Abstract
Juvenile gangs pose a significant problem for citizens and criminal justice personnel. The contemporary societal reaction to juvenile gangs relies on law enforcement's suppression abilities and the housing capacities of correctional institutions. These tactics fail to target the underlying factors leading to gang membership and offer short term solutions at best. An alternate course of action, however, is called reformative intervention. Reformative intervention refers to efforts made to provide youth gang members with the necessary resources, services, and tools to facilitate positive social development leading them away from the gang life and towards pro-social individualism. The City of Stockton, California suffered from high youth gang homicide rates in the mid-1990s and developed a reformative intervention program called Operation Peacekeeper, based on Boston's Ceasefire pulling levers strategy. Through a series of interviews conducted with youth gang outreach workers of Peacekeeper, this study provides a description of the reformative intervention process utilized by the City of Stockton. Peacekeeper involves the collaboration of a wide variety of agencies each providing unique services that outreach workers recommend for their clients. Peacekeeper's outreach staff have Hispanic, African-American, and Asian backgrounds, which allows them to engage youth of the same ethnicity with greater ease. There is also one female outreach worker who handles all the female clients in the program. The program is structured according to a three-tiered system, where each tier (1, 2, and 3) denotes a client's progress towards competency in his/her own self-management toward becoming productive and contributing members of their local community. Once a youth reaches level 3, s/he is able to manage him/herself without the constant assistance of outreach worker.