Yabbies - a novel

A quiet crusader

From The Courier-Mail, Saturday

A quiet crusader for social justice

By our US correspondent, Maggie Combin

It's the most comprehensive social study ever undertaken. Its credentials are impeccable, its logic is flawless, its results are  undeniable. It could well be the answer to inner-city stress, the best way to eradicate the seeds of crime. And it's simple, cheap and effective.

So why are the US authorities so studiously ignoring it?

Perhaps it's because it doesn't involve guns and violence. It doesn't involve jail. It doesn't involve punishment of any kind. In fact it doesn't involve much of anything they'd know as 'crime prevention'.

Because the one thing that's been proven to reduce crime – and reduce it dramatically – is entirely at the other end of the scale.

Playschools.

Since the mid-1970s, members of the HighScope project have worked tirelessly with inner-city kids and their families in some of the most run-down, crime-infested districts of urban Detroit, Michigan. Over the years, more than 30,000 two- and three-year-olds have passed through their doors.

The results are startling. As children, as teenagers, and then as adults, HighScope kids have markedly different lives from their compatriots in other cities. On average, they are two-thirds less likely to commit a crime; their incomes are 40 percent higher; they are 70 percent more likely to marry, and much more likely to stay married.

It's good for the individual, obviously, and good for society too. But it also makes sound economic sense. The figures show that for every dollar spent on HighScope, the effective return to the community is at least seven times that much.

And all of this from just six months in playschool.

So how does this happen? When I visited HighScope's leader David Weikart and his colleagues earlier this week, what I saw going on in the small schoolroom behind us seemed much the same as in any other pre-school. There were more parents than usual, including fathers, engaged in the activities, but on the surface that was about it.

Weikart explained the difference. "The content of what we teach doesn't matter much. It's more about the context. What we show is that every action has consequences, and that everyone, even a two-year-old, has choices about those actions that can shape their lives."

Weikart's guiding mantra for the children is 'Plan, Do, Review'. "What works is helping people to understand that they alone have the choices that matter", says this quiet crusader for social justice. "Punishment doesn't work. It never has."

Britain's Home Office agrees. "HighScope is brilliant, we need to be doing more of it", said a spokesman there last week. "Prison does work, after a fashion, but it is way too late and ruinously expensive. If you increase the prison population by 25 percent, you can reduce crime by up to one percent. Prison should only be regarded as an option of last resort."

But it is advice that is falling on deaf ears in Weikart's homeland. The state of Michigan recently withdrew further funding for HighScope, and is instead launching an ambitious prison-building programme, aiming to complete two new prisons next year alone. It seems probable that the only people who will gain from this policy are the shareholders of the ever-growing band of private companies who will run the new prisons.

Last month the US passed a grim milestone: two and a half million people, or one percent of the entire adult population, are now serving sentences behind prison bars. And most of these prisoners are young and black, as in so much of HighScope's Detroit.

It is anyone's guess as to how long it will take the US to under­stand that Weikart is right, and that there is a better, cheaper way. As one who has seen too much already of the carnage in American society, that day cannot come soon enough.