CDELLIOTT 9/26
Local expertise is a treat
for visiting editorial writers 
You know how you never get around to seeing a local point of interest until somebody comes to visit from out of town?
The out-of-town visitors were members of the National Conference of Editorial Writers, which held its annual convention in Denver Sept. 15-18. Delbert Elliott, director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado at Boulder, gave the main talk at a panel on youth violence. And though I'd read about his work, it was the first opportunity I'd had to hear him speak.
One part of Elliott's work is the Blueprints Project, which evaluates youth intervention programs. It identifies successful programs, and maybe even more importantly, highly popular but unsuccessful programs.
''We have to get rid of huge investments in things that don't work,'' he said. Among the better known of the don't-works: boot camps; D.A.R.E. drug education; gun buybacks.
Blueprints found 10 programs that do work (the complete list is on the center's Web site, colorado.edu/cspv), including nurse visits to young mothers and Big Brothers/Big Sisters. But Elliott's message to the editorial writers concerned less the specific programs and more the questions they should ask before endorsing some promising but untested proposal.
The three criteria for success, he said, are first, a good research design so the effects of the intervention can be measured; second, replicability, because a program that depends for its effectiveness on a charismatic leader won't work elsewhere; third, sustainability, meaning that the good effects last beyond the end of the program.
Reasonable expectations all, but plenty of editorial ink has been spilled in defense of programs that do not meet them. In fact, a journalist on the panel that followed Elliott's talk discussed at length the initiatives his paper had supported. ''We know what works!'' the panelist proclaimed, but obviously he didn't.
I'd read about Blueprints, but Elliott's talk included unfamiliar information as well. Journalists often fail to distinguish, he said, between a pattern of violent behavior that starts in childhood and one that starts in adolescence. But the distinction is important, because programs that are effective with one group won't work outside the targeted population.
Highly aggressive, out-of-control children, the terror of the preschool or the kindergarten, are examples of the first pattern. They may represent as much as 8 percent of 4-  and 5-year-old boys. By age 10, Elliott said, half will have matured, but the other half are likely to continue to serious violence.
The group that runs into trouble only in adolescence is much larger, with a cumulative total of 25 or 30 percent of males who have been involved in serious violence - maybe only once - by the end of the teen years. That sounds amazingly high to me, but then I was a girl. The peak of involvement in violence for girls comes at age 13, and it's about 6 percent; the peak for boys is more than 12 percent, and it stays above 10 percent from age 12 to age 18.
Elliott has looked also at race differences. The prevalence of serious violence among blacks in the mid-teen years is about 50 percent higher than among whites of the same age, a significant disparity but much smaller than commonly perceived. The most noticeable difference is that the black rate has a second, lower peak in the mid-20s. Some African-American males, Elliott said, ''are caught in a protracted adolescence.'' The indicators that someone is successfully adapting to adult life are regular employment and stable intimate relationships; if researchers control for factors like that, the racial differences virtually disappear.
Of course, that leaves unanswered the question of cause and effect.
One final chart Elliott constructed shows the relationship between minor delinquency and serious crimes such as aggravated assault, robbery and rape. It's a progression, and the serious stuff doesn't come out of nowhere. Rape is preceded, 92 percent of the time, by aggravated assault; serious crimes are preceded, 99 percent of the time, by minor delinquency. And, somewhat surprisingly, illegal use of hard drugs is more likely to come after major crime than before.
All in all, it was an illuminating morning. I'm glad the convention came to Denver so I could experience what a wealth of information we have right here at home.