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Crime Costs

• Each at-risk kid prevented from adopting a life of crime will save the country between $1.7 million and $2.3 million.

Early Education

• Head Start narrows the literacy skills gap by nearly half between children in poverty and all U.S. children.
• Eight out of 10 kindergarten teachers polled say that poorly prepared kids that didn't attend pre-k negatively impact well-prepared kids.
• Kids who didn't attend high-quality pre-kindergarten were five times more likely to become a chronic offender by age 27 than kids who did attend pre-kindergarten.
• Head Start serves only 33,584 children in Pennsylvania and only one in seven kids nationwide receive child care support through the Child Care and Development Block Grant.
• High/Scope Perry Preschool study found that high-quality pre-kindergarten saves $17 for every $1 invested with $11 of the savings from crime costs.
• Chicago Child-Parent Centers found that high-quality pre-kindergarten cuts child abuse and neglect rates in half.
• High-quality pre-kindergarten costs roughly $7,500 per child per year.

Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention

• Approximately 5,000 children in Pennsylvania are victims of abuse and neglect every year.
• Estimates are that the number of abused and neglected is three times higher than official confirmed cases.
• Research shows that kids are nearly one-quarter more likely to be arrested for violent crimes later in life due to the abuse they endured.
• In-home parent coaching programs have been shown to cut child abuse and neglect in half.
• Poor mothers who had been abused or neglected as a child were 13 times more likely to abuse or neglect their children than mothers who were not abused.
• Children of mothers not in an in-home parent coaching program had more than twice as many arrests as the children of mothers who received services.
• In-home parent coaching programs save as much as $4 for every $1 dollar invested.

After-School

• The hours from 3 to 6 PM on school days are the "prime time for juvenile crime."
• Approximately 26% of children in Pennsylvania are on their own after school.
• Studies show that the after school hours are the peak hours for teens to commit crime, be a victim of crime, be in or cause a car crash and smoke, drink or use drugs.
• One high-quality program found that boys left out averaged six times more crimes than teens in the program.
• A study of Boys & Girls clubs showed that housing projects without the clubs had 50 percent more vandalism and 37 percent worse drug activity.
• Teens with prior histories of arrest who were not participating in one California after-school program were twice as likely to be rearrested as similar teens in the program.
• The single most likely hour for a teen to commit a violent crime-homicide, rape, robbery, or assault-is between 3 PM and 4 PM on school days.

Troubled Kids

• More than 2 million teens are arrested each year.
• Forty percent of suburban counties and 12 percent of rural counties report gang activity.
• A police-community "carrot & stick" collaboration in Boston resulted in a two-thirds cut in youth homicides.
• Structure, support and discipline programs, such as Functional Family Therapy, cut repeat arrests by as much as half.
• Interventions with teen offenders save the public an estimated $9,000 to $24,000 in future crime costs.
• For children in sixth through tenth grade, nearly one in six - 3.2 million kids - are victims of bullying each year. An additional 3.7 million kids bully other children.
• Four of every 10 boys who bullied others as kids had three or more convictions by the time they turned 24.
• A program developed in Norway produced a 50 percent reduction of bullying there, large reductions in other countries, and a 20 percent reduction when it was first replicated in South Carolina.