Evansville Law Enforcement Leaders: Invest in Early Education or Foot Bigger Prison Bill Later
Sep 3rd 2009
EVANSVILLE, IND. -- At a news conference today, Evansville Police Chief Brad Hill, Vanderburgh County Sheriff Eric Williams, and Vanderburgh County Prosecutor Stanley Levco released a research brief indicating that high-quality early learning programs for at-risk young children ages birth to five can significantly reduce crime and ultimately cut corrections costs.
Currently in Indiana, there are nearly 43,000 incarcerated adults in jails and state prisons, with corrections costs exceeding $635,000,000 every year. The brief states that Indiana would save about $150,000,000 in taxpayer dollars if it cut prison costs by a quarter by investing in early learning.
"Quality early education is the foundation for a successful life," Chief Hill said. "If we help them learn to make a sentence in preschool now, it's less likely they will be serving a sentence in prison later on."
A long-term study of the high-quality Perry Preschool in Michigan found that by age 40, the kids left out of the program were 85 percent more likely to be sentenced to jail or prison. Another study detailed in the report showed that at-risk kids who did not attend Chicago's Child-Parent Centers were 24 percent more likely to be incarcerated than similar kids who did attend.
Sheriff Williams emphasized the cost-saving benefits of investing in high-quality early childhood education and care, especially for at-risk young children. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis found that the Perry Preschool program had an annual rate of return on investment of 16 percent. The majority of the cost savings in the Perry study came from reductions in crime and incarceration.
"State budgets are tight today, so we need to carefully consider how we spend scarce taxpayer dollars," Sheriff Williams said. "We either pay now for high-quality early education or pay a whole lot more later for high-security incarceration."
The new Early Learning Challenge Fund will support early education programs, such as Head Start, Early Head Start, pre-kindergarten or quality child care, which offer constructive environments for the healthy growth and development of young children in the first five years of life. The education committee in the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill in July that includes support for the Early Learning Challenge Fund.
Law enforcement said that more support is needed at the state and federal level to ensure that quality early childhood programs are available and affordable to more families. Costs for enrolling young children in early learning programs can run as high as $7,300 a year, which many families are unable to afford.
The need to increase high-quality early learning opportunities is great. For example, the federally-funded Head Start program for children in poverty serves only half of eligible children nationwide due to inadequate funding. And the youngest children, from birth to age 3, are even more dramatically underserved. In fact, Early Head Start serves about three percent of eligible infants and toddlers nationally.
The research shows that quality is essential to getting the crime and incarceration reduction benefits of early learning. The Early Learning Challenge Fund legislation will enable states to adopt best practices, including higher qualifications for teachers and caregivers, smaller class sizes, and early screening and treatment of mental, emotional and behavioral problems, as well as parent coaching, which teaches at-risk families ways to promote their children's development.
"We know the cost to society when someone becomes a career criminal. If getting these kids access to early learning can help us avoid those costs, then we need to make sure they have that opportunity today," said Prosecutor Levco.
Hill, Williams and Levco are members of FIGHT CRIME: INVEST IN KIDS, an anti-crime organization led by 5,000 police chiefs, sheriffs, prosecutors and violence survivors nationwide, including 74 in Indiana.
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