With Kane County’s vision of building a juvenile boot camp all but dead, Kane officials must figure out some other way to spend the $900,000 from the county’s portion of the Grand Victoria Casino riverboat gambling fund that had been earmarked for the military-style camp.
They thought they were on to something Thursday when the County Board’s Executive Committee opened public discussions about Kane’s spearheading programs to reach out to at-risk children from the earliest stages of their development. The goal would be to help them stay out of the county’s bulging youth home and adult jail.
Gerry Jones, chairman of the board’s Public Health Committee, told committee members that crime-prevention programs through early intervention could be applied in Kane. He said such programs have met with success elsewhere.
Targeted would be at-risk children, Jones said, in roughly their first 33 months of life and young mothers, many of them teenagers, who have grown up in environments not conducive to a happy childhood or a primer for parenting.
“The consensus is that we can’t keep building jails without something on the front end to keep people out of jails,” Jones (D-Aurora) said. “Studies say that every dollar spent on that (early) end potentially saves $17 on the other end.”
Jones, County Board Chairman Mike McCoy (R-Aurora) and board member Doug Weigand (R-Batavia) were among a group of county officials who recently talked with the authors of a new book that traces the roots of violence to the first months of childhood development.
They came back impressed with what they heard from Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith S. Wiley, who state in their 1998 book, “Ghosts From the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence,” that violent behavior is learned, and perhaps cultivated, in the first months after birth.
“Studies show the greatest brain growth occurs between birth and 33 months, and it’s greatly influenced by the environment a child is in,” said Weigand, chairman of the board’s Corrections and Rehabilitations Committee. “We spend more money in the United States locking people up than we do on college. We have to break the cycle. If we can provide services, maybe we’ll lessen the need for youth homes and jails.”
But some Republicans on the committee expressed caution.
“This is a great idea, but when you get into social spending, that’s something you can keep pouring more and more money into,” said Caryl VanOvermeiren (R-St. Charles), the board’s vice chairman. “I’m not opposing this, but we must be careful.”
“I don’t view this as a social program; I view this as a crime-prevention program,” McCoy countered.
Others cautioned that poverty and children at risk of criminal futures are not necessarily related.
Although county officials have yet to formulate any plans for the project, which may be incorporated with other county-backed programs, McCoy said he would like to appoint a task force quickly to determine the most productive course.
“I don’t see us owning and operating anything at this point, but I do see us putting together a program,” McCoy said.
One potential use of funds, McCoy said, is at the Marie Wilkinson Child Development Center in Aurora.
Named for that city’s civil-rights pioneer who shepherded creation of Aurora’s first integrated day-care center 30 years ago, the center has long served as a model for preschool education. Now, county officials hope to help expand the facility’s reach to include as many at-risk children as possible.
“We’re going to have measured results with this program,” McCoy said. “This is a long-term investment in crime prevention.”
