Nyberg: Making the World Safer

(WTNH) -- Following the tragedy in Newtown in which 20 children and six adults died, the state and nation have a dialogue going about what to do to make the world safer.
    
Stanley Konesky has been in law enforcement for 42 years and wants to lend his ideas to the mix.
     
Now retired from the State Police Academy, Konesky tells News 8 we have to identify problems early in a child's life and listen and care for them, but he wonders if we really have the will to do this.

"If you look at the history of juvenile law you'll find a thing which they call pathway to delinquency, and there's three major ones; the first one is delinquency to authority where a student has an issue with Mom and Dad, teacher, coach, policeman, authority, it's starts at a very young age and blossoms around 14," said Konesky.

Konesky continued on to say, "The second pathway to delinquency is called overt, outward, the bully and we know about the bullies don't we? Connecticut has developed laws and all schools are worried about the bully on school buses, in school, neighborhoods, the overt. And the third is covert, the fire burning, the vandalism, the burglary, my research that I took further than the author of pathways to delinquency has been done over the 13 years at the State Police Academy, and here's the question I asked and the overwhelming number was about 85 percent how many students that I have met, and now we're doing it at the University of New Haven as well, how many knew a child, when you're growing up that had an authority delinquency, an overt or covert issue and everybody says 'yeah I knew.' The interesting thing is when a student has all three, all three, we identify authority issues, overt and covert, and I asked the students where is that person now, several say 'I don't know,' 85 percent and higher said, they're either dead or in prison.

"So let's go back again," Konesky said. "If we can identify early intervention because school psychologists say and professors throughout the country state that a child learns 80 percent of everything they will learn before they're six years of age, 80 percent, so those first six years are critical, and most of those are in the home. So again back to the family core, but also pre-school, nursery school, pre-k, kindergarten and first grade are critical years and with audio visual touch we now start seeing how the pillars are working together, but it's a mammoth task, it's a lot of energy and a lot of money.

Konesky, who is a Professor at the University of New Haven, now at the Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice has a lot of ideas and says he would willingly serve on a state or national task force to help out.