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Abstract
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VioLit summary:
OBJECTIVE:
The intent of this article by Willman and Snortum was to examine the effect of a gang employment program on rates of delinquency and violence among gang members in El Monte, CA.
METHODOLOGY:
The authors employed a quasi-experimental design by matching a group of 100 experimental subjects with 100 control subjects according to age, sex, ethnic group, and gang membership. All subjects were male and each group contained 93 Hispanic Americans and 7 Anglo-Americans. Members of the experimental group were provided with skills for obtaining and maintaining a job, with the assistance of two, full-time, El Monte Police Department Community Relations Officers and several part-time volunteers.
FINDINGS/DISCUSSION:
The experimental and control groups demonstrated about the same detention rates in the first time period (February 1975 through July 1975), followed by a slightly poorer record by experimental subjects in the next three six-month time periods (August 1975 through January 1976; February 1976 through June 1976; and July 1976 through December 1976). The rates for the two groups began to converge again in the final time periods (January 1977 through February 1977). When considering the data for all crimes it was noted that the pre-intervention rate of detentions was flat for both groups but that there was a clear decline during the post-intervention period. The parallel effects suggested that rather than the employment program, a natural maturation might have been operating to reduce crime. An alternative to this conclusion was the possibility that since so many programs existed for trouble-prone gang members, the study actually compared two, different treatment groups rather than a treatment and a control group.
AUTHORS' RECOMMENDATIONS:
The authors suggested that control-group designs be more rigorously applied to the study of such interventions in order to discern whether the recipients of juvenile services would be leaving their delinquent activities behind, with or without such services.
(CSPV Abstract - Copyright © 1992-2007 by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Institute of Behavioral Science, Regents of the University of Colorado)
KW - California
KW - Juvenile Gang
KW - Juvenile Offender
KW - Juvenile Violence
KW - Intervention Program
KW - Police Intervention
KW - Police Program
KW - Law Enforcement Intervention
KW - Law Enforcement Program
KW - Employment Program
KW - Employment Factors
KW - Program Effectiveness
KW - Program Evaluation
KW - Crime Intervention
KW - Violence Intervention
KW - Delinquency Intervention
KW - Gang Intervention
KW - Gang Violence
KW - Gang Crime
KW - Juvenile Delinquency
KW - Juvenile Crime
Language: en |