An ounce of prevention.

Congressional debate last year turned crime prevention into a four-letter word: pork. In state capitols as well, it's difficult to support expenditures that might reduce crime and prison costs in years to come voters are clamoring for action now.

"We may soon have a billion-dollar budget for corrections," Pennsylvania Representative Ron Cowell explains. "How can we be tough on crime and be smart while not breaking the bank? We need to invest in front-end programs intended to prevent violence. But the easiest thing to do [politically] is to raise money for jails, and that's a sentiment that is going to continue to prevail."

Historically, the rap on programs to prevent juvenile crimes is that they lacked statistical support or had vague results. But advocates now have more ammunition to justify spending money for prevention. While incarceration costs continue to take bigger bites out of state budgets, crime rates remain high. Countering the pork charge is new research that indicates that less-costly prevention programs work over time.

"We have more and better information on what works and what does not," says Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in San Francisco. "What works? Certain Head Start [preschool] programs, programs of family visitation and family preservation among others," he says.

PRESCHOOL PROGRAMS HELP

Good quality preschool programs, in particular, have been shown to be remarkably effective - years later - in reducing both the incidence and the severity of criminal behavior among children who participated in them. One of the best-known examples, the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project in Ypsilanti, Mich., showed that good preschools can reduce the costs of crime by nearly $150,000 per participant over a lifetime.

A 1993 report, Significant Benefits, found that after 20 years, participants had fewer arrests than a control group and were five times less likely to have been arrested five or more times. Other studies also document the reduction of juvenile criminal behavior through early care and education programs.

A Syracuse University study examined a program that provided child care and home visits to very poor families. Six percent of the program children, compared to 22 percent in a control group, became adolescent probation cases. Nonparticipants committed more robberies, burglaries and physical and sexual assaults. Juvenile justice system costs per child were 10 times less for the preschool home visiting group than for the control group. Other studies, including one by the Houston Parent-Child Development Center and another by the Yale Child Welfare Project, have come up with similar results, especially related to aggressive behavior in teens.

Despite encouraging evidence of the value of preschool in reducing later crime and delinquency, most of the one in four children in this country who live in poverty lack access to good prekindergarten programs. The U.S. General Accounting Office and U.S. Head Start Bureau have estimated that fewer than 40 percent of poor 3- and 4-year-olds participate in preschool including the well-known Head Start.

STARTING KIDS OUT RIGHT

Minnesota is among the states out to change that. In recent years, the Legislature has increased appropriations for Head Start, learning readiness and family support programs within general crime prevention budgets, and has established a Senate Crime Prevention Committee. "It's more effective to start kids out on the right foot than to try to turn them around after they have begun to engage in criminal behavior," said Minnesota Senate President Allan Spear. His proposals include spending a dollar on prevention for every dollar spent on corrections. "This is a way to emphasize long-term effects of early childhood programs on crime prevention," Spear said.

Over the next year, the Legislature will review task force recommendations to coordinate overall state crime prevention. Meanwhile, lawmakers are grappling with the governor's current request for a 25 percent corrections budget increase. If approved, the spending increase may drain money available for prevention and derail the FY 1996 dollar-for-dollar strategy.

In Tennessee, lawmakers adopted an "earlier is better" crime prevention plan by targeting services to at-risk infants, toddlers and preschoolers. The Early Childhood Development Act of 1994, formulated by the Joint Select Committee on Children and Youth, expanded family support and family preservation services. In addition, the law requires a statewide, early childhood education plan for all at-risk 3- and 4-year-olds. It addresses the cycle of violence associated with child abuse with a Healthy Start home visiting program for families with infants. The Tennessee package gets tough as well, but lawmakers sought to balance the tough measures with "get smart" provisions designed to prevent criminal activity.

Other states also included preschools for low income, at-risk children in their crime prevention packages. Delaware initiated an early childhood education program, and Colorado expanded its preschool and parent education programs in 1994.

Buddy Howell of the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) says early childhood programs mitigate some of the risk factors associated with an increased likelihood of delinquency and crime. Those risk factors include school failure, economic distress and child abuse.

"In using the risk factor approach to prevention, we have the potential for not only preventing delinquency in general, but [specifically] more serious, violent delinquency," Howell said. A recent Justice Department study found that children with a stronger school interest and commitment are less likely to engage in delinquent acts. And several researchers have shown that child abuse victims are more likely to commit serious crimes.

NIPPING VIOLENCE IN THE BUD

Increasingly, legislators are applying a research-based, risk factor approach to their prevention efforts. Based on a violence prevention research model supported by the OJJDP, the state of Washington passed 1994 legislation that asks local communities to assess risk factors and then choose from an array of services to assist families. The legislation outlines such programs as parent education and skills development, family preservation and support services, child care and early home visiting for parents of newborns.

