Gang Deconstruction

2013, OJJDP made Community-Based Violence Prevention Initiative awards to
recipients in Baltimore, MD, Camden, NJ, Baton Rouge, LA, Syracuse, NY, Kansas
City, MO, and Newport News, VA.
In FY2011, OJJDP supported the national Boys & Girls Clubs of America
(BGCA) organization of Atlanta, GA, to help local affiliate clubs prevent youth from
joining gangs, intervene with gang members in the early stages of gang involvement,
and divert youth from gangs into more constructive activities. This program reflects a
long-term collaboration between OJJDP and BGCA to reduce problems of juvenile
gangs, delinquency, and violence. The national organization provides training and
technical assistance to local gang prevention and intervention sites and to other clubs
and organizations through regional training sessions and national conferences. Each
year, dozens of new gang prevention sites, gang intervention sites, and a targeted
reintegration sites are added to the many existing programs implementing these
strategies across the country
The Gang Resistance Education And Training (G.R.E.A.T.) Program is a schoolbased,
law enforcement officer-instructed, classroom curriculum administered by
OJJDP. Using a communitywide approach to combat risk factors, the goal of the
G.R.E.A.T. Program is to help youth develop positive life skills that will help them avoid
gang involvement and violent behavior. The G.R.E.A.T. Program consists of four
interrelated components, each designed to target different audiences: Elementary
School Component, Middle School Component, Summer Component, and Families
Component. The components can stand alone to teach the necessary skills and
attitudes that will help youth resist the pressures to become involved in gang behavior
and avoid situations that could lead to violence.
The Urban Institute and Temple University received grant funding to look at norms and
networks of Latino gang youth. This study, Norms and Networks of Latino Gang Youth,
employed a social network framework to understand the patterns of relations by
examining two levels of social processes for the unit of analysis (individual and group
relationships) through both egocentric and sociocentric network analysis, and extending
network analysis to include different types of relationships (e.g., friend, relative,
neighbor), This study examined multiple research questions that have not yet been
addressed in delinquency and gang literature. The results of this study can be found at
the Urban Institute website.
Additional research in the area of gang prevention and intervention is being conducted
by the University of Maryland through the Blueprints for Gang Prevention Project.
Gang membership facilitates increased involvement in violence and serious
delinquency. It is necessary to identify effective programs to reduce the level of gang
membership and to reduce the impact that gang membership has in facilitating
antisocial behaviors. Currently, the numbers of known gang intervention programs that
meet rigorous standards to be considered "evidence-based" are very limited. The
Blueprints for Violence Prevention project has identified programs that have been
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