020 An examination of the life course trajectories of gun-involved youth now deceased

Background

Gun violence and injury are concentrated among small numbers of people, places, and networks and disproportionately impact young men of color. Project Life is a court ordered violence prevention program involving the county prosecutor’s office and level 1 trauma centers as well as local public and behavioral health agencies designed to educate youth and their families about the consequences of illegal gun use and acts of violence against others. Youth assigned to the program are between the ages of 13–18 and are serving sentences for offenses involving a firearm, ranging from reckless discharge to armed robbery. Project Life, like many well-intentioned social interventions, has never been formally evaluated, and questions of what works, for whom, and why remain unanswered.

Statement of Purpose

Our analysis will focus on youths who are now deceased (n=~24) looking at similarities and differences in their life-course trajectories within the criminal justice system, including their offending history, qualifying incident, and death incident alongside their health trajectories.

Methods/Approach

We acquired data from a cohort of 440 youths court ordered to Project Life from 2015–2019. Data include detailed criminal justice records (offending history, case information related to qualifying incident and death incident) and health records (diagnoses, visits, medicines prescribed). As of the writing of this abstract, 24 individuals from the cohort are now deceased. We will provide an overview of the cohort. We will use mixed methods to look for similarities and differences in the life course of our sample.

Significance

A focus on this subset of young persons offers an important vantage on the relatively unexplored intersections between the criminal justice and health systems—identify inflection points, missed opportunities, and factors or combinations of factors that can better identify youth most at risk for gun violence.