The North Carolina General Assembly also focused last year on school success and family support to help reduce crime. The legislature appropriated $37 million for these programs, adding that to $67 million approved in 1993 for comprehensive early care and education. The 1994 package included money for schools to design new local programs to discourage juvenile crime. Included are school-based resource centers and after-school programs to address drop-out risk, safe learning environments and alternative schools. Money was ear-marked for grants to nonprofit agencies that have kindergarten through ninth-grade programs geared toward preventing crime and delinquency. Teachers and staff received more money to help failing students. Family resource centers were established in high-crime, low income communities and schools. North Carolina Representative Anne Barnes said the legislation recognizes the school and family problems that contribute to crime and delinquency. "There is a pretty strong feeling among most people, legislators included, that much of youth violence stems from juveniles' environments and early associations," she said.

North Carolina's crime prevention legislation was balanced with a number of "get tough" measures, including a boot camp for offenders ages 16 to 25 and allowing additional transfers of juvenile felons to adult court jurisdiction. Those moves make more sense to some lawmakers for reducing crime than prevention does. Representative Robert Brawley says prevention programs don't deter criminal acts. "The effect [of prevention programs] is negligible because the criminal doesn't fear the consequences," he says.

Others are skeptical of local control over prevention programs, including Representative Gene Arnold, who argues that some initiatives are too loosely defined to determine if the money is spent properly. "How do we know when we have achieved the goal we are trying to achieve?" he asks.

RISKS, PROGRAMS AND COLLABORATION

Pennsylvania has wrestled with some of those same questions over the past year as part of the state Anti-Violence Education Initiative. The project brought together leaders from the aging and youth, appropriations, education, health and welfare and judiciary committees as a Select Committee on Violence.

Following 10 months of study and an interim report, the committee released a final report late last year. The report articulated three primary objectives: recognizing risk factors of juvenile violence; beginning programs as early as possible; collaborating between state and local governments to better address the needs of children and families. The Pennsylvania work recognized that juvenile crime is no longer just a judiciary or human services concern, but one that cuts across many areas of state policy.

"The interdisciplinary approach [across legislative committees] has tremendous value in looking at youth violence," says Cowell, the former Pennsylvania Education Committee chair. "Violence is so pervasive that you can't box it into one committee."

Washington's recent legislation also recognized in statute that addressing the problem of violence requires "the concerted effort of all communities and all parts of state and local governments."

PREVENTION SAVES MONEY

Despite historical criticism that prevention programs lack results, as early as 1984 a Vanderbilt University study of Los Angeles County delinquency prevention programs lent credence to their cost benefits. The study found that prevention programs saved $1.40 for every $1 spent. In addition, more recent research supports the "earlier is better" juvenile violence arguments.

Starting Points, a 1994 Carnegie report documents a range of scientific evidence confirming that "during the first three years of life, children also learn - or fail to learn - to get along with other people, to resolve disputes peaceably and not through violence."

The last word has not been heard on which programs work and what saves money. But two things are certain: There's a growing number of teens reaching the age (16 to 17) when they're most likely to commit violent crimes; and prison spending, which rose faster than any other category of state general fund spending in 1995, will continue to increase. "If we do not address prevention, we will spend more and more money maintaining prisons, and have less for the education system," says Del Elliott, director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence. "The cost of incarcerating this [serious and violent offender] population will simply push the country under."

Looking to the next decade, Krisberg projects, "Demographics tell us we can expect a 20 percent increase in violent juvenile crime in 10 years. But we can do something today about the kids who otherwise are likely to be committing violent crimes 10 years from now."

RELATED ARTICLE: RAISING KIDS IN INNER-CITY WAR ZONES

The first three years are the most important time in a child's life, says the Carnegie research report Starting Points released in 1994 by its Task Force on Meeting the Needs of Young Children. Yet many children that age are exposed to violence in their communities and their homes.

"The escalating rate of violence in many American cities means that families are raising children in what have been described as 'inner-city war zones,'" the report contends.

According to one survey, "Forty-seven percent of mothers reported that their children had heard gunshots in their neighborhood, and one in 10 of these young children had witnessed a knifing or shooting before age 6."

How do we strengthen families? The task force recommends improved policies on parenting, child care, poverty and health care that can positively shape the next generation. Policies could include:

* Expanding proven parent education, support and counseling programs to teach parents conflict resolution in order to prevent child abuse and neglect.

* Implementing community-based programs to help families and children cope with the effects of living in unsafe and violent communities.

Scott Groginsky and Jay Kroshus track crime prevention legislation and children's issues for NCSL.