The Little Village Gang Violence Reduction Project in Chicago

inaccuracies and inconsistencies in recordkeeping both within and across components of thejustice system, but also in part to the fact that youth who are arrested may give false orcontradictory information to police, the courts, and correctional officials. Arrested youthfrequently falsify their real names, and change their family names, their birthdates and addresses.One of the means our justice-system researcher employed to identify program and comparisonyouth was to compare, over time, the records of both program youth and co-arrestees. Becauseof the network-character of the gang problem, the same youth are often arrested together indifferent gang incidents. In most cases, we were able to accurately identify youth even thoughfalse or inaccurate names and addresses might have been given. Through this continuednetwork-type of checking procedure, we believe we established a valid set of records.Demographic Characteristics of YouthThere was no statistically significant difference in characteristics of race/ethnicity,gender, and age across the three samples: program, quasi-program, and comparison.Race/Ethnicity. The ethnicity of program, quasi-program, and comparison youth (N = 493) waspredominantly Latino, mainly Mexican-American. Only 4.2% (n = 8) of the program group wasof European origin, with no Asian or African-Americans. The quasi-program group was evenmore predominantly Latino or Mexican-American; only 2.3% (n = 2) were non-Latinos. Thecomparison group, although predominantly Mexican-Americans or Latinos, were a littledifferent. Eleven and five-tenths percent (11.5%) of this sample (n = 25) were non-Latino ornon-Mexican-American, including youth of middle European origin (n = 19); five additional8.33