The other half are getting home visits, tutoring in reading, social skills training, mentoring, vocational and career guidance and counseling in social and emotional development. Their parents are also getting special help, and sometimes given stipends for their participation. If Dodge's program seeks to keep children from falling into dangerous water, Sen. Paul Wellstone's recently introduced Juvenile Justice Mental Health bill would pluck them out of the stream, but before the plunge over the cataract. The legislation would fund training for mental health professionals, probation personnel, detention officers, lawyers and juvenile justice service providers to enable them to identify which troubled juveniles could profitably be diverted from detention and incarceration into community-based programs. There would also be money to establish and expand the diversion programs.
Diversion is the right thing to do, and it's cost effective except in the very shortest term.
It makes so much more sense to me than putting all the money into jails. They've been beaten, or they've seen Mom beaten up again and again, or they haven't slept. If there was additional support for the kind of thing professor Dodge is doing, we could keep a lot of kids from even getting to the point my bill deals with. There's nothing mysterious about what Dodge and Wellstone are urging. But when we're so consumed with what presently violent youngsters are doing, we find it hard to think of prevention.