John Doolittle: “it is costing the taxpayers of this country billions and billions of dollars. Any time we pick up the papers and we read…”

“it is costing the taxpayers of this country billions and billions of dollars. Any time we pick up the papers and we read about the crime in the District of Columbia or any other urban area across the United States, we ask ourselves, ``What can we do about this situation? How are we going to change this?'' This is one of the ways, I would submit, that we can begin to change the deteriorating social conditions within the United States. Yes, building prisons and having tougher laws are part of one approach that we need to have, I stipulate to that, but we will never build enough prisons or have laws Draconian enough that in and of themselves they are going to stem this problem. We need to start right at the beginning, on the other end of things, before we spend money to build those expensive prisons and deal with people, equip our young people to live better lives, to avoid the pitfalls of promiscuous sexual activity, and the results from that will be much fewer problems that we are going to have to deal with later on as a society, when all we know to do ultimately is to lock people up and keep them locked up. That is really not a very good solution. It may be part of the solution, because we have to have some immediate answer, but the long-term answer is to deal with this side of the equation. Madam Chairman, this chart shows that abstinence-based sex education works.…”