Comprehensive Gang Prevention, Intervention, and Suppression Model
Comprehensive; Ages 6–29
Effectiveness
- Promising gang program
- Promising adult program
Description
The Comprehensive Gang Prevention, Intervention, and Suppression Model (referred to herein as the Comprehensive Gang Model) is based on a nationwide assessment of youth gang problems and programs, funded by the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). Conducted in the late 1980s, this study identified the main strategies that are commonly used and viewed favorably in community responses to gang problems. These strategies have been further developed and interrelated in the OJJDP Comprehensive Gang Model. Brief descriptions of the five strategies follow.
Community Mobilization: Involvement of local citizens—including former gang youth, community groups, and agencies—and the coordination of programs and staff functions within and across agencies.
Opportunities Provision: The development of a variety of specific education, training, and employment programs targeting gang-involved youth.
Social Intervention: Involving youth-serving agencies, schools, grassroots groups, faith-based organizations, law enforcement, and other juvenile/criminal justice organizations in “reaching out” to gang-involved youth and their families and linking them with the conventional world and needed services.
Suppression: Formal and informal social control procedures, including close supervision and monitoring of gang-involved youth by agencies of the juvenile/criminal justice system and also by community-based agencies, schools, and grassroots groups.
Organizational Change and Development: Development and implementation of policies and procedures that result in the most effective use of available and potential resources, within and across agencies, to better address the gang problem.
- The Comprehensive Gang Prevention, Intervention, and Suppression Model has demonstrated effectiveness in multiple cities.
- Researchers looked at six cities in the initial evaluation of the model; they compared youth and neighborhoods that received Comprehensive Gang Model programming with matched comparison groups of youth and neighborhoods that did not receive the programming. They found that the program was implemented with high fidelity in three of six sites (Chicago, IL, Riverside, CA, and Mesa, AZ). In these three sites, there were statistically significant reductions in gang violence, and in two of these sites, there were statistically significant reductions in drug-related offenses when compared with the control groups of youth and neighborhoods.
- In a later evaluation of an adaption of the Comprehensive Gang Model in Los Angeles, CA the Gang Reduction Program, researchers concluded the program was effectively implemented to combat “traditional,” multigenerational, urban territorial gangs, and that the strongest concentrations of violent crime, or “hot spots,” diminished with statistical significance following CGM implementation.
In sum, the Comprehensive Gang Model has demonstrated evidence of its effectiveness in reducing gang violence when implemented with good program fidelity. Although the research to date has been primarily on the intervention and suppression components, the Comprehensive Gang Model holds promise for integrating prevention activities with intervention programs and suppression strategies.
Risk Factors
- Individual
- Antisocial/delinquent beliefs
- Conduct disorders (authority conflict/rebellious/stubborn/disruptive/antisocial)
- Early and persistent noncompliant behavior
- Early dating/sexual activity/fatherhood
- Early onset of aggression/violence
- Exposure to firearm violence
- Few social ties (involved in social activities, popularity)
- Gang involvement in adolescence
- General delinquency involvement
- High alcohol/drug use
- Hyperactivity/impulsivity
- Illegal gun ownership/carrying
- Lack of guilt and empathy
- Life stressors
- Low intelligence quotient
- Low perceived likelihood of being caught
- Makes excuses for delinquent behavior (neutralization)
- Medical/physical condition
- Mental health problems
- Physical violence/aggression
- Poor refusal skills
- Victim of child maltreatment
- Victimization and exposure to violence
- Violence at age 13
- Violent victimization
- Family
- Abusive parents
- Antisocial parents
- Broken home/changes in caretaker
- Delinquent siblings
- Family history of problem behavior/criminal involvement
- Family poverty/low family socioeconomic status
- Family violence (child maltreatment, partner violence, conflict)
- Having a teenage mother
- High parental stress/maternal depression
- Lack of orderly and structured activities within the family
- Low parental attachment to child/adolescent
- Low parental education
- Parent proviolent attitudes
- Parental use of physical punishment/harsh and/or erratic discipline practices
- Poor parental supervision (control, monitoring, and child management)
- Poor parent-child relations or communication
- Sibling antisocial behavior
- Unhappy parents
- School
- Bullying
- Frequent school transitions
- Frequent truancy/absences/suspensions; expelled from school; dropping out of school
- Identified as learning disabled
- Low academic aspirations
- Low achievement in school
- Low math achievement test scores (males)
- Low parent college expectations for child
- Low school attachment/bonding/motivation/commitment to school
- Old for grade/repeated a grade
- Poor school attitude/performance; academic failure
- Poor student-teacher relations
- Poorly defined rules and expectations for appropriate conduct
- Poorly organized and functioning schools/inadequate school climate/negative labeling by teachers
- Student failure in the first grade
- Unsafe schools
- Community
- Availability and use of drugs in the neighborhood
- Availability of firearms
- Community disorganization
- Economic deprivation/poverty/residence in a disadvantaged neighborhood
- Exposure to violence and racial prejudice
- Feeling unsafe in the neighborhood
- High-crime neighborhood
- Low neighborhood attachment
- Neighborhood antisocial environment
- Neighborhood physical disorder
- Neighborhood youth in trouble
- Peer
- Association with antisocial/aggressive/delinquent peers; high peer delinquency
- Association with gang-involved peers/relatives
- Gang membership
- Peer alcohol/drug use
- Peer rejection
Endorsements
National Gang Center : Effective Program Structure
OJJDP Model Programs Guide: Promising Program
Crime Solutions: Promising Program
Contact
National Gang Center
Institute for Intergovernmental Research
Post Office Box 12729
Tallahassee, FL 32317-2729
Phone: (850) 385-0600
Fax: (850) 386-5356
E-mail: information@nationalgangcenter.gov
Web site: https://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/
References
Best Practices to Address Community Gang Problems. (2008). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. http://www.ojjdp.gov/publications/PubAbstract.asp?pubi=253257.
Cahill, M., & Hayeslip, D. (2010). Findings from the Evaluation of OJJDP's Gang Reduction Program. Juvenile Justice Bulletin. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
Spergel, I. A. (1995). The Youth Gang Problem: A Community Approach. Oxford University Press: New York.
Spergel, I. A. (2007). Reducing Youth Gang Violence: The Little Village Gang Project in Chicago. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Appendix A, p. 51.
Spergel, I. A.; Wa, K. M.; and Sosa, R. V. (2006). “The Comprehensive, Community-Wide, Gang Program Model: Success and Failure.” In J. F. Short and L. A. Hughes (eds.), Studying Youth Gangs. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, pp. 203–224.
Hayeslip, D., and Cahill, M. (2009). Community Collaboratives Addressing Youth Gangs: Final Evaluation Findings From the Gang Reduction Program. Washington, DC: Urban Institute.
Wyrick, P. (2006). “Gang Prevention: How to Make the ’Front End’ of Your Anti-Gang Effort Work.” United States Attorneys’ Bulletin, 54(3):52–60.