Rahway Comprehensive Antigang Program

Youth gangs continue to have a significant adverse impact on youth, families, and communities across America. A growing number of communities have adopted OJJDP’s Comprehensive Gang Model, a multistrategy, multidisciplinary approach that has proven to be effective in reducing gang activity. The fiscal year 2016 Comprehensive Antigang Strategies and Programs solicitation provides funding for localities to enhance coordination of federal, state, and local resources in support of community partnerships implementing the following antigang programs: primary prevention, secondary prevention, gang intervention, and targeted gang enforcement.

The goals of this program are to reduce the number of youth in Rahway who are involved in gang activity by 33 percent within 3 years, and to reduce the number of gang-related crimes by 33 percent in that same period. Related to this outcome-oriented goal are the process-oriented goals of reducing risks and increasing protective factors for the Rahway youth population as a whole. Community-based gang prevention, intervention, and suppression will involve multiple organizations and programs working in partnership to deliver complementary services to a specific population—Rahway youth ages 11 to 19—in a targeted area. The four-pronged approach of Rahway’s antigang strategy will include targeted enforcement of youth who commit the most serious and chronic offenses, intervening with youth who are already gang involved, preventing youth who have been identified as being at high risk from entering a gang, and targeting the entire population in high-crime, high-risk areas through the implementation of programs that address risk and protective factors.

CA/NCF