Statement of Michael R. Efford, Chief of Police,
Chico Police Department, Chico, California
Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Human Resources
of the House Committee on Ways and Means
Hearing on Welfare Reform Reauthorization Proposals
April 11, 2002
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:
Thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today. My name is Michael Efford, and I am the Chief of Police in Chico, California. I am also a member of the anti-crime group Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, which is made up of more than 1,500 police chiefs, sheriffs, prosecutors and victims of violence from across the country who have come together to take a hard-nosed look at the research about what really works to keep kids from becoming criminals.
I am very pleased to be here today to share with you what I hope will be a unique perspective on welfare reform: its impact on crime. During my 30-year career, I’ve been involved in virtually every aspect of law enforcement. I have worked as a front line police officer and have seen first hand how the lack of properly supervised activities can lead kids into a crime-laden environment. I have listened to testimony in our courtrooms by so many of our young people as they were sentenced to incarceration. I have heard the same account over and over: if there had only been some positive influence in their lives, their story may have come out different. Luckily, I have also been fortunate enough to see and work with programs and activities that provided that badly-needed positive experience – and today I’d like to tell you about some of those experiences and the research that relates to them.
Government’s most fundamental responsibility is to protect the public safety. In many cases, this requires capturing, trying and imprisoning those who have committed a crime. There is no substitute for tough law enforcement. But once a crime has been committed, lives have already been shattered. Those of us on the front lines in the fight against crime understand that we’ll never be able to just arrest and imprison our way out of the crime problem. We can save lives, hardship – and money – by investing in programs that can keep children from growing up to become criminals in the first place.
The members of Fight Crime: Invest in Kids have come together to issue a “School and Youth Violence Prevention Plan” that lays out four types of programs that research proves – and law enforcement knows – can greatly reduce crime. The violence prevention plan calls for more investments in:
These investments are overwhelmingly supported by law enforcement. A poll of police chiefs nationwide conducted by George Mason University professors in 1999 showed that 86 percent of chiefs believed that expanding after-school programs and educational child care would greatly reduce youth crime and violence. When asked to rate the value on a scale of 1 to 5 of parent coaching programs for high-risk families, which are proven to reduce child abuse and neglect, 79 percent gave such programs a 1 or a 2 (with 1 being “very valuable” and 3 being “valuable”).
The chiefs were also asked which of the following strategies they thought was most effective in reducing youth violence:
Expanding after-school and educational child care was picked as the top choice by more than four to one over any other option. In fact, more chiefs chose “expanding after-school programs and educational child care” as “most effective” in reducing crime than chose the other three strategies combined. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re against those other strategies. But police chiefs are clear that these preventive approaches will have a greater impact than the others.
These chiefs are not alone. Dozens of state and national law enforcement associations have adopted resolutions highlighting the crime-fighting importance of quality child care, after-school programs, and programs that prevent abuse and neglect, including the Fraternal Order of Police, the Major Cities Chiefs organization, the National District Attorneys Association,
the National Sheriffs Association, and the Police Executive Research Forum. In my own state of California, the California Police Chiefs Association, the California District Attorneys Association, the California State Sheriffs’ Association and the California Peace Officers’ Association have all adopted similar resolutions.
I know from first-hand experience that these types of programs really can make a difference. I spent a large portion of my career working with youth. I have worked in neighborhoods with strong gang influences, and in some of the most underprivileged neighborhoods where children “hung out” on street corners and alleyways because they had no place else to go. I spent several years as a detective, pursuing the criminal activities of young people whose lives could have been different if only they had had some structure in their young lives. As an active member on the board of directors of my local area Boys and Girls Club, I have also seen first hand how well-organized and properly-supervised activities provide our youth with the alternatives that they so desperately need. In 1998, I worked with a large group of young men and women to build a skate park in their neighborhood. I was very fortunate to be able to watch these young “castaways” of society work to see their dream come into fruition, and then see the lasting impact that their success had on their lives. Something as simple as a skate park changed dozens of young lives forever. Throughout my career, I have seen it proven time and again that early interventions with our youth can change a path leading to criminality toward that of being a productive member of our society.
