Breaking the Gang: A Preventive Approach to Reduce Recruitment in Schools

Maria Micaela Sviatschi
Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Affairs
Princeton School of Public and International Affairs
Princeton University

We provide evidence that preventing gang recruitment at schools can durably improve youths' human capital, reduce their criminal involvement, and ultimately weaken criminal organizations. Exploiting the staggered rollout of a program in El Salvador that deployed police patrols to high-risk schools, which are central recruitment sites for gangs, and drawing on new administrative data from schools, field informants, and the police, we find that these preventive patrols reduce both dropout rates and gang enlistment by around 20 percent. Consequently, youth who were at critical recruitment ages when the program was active face lower incarceration rates for gang-related offenses as adults. The disruption to youth recruitment generates persistent effects on gangs' primary revenue source: we document a long-run decline in extortion with no displacement to neighboring areas, consistent with the localized nature of territorial control. These findings demonstrate that targeting recruitment margins can substantially limit criminal career formation and constrain gang operations, highlighting both the centrality of youth enlistment to gang sustainability and the limited substitutability between child and adult recruits.

Maria Micaela Sviatschi is assistant professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, specializing in labor and development economics with a focus on human capital, gender-based violence, and the economic impacts of crime and organized violence. Her research explores how children enter criminal careers in drug trafficking and gangs, and the role of state capacity and policies in reducing violence, particularly through collaborative projects across Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia.