The Crime Lab Findings

The Crime Lab offers a fresh perspective on youth misbehaviors. In the spring of 2009, Office of the Chief Judge (OCJ) liaison Dr. Beverly Butler arranged a meeting between members of the transitional administrator consulting team and researchers from the University of Chicago Crime Lab. Involvement of the Crime Lab could help, and the OCJ trusted its work based on prior and ongoing projects with the Juvenile Court. The Crime Lab presents some evidence suggesting that reduced automaticity may be a key mechanism. For making sense of the Crime Lab findings, the focus on learning more about the mechanisms of automatic thinking is critical. The potential solution for maladaptive automatic responses is not to teach youth to deploy the same “prosocial” automatic response in every situation. Automaticity looks like the absence of self-control but, instead, seems to be a situational misdiagnosis of the environmental context.