Therapy plus $200 in cash cut Liberia's highest-risk men's crime for 10 years

In 2009, economist Chris Blattman was shown around Monrovia by Johnson Borh, who had spent 15 years running the Sustainable Transformation of Youth in Liberia (STYL) program for men at high risk of violent crime. Ex-participants hugged Borh on street corners and pointed to the pickpockets nearby: "I used to be like them. But then I went through Borh's program." STYL offered eight weeks of therapy: in groups of about 20, men practiced anger management and self-control, and rehearsed a new identity — new clothes and haircuts, reintegration through community sports and banks.

Blattman turned it into a randomized controlled trial with 999 of the most dangerous men in Monrovia, recruited on the street and split four ways: therapy alone, $200 in cash alone, therapy plus cash, and nothing. A month in, both therapy arms showed positive results. A year in, the therapy-only effect had faded a bit, but the therapy-plus-cash group was still showing huge impacts: crime and violence down about 50%. Experts Blattman surveyed predicted the effects would steeply diminish, as they do in most interventions.

Ten years later Blattman tracked the men down and reevaluated them: crime and violence were still down about 50% in the therapy-plus-cash group. With 338 fewer crimes per participant over a decade and a $530 per-participant cost, that works out to about $1.50 per crime avoided. The 2022 study by Blattman, Margaret Sheridan, Julian Jamison and Sebastian Chaskel weathered its own robustness checks — including modeling pessimistic outcomes for missing participants — with the effect largely intact.

The result inspired Chicago's READI program — an 18-month, more intensive adaptation with therapy mornings and job-training afternoons, chosen because a developed labor market rewards job skills while Liberia's did not — though Blattman, advising, said early results "don't look like a slam dunk." Chicago's separate Becoming a Man program, CBT-inspired group sessions for high schoolers, cut criminal arrests by about half during the program in an RCT.

Rehearse a new identity, then fund it: CBT that practices self-control plus $200 of startup cash beat either alone, and the mix is what lasted

The therapy targeted identity, not just behavior: new clothes, haircuts and public reintegration let men perform being someone else before believing it.

Cash at the end gave the new identity economic footing — the group that got both kept improving while therapy alone faded.

Practicing self-control and anger management in a group of peers normalized the effort and made it repeatable.

Borh's 15 years of untracked success gave the trial a mechanism that already worked; the RCT just proved how durable it was.

Behavior change sticks when therapy and resources land together: the therapy makes a new self feel possible, the cash makes it affordable — neither substitutes for the other.

The 2022 ten-year results made STYL one of the most cost-effective violence-reduction interventions ever measured, at roughly $1.50 per crime avoided. Chicago's READI adapted the model with job training in place of cash; Blattman advised and cautioned that early results were unimpressive, while the related Becoming a Man RCT showed arrests halving during the program.