The Little Village Gang Violence Reduction Project in Chicago

whether certain youth were doing better or worse in the post-Project period.The Little Village model of youth-worker outreach emphasized social intervention andproviding access to opportunities (particularly counseling, jobs and education) for gang youth,within a framework of collaboration with criminal-justice-system and local neighborhoodorganizationpersonnel. The Little Village model of youth work differed from the so-called“traditional” models, which stressed group work, formal club meetings, recreation and/or peacemeetings between feuding gangs. The evaluations of many of these “traditional” gang programsdeemphasized the worker’s assistance with jobs and education, minimized the worker’s efforts toreintegrate youth into mainstream society through counseling, and claimed the youth worker mayhave been responsible for cohering the gang and increasing the gang-youth’s commitment todelinquent behaviors (Klein 1971, 1995).Gang-program evaluations have not generally considered factors which interactivelyinfluence individual-youth outcome, i.e., the youth’s age and distinctive developmental, arresthistory,gang, and subgroup characteristics. A major weakness of gang evaluations also has beena failure to relate specific patterns of services or worker activities to outcome for different youthunder statistically controlled conditions in order to truly judge the success or failure of theprogram. We have controlled for these factors in our evaluation of the Little Village GangViolence Reduction program.Effects of Services Provided to Gang YouthWe have already demonstrated that the program as a whole was associated with thereduction of arrests for different types of youth. We now examine the odds of success to failure14.2