I work at a juvenile facility housing over a hundred 16-18 year olds in a dorm-type setting. There are 6 “dorms” and when a kid comes in they check gang affiliation and rivals. Then the minor is placed on one side of the facility or the other based on this info. Over half of our population are in a gang and many are on “gang-terms” regarding their probation. My issue is this, it appears that separating minors based on their gang affiliation serves only to re-inforce the gang member mentality and gives the minor a sense of empowerment for engaging in this behavior. I am curious as to how other facilities deal with this issue and are there any evidence-based intake procedures that work better than this?

Your thinking is probably right, but the facilities think of the high cost of lawsuits when good little johnny gets beat up when we housed him with a rival gang member when we should have known they wouldn’t get along. And judges go along with it. Instead of forcing them to live together and deal with their differences (usually just the stupid zip code they live in), we put them together reinforce the gang mentality, and let them reorganize, and recruit more members while locked up so when they hit the streets, they can pick up where they left off without missing a beat.

I appreciate your input and it is probably right on. It just gets very frustrating when our mission is to try and reintegrate these guys back into the community and all we are really doing is warehousing gang members and sending the same gang members back into the community to terrorize.