An integrated public health and criminal justice approach to gangs: What can research tell us?

• A public health framework is applied to gang violence.
• Gang violence is a special case of youth violence.
• Youth violence should be the focus at primary and secondary prevention stages.
• Gang violence should be the focus at the tertiary prevention stage.

There has been a call to better link public health and criminal justice approaches to best address crime problems generally, and youth and gang violence in particular. Importantly, there has yet to be a systematic examination of how criminal justice approaches can be integrated within a public health framework. This paper examines the strengths and challenges with mapping gang research and evidence-informed practices onto a public health approach. Conceptual examination reveals benefits to utilizing an integrated framework, but it also exposes core problems with identification and prediction of gang joining and gang membership. The gang label as a master status is called into question. It is argued that a public health framework can inform public policy approaches as to when the focus should be youth violence versus gangs and gang violence.