Diverting Children from a Life of Crime is the first book to rigorously compare the costs and effectiveness of various early-intervention approaches with each other and with incarceration.

The author examines four such programs: home visits by child care professionals to provide guidance in infant and child care; parent training and therapy for families with primary-school-age children who have shown aggressive behavior; cash and other incentives to induce disadvantaged high school students to graduate; and monitoring and supervision of high-school-age youth who have already exhibited delinquent behavior.

The authors assess the cost-effectiveness of each program and find that graduation incentives might reduce crime by 15% and that other interventions could reduce crime by smaller but significant amounts.