How universal pre-K can reduce overall U.S. crime

Associate Director of Research, Ruth Paris, offers insight on how universal pre-k can impact youth development. 

Excerpt from The 19th* (19thnews.org) 

By Mariel Padilla

“In his early career as a law enforcement officer, Vernon Stanforth, the president of the National Sheriffs’ Association, said he often saw arrests of grandfathers, fathers and sons of the same family — a generational cycle of incarceration. Now, he’s also seeing grandmothers, mothers and daughters enter the cycle.

‘Many of our children are being raised by grandparents, and I think today we’re even seeing some of our small children being raised by great-grandparents,’ Stanforth said Thursday in a panel on early childhood education and juvenile crime. ‘That cycle has not been broken, and we have to break that cycle somehow.’

Law enforcement is too reactionary, Stanforth argued. A first-grade teacher once told him that she could look in her classroom and pick out which kids were going to be in jail in 20 years. She was accurate in her experience, and he was alarmed.”

Read the full article at: https://19thnews.org/2021/10/reduce-crime-universal-pre-k/