In programs involving child poverty, we face a basic choice. Do we invest in the front end, trying to break the cycle of poverty by providing family planning and helping children when they are young and malleable? Or do we pay at the back end, after the problems of poverty manifest themselves, through the criminal justice system and hospital emergency rooms? As must be clear by now, our argument, drawing on the views of most experts, is that it's far more cost effective - and fair - to prevent problems from arising in the first place. As Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard University, once said: "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." But, in fact, since the 1970S the United States has mostly tried the opposite approach. We've invested minimally in early childhood to prevent delinquency, but enormously in the criminal justice system as we quintupled incarceration rates.
States now spend $50 billion a year on the prison system, up from $9 billion in 1985. The United States has 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of its prisoners, and the proportion of Americans ensnared in the criminal justice system is twice as great today as when Ronald Reagan was president. One study found that by age twenty-three, 49 percent of black males have been arrested, along with 44 percent of Hispanic males and 38 percent of white males. It's increasingly recognized in red and blue states alike that this effort to
Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn "A Path Appears" (2014)
