Lately, as a result of viewing the Democratic Party debates, I have become curious as to the effectiveness of some of the social programs, such as the social benefits of investment in the development and education of children and youth, as espoused by the candidate Bernie Sanders. My investigations turned up the following:
Economists have calculated that every dollar invested in high-quality home visitation, day care, and preschool programs results in seven dollars of savings on welfare payments, health-care costs, substance-abuse treatment, and incarceration, plus higher tax revenues due to better-paying jobs.
Could this approach to public health have something to do with the fact that the incarceration rate in Norway is 71 per 100,000, in the Netherlands 81 per 100,000 and the US 781 per 100,000, while the crime rate in those countries is much lower than ours, and the cost of medical care about half?
Seventy percent of prisoners in California spent time in foster care while growing up. The United States spends $84 billion per year to incarcerate people at approximately $44,000 per prisoner; the northern European countries a fraction of that amount. Instead, they invest in helping parents to raise their children in safe and predictable surroundings. Their academic test scores and crime rates seem to reflect the success of those investments. (Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D., The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking (2014 pp.167-168)
Dr. Van Der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, is perceived by most in his field as the leading authority today in the field of stress and trauma research and its remedial implementation. He cites numerous academic sources bolstering his study.
James A. Mischke
Cortez