The Little Village Gang Violence Reduction Project in Chicago

discussion in Chapter 9 sheds some light on the nature of services provided, and specificallywhether the provision of social-intervention services was associated with lowered levels ofoffending and arrests.The GangA variety of questions were asked about the program youth’s perception of their gang’sstructure, its patterns of fighting and reasons for fighting. There were few gang-levelcharacteristics, per se, correlated positively or negatively with the youth’s self-reported offenseor arrest level. There was little to distinguish the perceptions of Latin Kings and Two Sixregarding gang structure.The one meaningful or interpretable relationship was the youth’s perception of change inthe size of the gang section to which he was most closely affiliated. If the youth perceived thathis section had become smaller, this was associated at Time III with a reduction in his total selfreportedoffenses, violence offenses, serious violence offenses, and property arrests (p # 0.05).In other words, the smaller the perceived size of the gang section over time, the less likely theyouth would be involved in gang offending. This could suggest several things: the youth himselfwas withdrawing from the gang; others in his group were also withdrawing; the gang sectionmay have become less “tight,” (or cohesive) and diminished in size; the gang section was in factsmaller; or, most important, the youth was no longer attracted to or influenced by the gang’scriminal norms or activities (see also M. Klein, 1971).The above correlation indicates it is not only the gang’s scope, or character of operations,but also the nature of the youths’ individual relationships to the gang which may be associated10.20