Early Intervention Shows Promise in Reducing and Prevention Future Crime

By Darien Bates

In 1962 the High/Scope Educational Foundation started what has become the well-known educational research project, the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project. The project involved studying 123 African Americans aged three and four, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, born into poverty and at risk of failing in school.

By random selection, half of the students were provided with a quality pre-school program and the other half were not. The program then tracked the lives of both groups of students for the next 35 years, documenting how their time in preschool changed the direction of their lives. The conclusions, as documented in a report released in November 2004, were staggering.

The results showed that the preschool experience had a profound effect on the direction of the kids’ lives. Those enrolled in the program showed a much higher percentage of high school graduation compared to students not enrolled (65% to 45%). Mental impairment was significantly reduced (8% vs. 36%) as well as the percentage of those who had to repeat a grade (21% vs. 41%).

But the study also showed that the effects went beyond performance in school. By the age of 40, males who had been through the program had a 20% higher employment rate (80% to 60%) than those who had not been enrolled in a preschool program. For females the difference was even greater, with a 25% employment difference between program and non-program students (80% to 55%).

As for the effect of the program on the criminal justice system, the study showed that those who participated in the program were significantly less likely to ever be sentenced for a crime (19% to 43%).

With the increase in quality preschool programs throughout the country like Head Start, a preschool program for at-risk children which has seen enrollment almost double in the past 15 years, there are indications that early intervention and schooling have contributed to recent improvements in the quality of life for children, and more significantly, dramatic reductions in youth crime rates.

Last Wednesday, the Brookings Institution presented its Child Well-Being Index (CWI) for 2003 with a degree of optimism, the statistics showing that the state of the nation’s young people has steadily risen since a dip in the mid 1990s, and continued to improve over the numbers from 1975, when the index was first calculated.

Notable among the improvements was the continuance of the trend in decreased youth violence, a problem that reached its peak in the early nineties, and has since fallen to all-time lows.

But even as the numbers show a positive face on an issue that a decade ago was seen as one of the biggest problems facing communities, researchers and law enforcement alike warn against considering the battle over too soon. Despite the positive trends, juvenile crime and specifically, violent crime in the U.S. remains high compared to other industrialized countries, and policy changes threaten to turn back the clock on the improvements that have been made.

The Brookings Institute began compiling CWI information in 1975 as a way to analyze the massive investment that America makes in its children. The idea was to create a measure that could identify shortcomings in youth systems and provide some direction for any needed change.

The figure is compiled of 28 different national indicators in seven quality of life domains. The domains include: family economic well-being, health, safety/behavioral concerns, educational attainments, community connectedness, social relationships (family and peers) and emotional/spiritual well-being.

The primary focus of the conference last week was on youth behavioral concerns, which includes cigarette, alcohol and drug use, teen pregnancy and violent crime involvement, all areas that have seen substantial improvement over the past 10 years.

James Lynch, professor and chair of public affairs at American University, talked specifically about the dynamic shift in violent youth crimes and crime victimization, which have both decreased significantly since the early 90s.

He said that the trend should be looked at as two different developments, the first extending from 1993 to 1998 and the second from 1998 to 2003. These two sections, Lynch said, while they both involve a significant drop in youth crime, seem to be the result of two different causal factors.

During the mid to late 90’s, the first period of decreasing youth crime rates, Lynch said that it is possible to attribute a lot of the decreases to stepped up efforts against the drug trade, which was responsible for a lot of the youth involvement in crime, working as runners, joining gangs and carrying firearms for protection.

During that time period, programs like COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services), which focused on creating a greater personal involvement between law enforcement and the communities they protect, were instituted to help stem the drug trade that was ravaging inner cities.

The concepts focused not only on catching individual criminals, but on creating an atmosphere where people are comfortable with officers and where the presence of law enforcement could prevent new crimes. The program was supposed to put 100,000 new officers on the streets, and while that number was never entirely reached, around 70,000 officers were added to help areas in need.

Consistent with those stepped up efforts, Lynch said that the largest decreases in youth crime were seen among African American youth, crimes committed in groups and stranger-to-stranger violence, all consistent with the trends in the crack/cocaine epidemic which had been steadily decreasing and stabilizing.

But stepped up drug policing fails to explain the continuing decreases beyond 1998. Lynch said that while youth crime continued to drop, suddenly a more significant drop was being seen among white populations, diffusing across a wider range of people, making it harder to disaggregate the data and identify the specific causes of the change.

But the answer could be in the results of the High/Scope study.

One long-time advocate of programs to assist child development at an early age is Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, which has attempted to target youth violence by working with at risk kids before they start becoming problems.

Speaking at the Brookings discussion Wednesday, Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske said that his department founded the program after one of his officers was shot a dozen times by a 19 year-old male, recently released from jail. During the subsequent trial, it was discovered that not only was the young man a long time offender but had shown signs of problems since grade school and had been born with fetal alcohol syndrome to an alcoholic mother.

The department decided to look into what they could have done, and what they could be doing to intervene earlier and prevent problems from getting to the point where an officer is killed.

“We didn’t see all of this as an incredible amount or really wonderful social service on behalf of the police department,” he said. “You know, what we saw it as was officer safety.”

The department wrote a grant and hired a social worker for the police department. Officers would then make referrals to the social worker whenever they came across kids in difficult situations. Similarly, when officers responded to domestic violence calls, where the woman was pregnant, they would insure that she was receiving proper prenatal care, hopefully leading to a healthier infant.

The program has grown over the past 10 years to where it now includes over 2,000 police chiefs, sheriffs, prosecutors, and crime victims across the U.S. The organization is a bi-partisan with two thirds of the members from the Republican Party.

In-depth research of intervention programs, such as that done in the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project, has yielded results that support the work of the Seattle Police Department.

Michael Kharfen, communications director for Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, said that research like the Perry Study shows the profound effect that an investment in services for young children can have on later social integration and eventual success.

“These are not things that turn around immediately, because four-year-olds don’t go out and commit crimes,” he said. But he said the long term effect on the crime rates, and the short term benefits in the classroom are indicative of the importance.

The effect of preschool programs go beyond helping the students enrolled in the program, a recent poll conducted of kindergarten teachers showed that students who took part in preschool programs were more sociable and less likely to create disruptions affecting other students’ learning

But despite the promising statistics, funding for programs to provide services for all eligible children is far short of the need. Kharfen said that Head Start only serves around one in seven of eligible children.

“Given that we know they work, the question is; why haven’t we stepped up to the plate?” Kharfen said.

Not only has federal funding been short of need, but budget cuts threaten to scale back programs that are already in place. Along with Head Start, other programs that are slated for the chopping block include child care for at-risk families, after school programs, funding for anti-gang work and the COPS program.

The combination of cutting the long term programs like Head Start and short term enforcement could affect future youth crime rates.

“It’s cutting off the right arm and left arm in crime prevention,” Kharfen said. The other alternative to early intervention seems to be in incarceration, which Kharfen pointed out is much more expensive than intervention program. Providing quality preschool programs for one year costs $7,000 per child, compared to $30,000 a year cost for incarcerating somebody in a state or federal prison, not to mention the damages from the crime and costs from the criminal justice system. Kharfen said that alone should be enough to convince people to take another look at these programs, no matter what one’s political affiliation.