
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, March 30, 1995                   TAG: 9503300066
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

INTERVENE BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE

MIDNIGHT BASKETBALL? Sure, by including such activities for young people in its parks-and-recreation programs, Roanoke may be preventing some criminal activity.

But by the time they're big enough to go for the hoops and stay up til midnight, youngsters destined for lives of crime may already have become hoodlums or drug pushers. If crime prevention is the goal, the city's increasing focus on early intervention in the lives of identifiably troubled children is likely to be far more effective in the long run.

Roanoke has noticeably stepped up early-intervention efforts - for example, with support for the West End Center's programs for at-risk youngsters; a pilot project at Jackson Middle School for kids with family problems; and one-on-one help for children as young as 4 years old who show signs of anti-social behavior and other patterns that may mark them for future failure in school as well as run-ins with the law.

Such endeavors, involving school officials, social-services workers, the juvenile-court system, Total Action Against Poverty and others, are not merely commendable. In a city where more than 50 percent of the children in public schools live in poverty - with poverty being the single strongest demographic predictor of crime - these efforts are urgently needed.

In truth, more - and more effective - early intervention is needed throughout the state. While some communities like Roanoke are beginning to realize the benefits, a legislative task force headed by state Sen. Ed Houck of Spotsylvania has found that too often the programs are fragmented. Initiatives are also often frustrated, if not rendered irrelevant, by lack of adequate funding.

Gov. George Allen shakes his head at the shame and sorrow of it all. ``Kids killing kids. Kids killing adults ... This is what the frightening new reality is here in Virginia.''

The governor made that comment last week while leading his new Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform on a tour of overcrowded Beaumont Juvenile Correctional Center - home to some of the state's most incorrigible young thugs. He used the visit to highlight the need for a new $11.3 million juvenile prison.

There's not much doubt a new facility is needed. Overcrowding is standard operating procedure at all of the state's juvenile correctional centers - and it's sure to get worse. Virginia's rate of serious juvenile crime, zooming for the past decade, is projected to increase another 114 percent by the year 2002.

Still, Allen would have done well also to have led his crime fighters on a tour of, say, a Head Start pre-school program. Head Start's intervention mission isn't crime prevention as such. But as the first generation of Head Start pupils reached adulthood, a 1992 study found that its graduates were considerably less likely to have landed in jail or prison than were impoverished youngsters who had not been enrolled.

Taxpayers' cost per Head Start pupil, incidentally, is about $3,500 a year. The average cost per kid in the state's juvenile corrections system: $35,000 a year, plus $8,000 for behind-bars education. Is no one in state government doing cost-benefit analysis?

by CNB