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April 29, 2007

Guns and preschool

The Syracuse Family Development program went even further. Economically deprived families with poorly educated parents were given a five year program that began with prenatal care and continued through preschool. [FN220] The families were visited weekly by highly skilled child development trainers to help improve parenting techniques and to address other problems. The children were also placed in high-quality preschool programs. A follow-up fifteen years later found that only six percent of children from those families ended up with a probation record, compared to twenty-two percent from a control group, and the offenses perpetrated by the latter group were much more serious than the offenses of the former.

By age twenty-five, the graduates of the Syracuse program had only .01 felony convictions per capita, compared to .18 for the controls. The Syracuse program was expensive; the cost in 1997 dollars was $18,037. But in the long run, the government criminal justice costs avoided amounted to $13,442; and there were $16,717 in crime victim costs avoided. [FN222] Thus, even if we do not count the improved quality of life for the children, as well as their greater economic productivity, the Syracuse program, despite its great expense, created net savings through reducing crime.

John Donohue and Peter Siegelman have evaluated the comparative benefits of increased spending on incarceration versus increased spending on early childhood programs. They point out that marginal dollars spent on prisons are less cost-effective than average prison spending: because the worst criminals are already in prison, marginal increases in prison spending allow incarceration only of less dangerous or less active criminals. Donohue and Siegelman show that if an early-childhood program can be at least half as effective as the Perry program, then reducing prison construction spending in order to spend more on early childhood education may be more cost effective. Donohue and Siegelman caution that simply throwing money at early childhood programs is no solution; the failed Head Start program (which yields no observable long-term benefits for its participants) was inspired by the Perry Preschool success. Moreover, early childhood dollars should be concentrated on the children most at risk (particularly inner-city males without two parents), but the authors warn that political needs might force too much money to be spent on groups with much lower risks of future violent delinquency (e.g., middle-class females from two-parent homes).

"Guns, Gangs and Preschools: Moving Beyond Conventional Solutions to Confront Juvenile Violence," by David Kopel, Summer 2000 (footnotes omitted)

Posted at April 29, 2007 12:07 AM | Categories: America

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