A visit yesterday in Portland from a national children’s lobbying group provided a refreshing change from the typical tough-on-crime attitude that has grown more common in response to violent kids. The group’s survey of Maine chiefs of police, sheriffs and prosecutors was meant to influence congressional debate, but it is useful within the state, as well.

Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, founded in 1996, is led by law-enforcement officers, including the presidents of the National Sheriffs’ Association, the National District Attorneys’ Association and the International Union of Police Associations. Part of its purpose is to look beyond the immediate and seemingly easy solutions for youth crime and violence and look for causes and conditions that provide the medium for the crime to grow. One of the ways it does this is to ask the people dealing with these problems every day what they think.

The key question of the survey taken earlier this month found that 87 percent (margin of error was no more than 7.5 percent) of the Maine officers agreed that “providing quality educational child care programs for preschool-age children of low- and moderate-income working parents will help children succeed in school and ultimately prevent crime and violence when the children grow up.”

This is an easy option to choose in the abstract; no one is against child care. What is noteworthy, however, is that the officers ranked the child-care option over the choices of hiring more police officers to investigate juvenile crimes, prosecuting and jailing more juveniles as adults and installing more metal detectors and surveillance cameras in schools.

Their apparent conclusion that environment is an important influence in criminal behavior echoes work done a couple of years ago by U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher, who wrote that, instead of strictly biological factors, risky behavior is theorized to “result from social learning or the combination of social learning and biological processes. This means that violent youths who have violent parents are far more likely to have modeled their behavior on their parents’ behavior – to have learned violent behavior from them – than simply to have inherited it from them.” And this is hopeful news because it means that it may be possible to replace negative models with positive ones.

That’s where the congressional debate comes in. Fight Crime: Invest in Kids wants Congress to expand the Child Care and Development Block Grants given to states as part of welfare reform, which is coming up for its five-year reauthorization in the next couple of weeks. CCDBG helps low-income families, including those trying to leave public assistance, pay for child care. According to advocates, the current funding level for the grants provides assistance to only one out of 10 eligible children. Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins are co-sponsors of the grant program in the reauthorization; the fight will be over how much money finally is approved for it.

Maine’s Department of Human Services currently is proposing new rules for its day care because its staff knows that what happens at those centers helps shape a child’s future learning. But any changes, as DHS heard at recent public hearings, are expensive. The federal blocks are one way for low- and moderate-income families to afford the kind of care that will have a positive effect on their children. Maine’s law-enforcement officers know just how important that is.