I want to thank this Subcommittee for inviting me to speak. I am Director of the Institute for Juvenile Research and Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I am also a member of the American Psychological Association s Committee on Children, Youth, and Families. In addition to conducting violence prevention studies and studies of the causes of youth violence, I and my colleagues track the current state of scientific knowledge about violence prevention. I am here to speak to the question of the effectiveness of violence prevention programs.
Violence prevention is a rapidly developing field that has made great strides in the past ten years.
We have progressed from poorly calculated, simplistic, and often misleading statistics to a broadly-based empirical knowledge base. The good news is that it is clear violence prevention works, works well by comparison to other crime prevention strategies, and is a good return on the investment. We are developing a basic but strong understanding of what works with whom. We are also finding that these approaches prevent related problems such as school failure, drug abuse and early pregnancy. We are now obtaining some of the first reliable estimates of the cost savings to our society that violence prevention provides.