Newspaper Column
When Santa Barbara District Attorney Joyce Dudley was invited to speak at the National District Attorneys Association by a national research/advocacy group, “Fight Crime, Invest in Kids,” her educational roots were abundantly clear. She demonstrated a spot-on understanding of human development and the critical importance of early interventions to prevent crimes.
She told the assembled
group that the traditional role of district attorneys was to “clean up the
mess.”
“On a good day,
our community feels justice was served,” she told them. “On a great day our
efforts helped victims become survivors.”
She said that
traditional role is no longer sufficient, and that district attorneys are
expected to become leaders in the field of crime prevention: to fight crime by
prosecuting criminals and investing in kids.
I greatly respect
and appreciate the approach she took with the assembled group.
She said that
district attorneys have all looked into the eyes of a murderer. But she
suspected that very few had had the opportunity to look into those same eyes
when the murderer was a child. Think of the power if that could be the case,
and preventive steps could be taken.
Ms. Dudley cited a
murderer she prosecuted a few years ago. She said that murderer, as a child,
had been the victim of vicious homophobic bullying. She said she also
prosecuted a child abuser a few years ago and now one of his abused children
was recently arrested for rape.
Said Ms. Dudley:
“In my mind, both cases stood for the proposition that to fight crime we MUST
invest in kids.”
She added: “If I
had been there to stop the bullying and the abuse when those violent offenders
were still children, I could have had a fighting chance to stop those later
crimes from every occurring.”
She admonished the
group of district attorneys to become those leaders in the field of crime
prevention and she laid out a very specific list of particulars to support:
high quality preschool education, enticing after-school programs, especially at
the junior high level, and truancy programs that re-engage the alienated
student.
Most impressive
about her talk to this esteemed group were the echoes we hear from the
educational establishment about the importance of these very issues. What has
been missing from the educational argument is the hard facts about crime and
the resultant costs to society, from a prosecutor with the vision and
understanding to lay out the case so clearly. I salute her approach and look
forward to having our offices collaborate to the shared goal of preventing
crime by investing in kids — especially those who are abused, bullied or
neglected. It is not only the right thing to do; it is also in our community’s
best interests. As Benjamin Franklin said so wisely, an ounce of prevention is
truly worth a pound of cure.
