The Cambridge Somerville Youth Study was commissioned in 1936 by Dr. Richard Cabot, a Boston physician who proposed an experiment to evaluate the effects of early intervention in preventing or lowering rates of juvenile delinquency. It was started in 1939 by Edwin Powers and Helen Witmer.
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Planning
In the study 506 boys, ages 5 to 13 years old who lived in youth facilities in eastern Massachusetts were selected and carefully matched into either a treatment group or a control group. The boys in the treatment group were assigned a counselor and received academic tutoring, medical and psychiatric attention, referrals to YMCA, Boy Scouts, summer camps and community programs. Boys in the control group only were told to report regularly.
Follow-up studies
In the initial and ten year follow up, there was either no difference or a higher rate of negative results as reported by the authors. 30 years after the initial experiment about 95% of the participants were tracked down through public records and surveyed by Joan McCord.
McCord reported: The program had no impacts on juvenile arrest rates measured by official or unofficial records. The program also had no impacts on adult arrest rates. There were no differences between the two groups in the number of serious crimes committed, age at when a first crime was committed, age when first committing a serious crime, or age after no serious crime was committed. A larger proportion of criminals from the treatment group went on to commit additional crimes than their counterparts in the control group.
Later conclusions
In 1981, McCord published the results of a study of the data from the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study to find out why the program had damaging results. She formulated four hypotheses: (1) that counselors imposed middle-class values on lower-class youth, which values simply did not work for them; (2) that counselors caused the boys in the treatment group to become dependent on them and, when the program ended, those boys lost a source of support; (3) that youth in the treatment group suffered a labeling effect; and (4) that the support of the counselors raised expectations of the boys in the treatment group which could not be sustained, and disillusionment set in after the program was completed.