Based on these experiences, I would now like to discuss a few of the ways welfare reform legislation can reduce crime. Welfare dependency is bad for children. The welfare reform legislation passed by Congress in 1996 has been an extraordinary success at helping parents leave welfare and enter the workforce – something necessary to improve the lives of children and make our communities safer.
Welfare reform now offers us the opportunity to fight one of the most egregious crimes of all – child abuse and neglect. Child abuse and neglect is a crime that keeps on giving. It hurts innocent kids immediately. And it too often starts a cycle of violence that leads to more crime, and sometimes more child abuse. Most kids who are abused or neglected grow up to become law-abiding citizens despite what they have gone through. But too many don’t. Being abused or neglected multiplies the risk that a child will grow up to become a criminal – a tragedy for the child, and also a tragedy for us all. The abuse and neglect occurring in a single year results in between 45,000 and 135,000 extra arrests for violence and 1,000 to 3,000 murders ultimately committed by some of those victimized as children.
The welfare reform legislation passed in 1996 increased funding for the Social Services Block Grant – a program that is actually the federal government’s single largest support for child abuse and neglect-related services. This block grant helps states and communities fund a variety of activities – including foster care, adoption and child protective services. Unfortunately, the level of funding for this important program has been cut by almost 40 percent from what it was promised in 1996. Welfare reform proposals that restore SSBG to its previously-set funding level will provide communities with much-needed help for efforts to prevent and treat child abuse and neglect, and therefore reduce later crime.
Another child abuse and neglect-related issue in welfare reform is kinship care. I’m sure we’d all agree that, whenever possible, we want children to be raised by their parents. But when that either is not desirable because the parents are abusive or is simply not possible, the next best scenario is for that child to live with a relative. About 420,000 children who are raised by relatives receive TANF support from child-only grants, and another 80,000 children receive support because the relatives who care for them are on TANF. It is critical that these relatives be able to care for these children. I hope Congress makes sure that these children are not returned to dangerous settings or placed in expensive foster care because their relative caregivers – many of whom are grandparents and are unable to work – have lost their TANF support due to time-limits or work requirements.
Now I’d like to talk about the program through which I believe welfare reform legislation can make the biggest impact on crime – the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG). As I mentioned earlier, the success of welfare reform has helped millions of parents into the workforce. With that success comes the reality that most parents, even parents of very young children, are working.
While these parents are at work, their kids will be in someone else’s care. As the President pointed out last week, 62 percent of young children –13 million kids – are in the care of someone other than their parents during the work-day. The question is: will it be stimulating, nurturing care that helps kids develop, or “child storage” with too few adults – who have too little training – and too many kids?
To quote President Bush’s new early childhood initiative released last week, “early childhood is a critical time for children to develop the physical, emotional, social, and cognitive skills they will need for the rest of their lives.” The good news is that numerous studies of quality early childhood programs have shown that participants have better self-esteem, achievement motivation, social behavior, academic achievements, cognitive development, grade retention and other benefits than similar children who did not participate in such programs.
What is equally important but less well-known is that quality educational child care programs can also significantly reduce the chances of a child growing up to become a criminal. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association last year demonstrated this fact. Over the last 30 years, Child-Parent Centers have provided school readiness child care to 100,000 3- and 4-year-olds in Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods. The study published in JAMA examined outcomes at age 18 for 1,000 of these children, and a matched group of 500 similar children who had not been enrolled in the Child-Parent Centers. The study showed that kids who did notreceive the Child-Parent Centers’ quality child care were 70 percent more likely to have been arrested for a violent crime by the time they reached adulthood. Kids left out of the program were also more likely to be held back in school, more likely to drop out, and less likely to graduate.
The researchers estimated that the program will have prevented 33,000 crimes —including 13,000 violent crimes—by the time all 100,000 participants reach age 18. Clearly hundreds of thousands of crimes would be prevented each year if all families nationwide had access to programs like this. When our fight against crime starts in the high chair, it won’t end in the electric chair.
