Anti-Gang Initiative Announced

“Now we need to focus on giving young people, especially young men in our cities, better options than apathy, or gangs, or jail.”
-President George W. Bush, February 2, 2005

Gangs have become an increasingly deadly threat to the safety and security of our nation’s citizens. Addressing this threat is one of the top priorities of the Department of Justice, and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales recently announced an anti-gang initiative to combat gang violence across America.

The Attorney General’s strategy is twofold: First, prioritize prevention programs to provide America’s youth and offenders returning to the community with opportunities that help them resist gang involvement. Second, ensure robust enforcement policies when gang-related violence does occur.

The cornerstones of the Attorney General’s program are an expansion of the successful Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) program to include new and enhanced anti-gang efforts, and a new anti-gang program to be rolled out later this year in six cities with significant gang problems.

Key components of the Anti-Gang Initiative:

• Funding: The Justice Department will provide $30 million in grants to support new and expanded anti-gang prevention and enforcement efforts under the PSN initiative. These new funds will allow local PSN task forces to combat gangs by building on the effective strategies and partnerships developed under PSN.

• Collaboration: PSN brings together federal, state, and local law enforcement and communities in the effort to reduce gun crime across America. Each U.S. Attorney’s office has created partnerships and a strategy to prevent gun crime and to enforce the law against armed criminals.

• Increased prosecutions: Under this initiative, the number of federal firearms prosecutions increased 73 percent from FY 2000 to FY 2005. Almost all of these gun criminals are convicted and sentenced to time in prison.

Six City Comprehensive Anti-Gang Program

Under Attorney General Gonzales’s leadership, the Justice Department will establish a comprehensive anti-gang prevention and enforcement program in six communities experiencing a significant gang problem. This program will incorporate prevention, enforcement, and reentry efforts to address gang membership and gang violence at every stage.

• Prevention: The Justice Department will provide approximately $1 million in grants per community to support comprehensive prevention efforts such as the Gang Reduction Program, which addresses the personal, family, and community factors that contribute to juvenile delinquency and gang activity. Each U.S. Attorney will organize a summit of law enforcement and community leaders to discuss best practices, identify gaps in services, and create a prevention plan to target at-risk youth within their individual communities. U.S. Attorneys will be encouraged to utilize all local prevention resources, including existing programs that have successful track records like Weed and Seed and PSN.

• Enforcement: The Department will provide approximately $1 million in grants per community to help support enforcement programs focusing law enforcement efforts on the most significant violent gang offenders. The Department of Justice will create a national gang task force composed of representatives from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Drug Enforcement Administration; Federal Bureau of Investigation; and U.S. Marshals Service, among others. The task force will create law enforcement strategies and operations across agency lines aimed at dismantling national and transnational violent gangs.

• Reentry: The Department will provide approximately $500,000 per community to create mentor-based reentry assistance programs that will provide transitional housing, job readiness and placement assistance, and substance abuse and mental health treatment to prisoners reentering society.  Persons sentenced to prison may be gang-involved before conviction, become gang-involved while incarcerated, or risk gang involvement upon release. To help address those risks, the Bureau of Prisons will expand the Life Connections Program that currently operates in five of its facilities. At least three new programs will be started this year. This program seeks to bring reconciliation to the victim, the community, and the offender through personal transformation based on the offender’s faith commitment.