On the Efficacy of Targeted Gang Interventions: Can We Identify Those Most At Risk?

One of the explicit goals of many recent and ongoing criminal justice interventions is to target youth most at risk for involvement in serious, chronic, and violent offending. While targeted programs appear promising at the conceptual level, data limitations have made systematic evaluations of the efficacy of such practices difficult to achieve. The current study helps to fill this void in the literature by examining the relative risk of youth targeted for prevention and intervention services with a comparable sample of youth from the general school population in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. Results suggest that youth targeted by the program under study were significantly less at risk in three of the four risk domains examined, and in seven of the twelve associated subdomains. Further, the nontargeted sample had higher accumulated risk than the targeted sample, which is a robust predictor of gang involvement. Implications for targeted prevention and intervention programs are discussed.