Breadcrumb
- Federal Resources
Federal Resources
Bureau of Justice Assistance Training and Technical Assistance
This resource provides technical assistance to practitioners in state, local, and tribal justice systems.
Gang Resistance and Education Program
The G.R.E.A.T. Program is a school-based, law enforcement officer-instructed classroom curriculum. With prevention as its primary objective, the program is intended as an immunization against delinquency, youth violence, and gang membership.
National Reentry Resource Center
Funded by the Second Chance Act of 2008, and launched by the Council of State Governments Justice Center in 2009, the National Reentry Resource Center provides education, training, and technical assistance to states, tribes, territories, local governments, service providers, non-profit organizations, and corrections institutions working on prisoner reentry.
Safeguarding Children of Arrested Parents: Trauma Prevention Policy
The Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs (OJP), in partnership with the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) created a policy, Safeguarding Children of Arrested Parents. The policy, which reflects input from subject-matter experts and stakeholders, provides strategies for law enforcement to improve their procedures for interactions with children when a parent is arrested.
Why Youth Join Gangs
OJJDP, BJA, and the National Gang Center developed “Why Youth Join Gangs,” an online video that features (a) gang researchers and practitioners providing their perspectives on gang joining and (b) youth sharing their gang experiences. The video highlights risk factors that may play a role in a youth’s decision to join a gang and behaviors that might be observed when interacting with youth at high risk of joining a gang.
Parents’ Guide to Gangs: Now Available in Spanish
NGC has published a Spanish version of the Parents' Guide to Gangs. This resource is designed to provide parents with answers to common questions about gangs and to help them recognize and prevent gang involvement.
Video: Safeguarding Children of Arrested Parents Training
This training video shows children telling their own stories about how they were affected by the arrest of a parent, and demonstrates the core principles from the Model Policy for Safeguarding Children of Arrested Parents (PDF, 38 pages), illustrating actions law enforcement officers can take to reduce trauma.
Resource: Redesigned National Gang Center Website
This redesigned website features new focus areas on criminal justice, communities and research, an inquiries section for quicker responses from staff, new forms to request technical assistance, the National Gang Center blog, and OJJDP Comprehensive Gang Model tools. Communities can utilize these resources in their gang prevention, intervention, and suppression efforts.
Share with Youth: A Roadmap to Behavioral Health: A Guide to Using Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder Services
This guide (PDF, 24 pages) can help people understand how to use health insurance coverage to improve their mental and physical health. It provides an eight step road map for understanding behavioral health, finding and accessing appropriate providers, and staying on the road to recovery.
A Guide to Assessing Your Community’s Youth Gang Problem
An important facet to implementing OJJDP's Comprehensive Gang Model in a community is to first assess the youth gang problem. This assessment includes collecting quantitative and qualitative data from community representatives such as law enforcement, school faculty, youth, parents, community leaders, probation officers, gang members, grass roots organizations, and local government. Data collected includes the perception of the gang problem as well as what the community considers as priority needs such as tutoring, jobs training, increased police presence, and mentoring for youth.
Aftercare Services
This Bulletin examines aftercare services that provide youth with comprehensive health, mental health, education, family, and vocational services upon their release from the juvenile justice system.
Best Practices to Address Community Gang Problems: OJJDP's Comprehensive Gang Model
The Comprehensive Gang Model developed by the OJJDP focuses on community prevention and intervention in balance with law enforcement suppression activities. The model involves five strategies for responding to gang-involved youth and their families. These include community mobilization, opportunities provision, social intervention, suppression, organizational change and development. This brief discusses best practices for implementing the model.
Confronting Commercial Sexual Exploitation and Sex Trafficking of Minors in the United States
This OJJDP-sponsored report, released by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, aims to strengthen prevention, identification, and response efforts by offering recommendations for the response to commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking of minors.
Gender-Specific Programming
This resource page from the OJJDP provides a comprehensive summary about girls and delinquency and their involvement in the juvenile justice system. It also covers more in-depth information about how girls develop differently than boys, how this affects their experiences with the juvenile justice system, and why services need to be tailored to their needs. Evaluation of gender-specific programming has shown encouraging results in substance abuse and gang prevention programs for girls.
Growth of Youth Gang Problems in the United States: 1970-98
An OJDDP report on the growth of youth gang problems in the United States between 1970-1998.
Highlights of the 2012 National Youth Gang Survey
Conducted by the National Gang Center, the National Youth Gang Survey uses data from a large, representative sample of local law enforcement agencies to track the size and scope of the national youth gang problem. This fact sheet highlights the findings of the 2012 National Youth Gang Survey (PDF, 4 pages), including trends in gang activity, gang membership designation, and antigang measures.
Highlights of the 2010 National Youth Gang Survey
The Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention has released “Highlights of the 2010 National Youth Gang Survey,” a fact sheet that discusses the prevalence of gangs and gang activity in the United States, as well as reasons for gang-member migration and external gang influences.
Implementing the OJJDP Comprehensive Gang Model
This fact sheet gives an overview of the five original communities that were awarded grants to implement demonstration projects of the Comprehensive Gang Model.
Juvenile Justice Bulletin: Gang Prevention
This bulletin presents research on why youth join gangs and how a community can build gang prevention and intervention services.
Juvenile Justice Journal, Vol. VII, No. 1 (Mental Health Issue)
This issue discusses incarcerated youth with mental health issues, including challenges and solutions.
National Gang Center
National Gang Center assists policymakers, practitioners, and researchers in the development and implementation of effective, community-based gang prevention, intervention, and suppression strategies
National Youth Gang Survey Analysis
This annual survey of law enforcement agencies is developed and implemented by the National Gang Center and is used to assess the extent of gang problems by measuring the presence, characteristics, and behaviors of local gangs in jurisdictions throughout the country.
Predictors of Youth Violence
This Juvenile Justice Bulletin from the OJJDP gives a comprehensive discussion of risk factors for youth violence, including gang membership, across the domains of individual, family, school, peer, and community factors. The Bulletin also gives a brief overview of a study that looked at predictors of violent or serious delinquency by age group and includes a discussion of what the results mean for implementing interventions and appropriately using the identified risk factors.
Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Strategic Planning Tool
This tool was developed to help communities assess gang problems and plan strategies to deal with the issue.
OJJDP Safe Start Center
The Safe Start communities are funded competitively through OJJDP, and work to coordinate the efforts of service providers in key areas, such as early childhood education, health, child welfare, substance abuse prevention and intervention, domestic violence, law enforcement, and the courts to address the needs of children exposed to violence.