Quality early education prevents kids’ involvement in crime

    As police chief, it’s my job to protect the public and arrest criminals. But I also know that by the time an individual is arrested and charged with a crime, we, as a society, have failed in many respects. To truly be successful in the fight against crime, we must take steps to prevent crime from happening in the first place. We need to be smart about the causes of crime, and the cures.     Research and experience have shown me that helping kids get the right start in life at very early ages is strategically vital in our efforts to control crime. High-quality childcare and education programs like Head Start and Early Head Start have proven to reduce later crime. These programs provide our state’s most vulnerable children with a social and educational foundation and also have dramatic crime prevention benefits.
    One of our nation’s longest running studies on the outcomes of high-quality early care and education followed the low-income, at-risk children who have attended the Chicago Child-Parent Centers since 1967. Forty years of research shows that at-risk children from the same neighborhoods who were left out of this program were 70 percent more likely to be arrested for a violent crime by the time they were 18 years old.
    In another similar longitudinal study of Michigan’s High/Scope Perry preschool programs, children who were left out of the program were five times more likely to become chronic lawbreakers as adults than similar kids who did not have the preschool experience.
    These studies also show that high-quality early learning experiences have strong education benefits as well, including academic improvements in vocabulary and early writing skills, and higher graduation rates.
    It is disturbing to read in the recent “Kids Count” report by the Maine Children’s Alliance that the percentage of eligible Maine children enrolled in Head Start, the premier federal-state pre-kindergarten program, has dropped – from 32 percent in 2006 to 30 percent in 2007. In Maine there are currently 9,146 at-risk 3- and 4-year-olds who are eligible but not enrolled in Head Start due to lack of funding. Far fewer, less than seven percent of eligible children nationally, are able to participate in Early Head Start (the program from birth-to-age-three) due to lack of funding.
    As a society, we should be making strategic investments that can help get kids started on the right track, keep them out of crime and give them the skills they need to be successful future Maine workers, and thus our future taxpayers.
    A report released in January 2007 by the national anti-crime organization Fight Crime: Invest In Kids found that fully funding Head Start would prevent as many as 150 Maine children from becoming criminals each year because of the way it gets kids ready to learn and to succeed in school and in life.
    These kinds of investments in our children would also save Maine money. Fight Crime: Invest In Kids estimates a $10 benefit for every dollar spent on high-quality Head Start in Maine. This is money saved from future special education, lower grade retention and criminal justice expenses. Head Start graduates are also more likely to have increased lifetime earnings than peers who lack a quality pre-kindergarten experience.
    For Maine’s law enforcement community, the crime-prevention benefits of investing in Head Start, Early Head Start and quality childcare are impossible to ignore. Almost every law enforcement officer who has patrolled a beat or worked in a jail has watched children progress from minor behavior problems in elementary school to more serious juvenile offenses to adult felonies.
    For these reasons, Maine law enforcement leaders and others are calling on Congress this year to increase Head Start and Early Head Start funding by $1 billion and increase funding for the Child Care Development Block Grant by $874 million. This will simply restore services to children to the FY02 levels before years of budget cuts and flat funding. These additional investment will not only help restore ground lost over the last several years, but will also set us on a path toward meeting the unmet early care and education needs of at-risk, low-income kids all across our country.
    In Maine we are fortunate that all four of our Members of Congress have been supportive of increases in Head Start, Early Head Start and the childcare development block grants. Currently the U. S. Senate and House members are negotiating a final budget compromise on the funding levels for these programs for the coming year. We hope a majority in Congress will join the Maine delegation in fighting for funding increases in these vital programs.
    We must cut off that pipeline that keeps feeding very young people into the criminal justice system. Investing in high-quality early learning programs will help to that.
    Gahagan is Caribou’s police chief and a member of Fight Crime: Invest In Kids Maine.