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Summary

Whether or not crime pays, it causes misery.

In this shallow report we estimate the cost-effectiveness of the Network for Empowerment & Progressive Initiative (NEPI), which aims to reduce crime in Liberia. NEPI’s primary programme provides cash transfers combined with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to reduce the anti-social activities of young men with violent or criminal backgrounds.

This unusual programme has been evaluated in an RCT (Blattman et al., 2023, n = 833),  which found incredible results. Ten years after it was delivered, the programme found large effects on the criminality and and the mental wellbeing of its recipients: 34 fewer reported thefts a year for the recipients, and a 0.19 standard deviation increase in mental health. After accounting for programme expenses, the authors concluded their results imply a cost of roughly $1.50 per crime avoided. Notably, these effects showed practically no signs of decay between the first and ten year follow-ups.

This research is part of our work at the Happier Lives Institute to try and find the most cost-effective ways to increase global wellbeing. We believe this is the first wellbeing cost-effectiveness analysis of a charity that attempts to reduce crime. Research into wellbeing cost-effectiveness is recent, having begun in the last 10 years.

Why and how do we assess impact in terms of wellbeing? We evaluate charities with wellbeing-adjusted life years (WELLBYs), a metric we did not invent (see footnote for details). The metric is simple: one WELLBY is equivalent to a 1-point increase on a 0-10 life satisfaction scale for one year. WELLBYs allow us to impartially compare the impact of very different charities addressing very different problems. While not without limitations, we think WELLBYs are the best way (yet) of capturing and comparing what really matters. See this part of our website for a fuller explanation.

Here we analyse the cost-effectiveness of NEPI’s combined therapy and cash programme to reduce crime. I estimate the total effect of NEPI (14 WELLBYs) per participant as stemming from two sources:  

(1) First, the wellbeing benefits to the high risk young men enrolled in the programme and their families. While the evidence for these effects is higher quality, it only makes up 17% of the total benefit (3 WELLBYs per person, counted over 10 years, after a 49% discount for general concerns about replicability); based on 2 studies of 1 RCT (n = 833).

(2) Second, I estimate part of the wellbeing benefits that accrue to the wider community: the benefits that come from not being victimised by theft (11 WELLBYs). The wider wellbeing effects comprised 83% of the total benefit even after I discounted the effect by 85% to account for concerns about replicability, reverse causality, self-report bias, and generalizability concerns. This estimate is based on 1 correlational study of the relation between theft victimisation and life-satisfaction in 20 African countries (n = 17,960). However, given that this evidence is less clearly relevant to the case of NEPI, most of the benefit we estimate for NEPI is rather speculative. Indeed, this estimate may be characterised as “very speculative” given that one of our downwards adjustments to this effect relies on some subjective guesswork (we consider our numbers here a placeholder we hope to upgrade in time). We prefer our models to be based on strong evidence, but we think that it’s worthwhile to make an (educated) guess about NEPI’s impact.

NEPI reports that this intervention costs $630 per person treated in Liberia. Accordingly, I estimate the cost-effectiveness to be 22 WELLBYs per $1,000 donated (WBp1k). However, I think this analysis leans to the conservative side. The cost-effectiveness could be as high as 104 WBp1k if we take a few alternative analytical choices that I find reasonable but more uncertain and thus harder to defend. Notably, the cost-effectiveness figures in both cases are driven (~80%) by the more speculative estimate – that of the wellbeing benefit to the potential theft victims and their household.