Towards a New Model for Helping Gang-Involved Youth during the Transition to Adulthood

• In Event: New Directions in Research and Practice at the Intersection of Youth/Emerging Adults and the Legal System

Abstract

Several well-researched, best-practice approaches have been identified for youth offenders generally (Boxer & Goldstein, 2012). Yet none of these has been shown reliably or robustly to improve well-being or prevent re-offending among gang-involved youth (Boxer, 2019). Even among other justice-involved youth with no gang affiliations, gang-involved youth enter the justice system at elevated levels of personal and contextual risk for aggressive and violent behavior as well as victimization and substance abuse (Herrera & Boxer, 2019). This includes histories of trauma and engagement in serious assaults (Boxer et al., 2023; Duron et al., 2022). In this paper we present our work exploring the impact of evidence-based intervention for gang-involved youth and insights from scholarship on life-course pathways into and out of gang affiliation. We present new data from youth in secure custody (N=55; ages 18-25 years; 100% male; 91% nonwhite; 42% active gang members) regarding their beliefs about gang involvement, motivations for engaging in constructive behavior, and ideas about barriers to positive change. Among gang-involved respondents, 57% indicated that they wanted to un-affiliate from the gang. We integrate these data with new ideas for intervening with gang-involved young people and describe our developing developmental-clinical model of gang intervention.

Authors

• Paul Boxer, Rutgers University - Newark

• Joanna Kubik, Rider University

• Stephanie Marcello, Rutgers University Behavioral Healthcare