Marc Klaas Joins Coalition Seeking to Prevent Crime

Marc Klaas awoke Friday steeled for closing arguments in the sentencing of the man convicted of abducting and murdering his 10-year-old daughter Polly in 1993. But the bereaved father-turned-victims rights advocate was thinking as much about prevention as about retribution.

While attorneys in California prepared to argue whether Richard Allen Davis should live or die, Klaas joined a new coalition of police organizations, prosecutors and crime victims in advocating children’s service programs as the most effective crime-fighting tool that the nation has to stem youth violence.

His voice piped into a Washington conference room filled with crime fighters and crime victims, Klaas touted the benefits of early-childhood programs like Head Start, parenting classes, organized after-school activities, job training and mentoring initiatives.

Without generous government support for such “vaccines,” Klaas said, the nation could suffer a plague of troubled children who will grow up to kill and rob the lives and dreams of tomorrow’s crime victims.

“Stopping crime by building more prisons is like trying to cure death by building more cemeteries,” Klaas told reporters by telephone.

Klaas’ plea came during a Washington press conference launching a new organization called Fight Crime: Invest in Kids. At a time when lawmakers are targeting a wide range of youth and crime-prevention programs for budget cuts and restructuring, the group will press Congress and state legislatures to support programs aimed at improving the lives of the children most likely to become juvenile offenders and adult criminals.

Sanford A. Newman, founder and president of the group, cited studies that evaluated the impact of several such programs, arguing that there is no better way to drive down violent crime than to invest in programs for children at risk.

In one study, low-income families whose 3- to 5-year-old children were enrolled in an intensive preschool program with weekly home visits were compared with children in the same housing project who were not enrolled. More than 20 years later, the arrest rates of those who participated in the program were half of those who did not. And the numbers of chronic offenders--those arrested more than four times--went from 1 in 3 among nonparticipants to 1 in 14 among those who had been enrolled in the program.

“Making sure kids have access to Head Start and good schools and community centers is the right thing to do but is also the smart thing to do--it is in our self-interest,” said Patrick Murphy, a former chief of police in New York City, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and Syracuse, N.Y., and who is currently director of the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ police policy board.

The new organization has won the support of the Fraternal Order of Police, the largest national police organization, and of several of the nation’s best-known prosecutors and big-city police chiefs.

There are currently 39 million children under the age of 10, many of them poor and unsupervised, warned James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University criminologist who joined the effort launched Friday.

“Prevention strategies aimed at young children and intervention approaches for at-risk teens will do the most to avert a future wave of teen violence,” Fox said in a statement of support for the group.

Among the issues the group expects to address:

* House and Senate lawmakers have proposed reducing or eliminating the $30 million now disbursed to states each year under a 1974 act that created a pool of money for the prevention of juvenile crime.

* Welfare bills passed by the House and Senate would plunge an additional 1.1 million children into poverty, according to the Urban Institute.

* While Congress has proposed small increases in funds for Head Start, the preschool program currently involves only one-third of the children it is designed to reach. It could fall further behind if legislation requiring mothers to take jobs within two years after they go on welfare is approved.