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This study employs in‐depth interviews (n = 45) with men 25–34 years in age who live in a Philadelphia neighborhood heavily impacted by mass incarceration. It asks the following: 1) How do they perceive risk? 2) How do they organize their daily routines in response to it? 3) Are there racial differences in perceptions and adaptations to risk? Nearly all of the men of color in the study reported staying in their houses and avoiding public spaces, viewing them as unpredictable and posing an unacceptable level of risk. They worried about “drama” or the potential for interactions with others to lead to attention by the police. Their practice of “network avoidance” often meant a complete lack of engagement in their community. Network avoidance is a racialized adaptation to the expansion of the criminal legal apparatus and the unpredictable nature of men's interactions with its agents and enforcers. It reproduces the effects of incarceration by essentially turning their homes into prisons. Network avoidance effectively erases young men of color from the public sphere in the same way that incarceration removes them from their communities, with considerable costs for the men themselves and for their neighborhoods.

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Research Summary No gang prevention or intervention programs meet the standards for effectiveness promulgated by Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development. This randomized controlled trial of a well‐known program—Functional Family Therapy—that was modified to address the needs of gang‐involved adolescents yields two main findings. First, youth at high risk for gang membership and their families engaged with and successfully completed the program at the same level as low‐gang‐risk youth. Second, the effectiveness results varied by gang‐risk status. For youth at high risk for gang membership, the treatment group had significantly lower recidivism rates at the 18‐month follow‐up as compared with a “treatment as usual” control group. For youth at low risk for gang membership, however, no consistent differences were found between the treated and control groups. Policy Implications Modifying and extending evidence‐based delinquency programs to gang‐involved youth seems to be a reasonable strategy for developing a wider array of effective programs to respond to the challenge of street gangs. The differential findings by gang‐risk status suggests that the juvenile justice system should expand the use of evidence‐based community programs to higher risk youth, including those identified as being “at risk” because of their gang involvement.