Research on Early Intervention

By Miles Donelly-Krol

Head start employee reading to schoolchildren

NBC News

SKPOST — Applying research on early childcare programs to our understanding of criminal behavior.

Currently, we understand that criminal behavior can be very heavily influenced by one's early life. Childhood abuse has an understood likeliness to increase later criminal behavior (1), as does neglect (2). We also know that one's chance of experiencing this behavior increases as their income lowers (3)(4), leading us to that often cited (but not always understood) relationship between poverty and crime (5). Other things that contribute to this can be found in the other parts of an impoverished environment, like having lead in the home (6), or witnessing violence, which can both contribute to increased susceptibility to commit crime (7). This is one of the most major (and possibly most intuitive) means by which poverty can increase crime, that is, children raised in poverty may have early emotional and behavioral problems because they're put in harmful environments, and these early problems may manifest into crime later in life.

Another thing that contributes to increased propensity towards crime in lower income communities has to do with a low access to good jobs in some communities (8). More specifically, when good jobs are simply unavailable to people, they may to what is, ultimately, more economical work. Some research into this finds that this relationship between joblessness and crime is rarely applicable to anything other than property crimes (9), while other suggests that joblessness can contribute to drug trafficking, which brings in a whole host of other dangers (10). This, for the purposes of this article, is the other relevant means by which crime can happen.

Understanding these two facets by which crime can occur, it is important that, as a society, our solution(s) are capable of addressing both of these problems at once. This type of overreaching solution could be found with early education and home visiting programs. One such program, the most famous failure of it's kind because of it's supposed likeliness to "fade-out" (11), however the program is effective in lowering crime rates among its participants (12), specifically among African Americans (13). This is not to say that Head Start was wholly successful or that criticisms of it aren't valid, there were major impacts of Head Start that faded over time (14), it is just to say that even this well understood policy blunder demonstrated considerable gains as a means of crime prevention (15). Other such early intervention programs aren't always longitudinal enough to see effects on crime patterns, but they do offer other promising results that come after the mechanisms by which crime happens. The Nurse-Family Partnership is a very promising program of this nature, involving qualified home visitors and lead to a 20-50% reduction in abuse and neglect (16). The HFA (Healthy Families America) program has also been demonstrated to cut maltreatment by a third (17). Broader studies looking at these programs corroborate the idea that these programs reduce maltreatment, lead to better life outcomes (18)(19), reduce crime (20), and have a favorable cost-benefit ratio (21).

With these programs, the conditions of children can not only be bettered, tackling one of the first means pointed out as to why crime happens, but it also (albeit less directly) addresses the second means by which crime happens: joblessness (22). This combinations makes early intervention a very sufficient option as a major means of crime prevention.