtain
  feedback about the program. A few participants
  felt the program was a useless exercise. Others
  reported that they were very optimistic about the
  program's effectiveness, although the researchers
  felt these individuals may not have fully
  understood Detroit street life and may have been
  expressing hopes, not beliefs. 
  
  The vast majority of focus group participants,
  about 80 percent, although skeptical about the
  program, nevertheless felt they had benefited from
  it and might think differently as a result. But
  they did not anticipate changes in behavior,
  because they felt that carrying a gun was still
  necessary since the streets were dangerous.
  
  The findings suggest that the Handgun Intervention
  Program changes attitudes but that it may be
  difficult to maintain the attitude changes over
  the long run and convert them into behavioral
  changes. If fear of the streets expressed by focus
  group participants is any indication, conditions
  in the community militate against substantive
  behavioral change, even if favorable attitudes do
  not dissipate over the long term. To better
  understand these conditions and their relationship
  to attitudes and behavior, the researchers are
  studying patterns of recidivism (for example, the
  percentage of people rearrested on gun charges),
  as well as individual and neighborhood
  characteristics, to uncover their connections.
  This phase of the study is nearing completion.
  
  ------------------------------
  
  This document is based on Dr. Jeffrey Roth's
  presentation to researchers and criminal justice
  practitioners as part of NIJ's Research in
  Progress seminar series. His study was sponsored
  by NIJ (grant number 95-IJ-CX-0106). Dr. Roth is
  Director of Crime Control Policy Studies at The
  Urban Institute. A 60-minute VHS videotape of the
  seminar, The Detroit Handgun Intervention Program:
  A Court-Based Program for Youthful Handgun
  Offenders, is available for $19 ($24 in Canada and
  other countries). Ask for NCJ 171126. Use the
  order form on the next page to obtain this
  videotape and any of the other tapes in the
  series.
  
  ------------------------------
  
  Findings and opinions in this document do not
  necessarily reflect the official position or
  policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.
  
  ------------------------------
  
  FS 000231
  
  ------------------------------
  
  The Latest Criminal Justice Videotape Series from
  NIJ: Research in Progress Seminars
  
  Learn about the latest developments in criminal
  justice research from prominent criminal justice
  experts.
  
  Each 60-minute tape presents a well-known scholar
  discussing his or her current studies and how they
  relate to existing criminal justice research and
  includes the lecturer's responses to audience
  questions. In addition to The Detroit Handgun
  Intervention Program: A Court-Based Program for
  Youthful Handgun Offenders, reported on in this
  Research Preview, the other tapes available in VHS
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