Infusing an Organizational Change Model into a Criminal Justice Practice

• In Event: Posters I

Abstract

The Comprehensive Gang Model (CGM) is a program that offers communities strategies, that when combined, are intended to minimize gang and youth violence. Recent research however, has relayed that the CGM is not effective in reducing such crime and organizational change has been identified as posing barriers to successful implementation. This study provides a Massachusetts-based intervention on the organizational change elements of the CGM to better understand whether targeted guidance around organizational change affects the CGM goals of increased community capacity to address gang and youth violence and decreases in gang and youth violence. A quasi-experimental design, with two non-equivalent control groups, is employed whereby two cities as experimental sites engage in relational coordination strategies to bolster organizational change and to elicit greater communication, collaboration and coordination among participating agencies. Through employing interrupted time series (ITS) and relational coordination (RC) analyses, we take an extended look at hypotheses as they relate to the CGM model, more specifically that providing relational coordination support will increase community capacity to address gang and youth violence; and, increased community capacity will result in decreased gang and youth violence. This presentation will offer preliminary findings on police data and insights into baseline relational coordination data.

Authors

• Stephanie Smith, Suffolk University

• Brenda J. Bond, Suffolk University

• Erika Gebo, Suffolk University