There is more that could be done to prevent young people from embarking on a life of crime. The Pew report rightly notes the success of the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project in Michigan, which began in the 1960s. The project has reduced delinquency among children of (mostly) poor black women by exposing them to a high-quality preschool program.
What we have learned from High/Scope is especially noteworthy because a random sample of youngsters were enrolled in the preschool program and the results were compared with those of a control group.
The Pew report could have mentioned at least 10 other crime-prevention programs that work. They can be found in "Blueprints for Violence Prevention," published by the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado, and include Big Brothers/Big Sisters, nurse home-visitation programs and various special education programs in high schools. All were rigorously tested by controlled experiments in at least two locations.
But even with prevention programs, there will always be many people in prison. A major challenge for scholars today is to discover better ways of placing ex-inmates back into the community. If such methods can be devised, we can reduce the large number of parolees who are sent back to prison for violating the terms of their release.
But we should not suppose that, except for some minor drug offenders, we imprison too many people. There are still people who ought to be in prison and are not. There are more than 1 million felons on probation, in many cases because prisons are overcrowded, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. There are violent gang members who are hard to arrest and convict because their neighbors are afraid to go to the police or testify against them.
It is discouraging to read a report by an important private organization that can do no better than say we incarcerate too many people, get nothing from it and are stealing money from higher education.
