The Little Village Gang Violence Reduction Project in Chicago

involved and violent youth and assign or provide some with social services or special controlcontacts and some not, at least for members of the same gangs. (The universe of Latin King andTwo Six youth in Little Village involved in gang crime was not necessarily known to Projectworkers, the police generally, or even among the program youth.) We also did not havesufficient funds to interview comparable gang youth from Pilsen, the nearby equivalent gangproblemcommunity, although crime data from that area was used in the aggregate-level analysis.The large initial group of approximately three hundred co-arrestees, mainly from CohortsI and II (early in the program) were mainly adults identified through criminal court records. Allof these co-arrestees were arrested in the same early period as targeted youth, approximatelyduring the first three months of target-youth program entry. However, several problems arose inthe development of the comparison group. We discovered that juveniles arrested along withadults were not listed in criminal court records; also, insufficient juveniles were found as coarresteesof program juveniles in juvenile court records, and in addition the records of juvenileco-arrestees in the Chicago Police Department’s Youth Division were often expunged before wecould get to them.We developed an equivalent group of juvenile co-arrestees based on the co-arrestees ofthe adult program youth when they were juveniles, using data from juvenile court records. Wealso extended the risk period of program juveniles as far back as necessary to obtain a sufficientnumber of juvenile co-arrestees. In due course we obtained a sample of 21 juvenile co-arrestees,and a further group of 52 juvenile co-arrestees using the additional earlier-time-period samplingframes. After extensive analysis, based on prior arrest, detention/ incarceration and agedistributions, we discovered that the various subgroups of juvenile co-arrestees did not differ8.31