James Q. Wilson writes, "There are countless efforts all over the country to reduce the chances that a child will become a criminal. These attempts, however, take hold only slowly because of three problems. First, many of the best prevention programs cost a lot of money for each child, and so we have to devote them to at-risk children if communities will be able to pay for them. But defining some children as ‘at-risk’ means talking specifically about black and Hispanic children in welfare homes, a task that our politically correct society finds it hard to do. Second, the programs that work are typically small, intense efforts that may or may not work if they are scaled up to be state-wide or nation-wide efforts run, not by skilled therapists, but by ordinarily folks. Third, good programs often lose out to bad ones because the latter, though equally devoted to prevention, lack supportive evidence but have political muscle."

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