Gangs, Criminal Offending, and an Inconvenient Truth

Abstract

For a theoretically driven school-based program, there is much to like about the findings from the 1and 4-year evaluations of the Gang Resistance Education and Training (G.R.E.A.T.) program provided by Esbensen, Osgood, Peterson, Taylor, and Carson (2013, this issue). Relative to the control group, students who received the 13 lessons of the G.R.E.A.T. curriculum had (a) more positive scores across a range of attitudinal measures central to several theories of criminal behavior; (b) improved police–youth relationships and lower odds of gang membership, satisfying two of the three primary goals of the program; and (c) long-term positive effects on many of the attitudinal outcomes, as well as police–youth relationships and gang membership. The findings for gang membership are important because they stand in contrast to a large body of work, including the first national evaluation of G.R.E.A.T. (Esbensen, Osgood, Taylor, and Peterson, 2001), making this the first study with rigorous randomized control trial evaluation to have a demonstrable impact on decreasing the rates of gang membership. Despite being a “gang” spinoff of the ineffective Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) program, the aggregate results suggest that the more inviting and optimistic acronym is indeed fitting for the G.R.E.A.T. program. But the picture is not all rosy. The third primary program goal to “prevent violent and criminal activity” was not achieved despite positive program effects on gang membership and numerous mediating mechanisms. This finding flies in the face of the logic of gang