Youth Gangs, Prevention of

Community Organization to Prevent Gangs

The community organization strategy seeks to enhance, modify, or change relationships among groups within a city in order to better cope with various problems. Community organizational prevention approaches normally refer to [Page 918]cross-agency initiatives. Some of the goals or activities that can be included in this strategy are graffiti removal and involving parent groups in community activities.

Building social cohesion places gang prevention within the context of a recognized deterioration of the social fabric of inner urban communities. This theoretical development stresses a link between the decline of collective efficacy and an increase in fear of crime, leading to a downward spiral of decay as fewer residents are willing to intervene on behalf of their neighbors or address incivilities and delinquent acts among youth in the community.

Social Intervention to Prevent Gangs

The goal of social intervention is to reduce gang involvement by focusing on changing the youth's value system. Several of the social intervention approaches include crisis intervention, counseling services, and drug use prevention and treatment.

One of the best-known prevention programs aimed at a wide audience of potentially at-risk youth within the schools is the Gang Resistance, Education, and Training (G.R.E.A.T.) program, which was based on the well-established Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) program. The G.R.E.A.T. program paralleled the lesson contents of the D.A.R.E. program, substituting gang issues for drug issues. Two of the most prominent and influential gang researchers, Malcolm Klein and Cheryl Maxson, identified the weaknesses revealed in evaluations of the G.R.E.A.T. program, most notably the weak decline in subjects' levels of delinquency and, most critical to the program, levels of gang membership.

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