In addition to saving lives, these programs also save money. Counting only savings to government, the Chicago Child-Parent Centers returned almost three dollars for every dollar invested. Counting those government savings, savings to crime victims, and benefits to the participants in the program, the results are $7 saved for every dollar invested.
Unfortunately, millions of children are being left out of these types of programs. Without government help, such programs are just too expensive for low- and moderate-income families. In every state, the cost for an infant to attend a good child care center is higher than the cost of tuition at a public university. Adequate care for two children in a child care center can easily cost over $12,000 a year – about $2,000 more than a minimum-wage worker earns working full-time.
Many working parents can’t possibly pay these costs, any more than they could pay private school tuition if public schools were eliminated. Unfortunately, the crime-reduction and other benefits I described earlier only occur when children are able to participate in quality programs – not programs that are simply “child storage.” We can no more afford to accept child care that is merely “custodial” than we could accept assigning some children to public schools that are “custodial” rather than “instructional.” Clearly that is not what Congress or the President desires, given the recent enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act.
To make sure child care is not simply “child storage,” it is imperative that CCDBG legislation provides for quality improvements to child care programs. An increase in the CCDBG “quality set-aside,” currently at a mere four percent, would help facilitate this improvement by supporting: scholarships to enhance the levels of educational attainment for child care providers; training that includes approaches through which providers can enhance children’s cognitive, social, emotional and physical development; and increased compensation levels that attract and retain qualified providers. Enhanced standards, an area that President Bush addressed in his recent early childhood education proposal, can also help to improve quality. However, all such quality initiatives require additional resources.
In addition to helping families send their young children to safe and stimulating environments while the parents work, CCDBG also helps families send their school-age children to safe and stimulating settings after school. As you probably know, the prime time for violent juvenile crime is in the after-school hours, from 3 to 6 p.m. These are also the peak hours for teens to commit other crimes, have sex, smoke, drink, use drugs, or become a victim of a crime. As more and more parents enter the workforce because of welfare reform, many teenagers are left in unsupervised environments. Already more than 10 million children and teens – including 7 million 5-14 year-olds – are unsupervised after school on a regular basis. In fact, 31 percent of school-age children of recent welfare leavers – and even higher proportions of school-age children of welfare recipients and other poor parents – do not participate in extracurricular activities. This rate is more than three times higher than the non-participation rate of children in families with incomes greater than 200 percent of the poverty line.
After-school programs can cut crime immediately by keeping kids safe and out of trouble during these dangerous hours. They can also cut later crime by helping participants develop the values and skills they need to become good, contributing citizens. In one study, students whose families were on welfare were randomly divided into two groups when they started high school. One group was enrolled in the Quantum Opportunities after-school program, which provided tutoring, mentoring, recreation, and community service programs and some monetary incentives to keep attendance up. The second group was left out of the program.
When studied two years after the four-year program ended, the group of boys left out of the program had six times more convictions for crimes than those provided with the program. In addition, every dollar invested in this program produced three dollars in benefits to government and the recipients. That doesn’t even count the savings that result from a lowered crime rate. Our choice is simple: we can either send our children to after-school programs that will teach them good values and skills, or we can entrust them to the after-school teachings of Jerry Springer, violent video games or the streets.
In conclusion, investing in quality educational child care and after-school programs are among the most significant steps Congress can take to stop kids from growing up to become criminals. That is why substantial increases are needed in the Child Care and Development Block Grant. Unfortunately, this program is so under-funded that only one in seven children who are eligible for benefits receive them. If increased work requirements are added to welfare reform, without a significant increase in CCDBG, then the unmet need will only increase. I hope that you will provide a substantial increase in funding for this program to allow more of the eligible children to participate – and to improve the quality of programs. Every day we fail to help working families afford quality educational child care and after-school programs, we increase the risk that you or someone you love will fall victim to violence. We need to invest in America’s most vulnerable kids now, so they won’t become America’s Most Wanted adults later.
Thank you once again for this opportunity to testify before your subcommittee. I would be happy to answer any questions you may have.