Reducing Crime Among Youth at Risk for Gang Involvement

• Author: Molly P. Slothower,Denise C. Gottfredson,Jamie J. Fader,Brook Kearley,Terence P. Thornberry,Deanna N. Devlin
• Date: 01 November 2018
• Published date: 01 November 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12395

RESEARCH ARTICLE

YOUTH AT RISK FOR GANG

INVOLVEMENT

Reducing Crime Among Youth at Risk for

Gang Involvement

A Randomized Trial

TerenceP. Thornberry

University of Maryland—College Park

University at Albany, State University of New York

Brook Kearley

University of Maryland—Baltimore

Denise C. Gottfredson

Molly P. Slothower

University of Maryland—College Park

Deanna N. Devlin

CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance

Jamie J. Fader

Temple University

Research Summary

No gang prevention or intervention programs meet the standards for effectiveness pro-

mulgated by Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development. This randomized controlled

trial of a well-known program—Functional Family Therapy—that was modified to

address the needs of gang-involved adolescents yields two main findings. First, youth at

We are grateful for support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Office of Juvenile

Justice and Delinquency Prevention during the development phase and from the Smith Richardson

Foundation and the National Institute of Justice during the implementation phase of the study. We wish to

thank the Honorable Lori Dumas, Chief Faustino Castro-Jimenez, William Cooney, and many other partners in

the Philadelphia Family Court system for their leadership and guidance; Mike Robbins and Helen Midouhas of

FFT LLC for their support; Pam Porter of the University of Maryland for input on study design and

implementation; and Courtney Harding and Joe Pitts of Temple University for data collection. We also thank

Senior Editor Abigail Fagan and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier draft

of this article. Direct correspondence to Terence P. Thornberry, Department of Criminology and Criminal

Justice, 2220 LeFrak Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 (e-mail: thornbet@umd.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12395 C2018 American Society of Criminology 953

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 17 rIssue 4

Research Article Youth at Risk for Gang Involvement

high risk for gang membership and their families engaged with and successfully com-

pleted the program at the same level as low-gang-risk youth. Second, the effectiveness

results varied by gang-risk status. For youth at high risk for gang membership, the

treatment group had significantly lower recidivism rates at the 18-month follow-up as

compared with a “treatment as usual” control group. For youth at low risk for gang

membership, however, no consistent differences were found between the treated and

control groups.

Policy Implications

Modifying and extending evidence-based delinquency programs to gang-involved youth

seems to be a reasonable strategy for developing a wider array of effective programs

to respond to the challenge of street gangs. The differential findings by gang-risk

status suggests that the juvenile justice system should expand the use of evidence-based

community programs to higher risk youth, including those identified as being “at risk”

because of their gang involvement.

Keywords

gangs, gang prevention intervention, family therapy for court-involved youth,

randomized controlled trial, Functional Family Therapy

During the last 25 years, adolescent street gangs, once primarily a phenomenon of

a few major metropolitan areas, have spread rapidly throughout the country. In

its most recent survey, the National Youth Gang Center estimated that 30,700

gangs with 850,000 members were located in more than 3,100 jurisdictions throughout

the United States. Gangs were found in 85% of larger cities, 50% of suburban counties,

32% of smaller cities, and 15% of rural counties. The number of gangs, gang members, and

gang-related homicides are on the rise when compared with the previous 5-year average,

and the problem of street gangs now reaches into all corners of American society (Egley,

Howell, and Harris, 2014).

Given the prevalence of gangs and their negative impact on the behavior and devel-

opment of gang members (Pyrooz, Turanivic, Decker, and Wu, 2015; Thornberry, Krohn,

Lizotte, Smith, and Tobin, 2003), it is imperative to develop effective, evidence-based pro-

grams to prevent gang membership and to reduce the impact of gangs on the adolescents

who do join them. In this area where effective programs are strongly needed, however,

they are least available. Although evidence-based programs for a variety of other problem

behaviors do exist, currently no known gang programs meet the rigorous standards of

demonstrated effectiveness such as those promulgated by the Blueprints for Healthy Youth

Development (blueprintsprograms.com). The purposes of this article are to (a) describe

a strategy for developing an evidence-based gang program, (b) examine whether such a

program can successfully engage gang members and their families, and (c) present the

results of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) that evaluated its effectiveness. We begin

954 Criminology & Public Policy

Thornberry et al.

with a brief description of the impact of adolescent street gangs and the need for effective

programming.

Impact of Adolescent Street Gangs

Since the pioneering work of Frederick Thrasher (1927), compelling scientific evidence has

been presented that gang membership is associated with elevated involvement in delinquent

and criminal behavior. The results of a recent meta-analysis of 179 empirical studies clearly

demonstrate the association between gangs and crime: “[O]ur analyses reveal that gang

membership is consistently and significantly related to offending regardless of the mea-

surement of key variables, sampling approaches, and model specifications” (Pyrooz et al.,

2015: 381–382). Gang members are involved at a higher level than are nongang members

in almost all forms of criminal behavior including violent crime, property crime, drug use,

drug sales, and gun crime (Thornberry et al., 2003). This higher rate of involvement is

observed across racial and ethnic groups and across gender (Esbensen, Peterson, Taylor,

and Freng, 2010; Pyrooz et al., 2015). The discrepancy between gang and nongang mem-

bers is also evident at the most extreme end of the continuum. The National Youth Gang

Center estimated that even though gang members represent only a fraction of 1% of the

U.S. population, a total of 2,363 gang-related homicides occurred in 2012, representing

approximately 16% of all homicides in the country (Egley et al., 2014). The impact of gang

membership has also been linked to the recent upswing in homicide and violent crime in

cities such as Philadelphia, the site of this study, and Chicago (Drug Enforcement Agency

[DEA], 2015; University of Chicago Crime Lab, 2017).

Compelling evidence also exists that gang membership is not merely a risk factor for

offending but seems to facilitate this high level of involvement in delinquency.In numerous

individual studies where rigorous methods were used to control selection effects, scholars

have found that crime and delinquency are elevated during time periods when adolescents

are active gang members and directly exposed to gang influences as compared with periods

either before or after membership (e.g., Haviland and Nagin, 2005; Melde and Esbensen,

2011, 2013; Thornberry, Krohn, Lizotte, and Chard-Wierschem, 1993; Thornberry et al.,

2003). This pattern, which has been replicated in more than 20 studies in the United States

and abroad using many different measures, samples, and analytical methods (Krohn and

Thornberry,2008), strongly suggests that it is unlikely that individual characteristics of gang

members account for their elevated level of delinquency. Indeed, in no study of this issue

have scholars found support for a pure selection model that hypothesizes that the gang effect

is spurious and that gangs are merely a collection of individuals who already have a high

propensity to offend. Instead, the data suggest that it is something about the gang itself—for

example, its structure, norms, culture, and group processes—that increases the delinquency

of gang members. It is also important to note that gang effects are not merely delinquent

peer group effects. Even when gang members are compared only with nonmembers who

have highly delinquent peer groups, the gang members still have significantly higher levels

Volume 17 rIssue 4 955