What can be done about youth gangs?
Overreliance on one strategy or another is unlikely to produce fundamental changes in the scope and severity of a community’s gang problem (Curry and Decker, 2003; Wyrick and Howell, 2004). A balance of prevention, intervention, and suppression strategies and programs is likely to be far more effective (see Esbensen, 2000). For example, the Gang Resistance Education And Training (G.R.E.A.T.) prevention program (http://www.great-online.org/) could serve youth in gang-problem areas, while an Intervention Team (National Youth Gang Center, 2002b) could work with active gang members, and a Gang Suppression Unit could target the most violent gangs and gang members. The Comprehensive Gang Prevention, Intervention, and Suppression Model (Spergel, 1995) is a flexible framework that guides communities in developing and organizing such a continuum of programs and strategies. The National Youth Gang Center (NYGC) has developed an assessment protocol which any community can use to assess its gang p
