CALIFORNIA COMMENTARY : Prevention Snaps Chain of Poverty : By putting more resources into programs for children, we’ll have more success stories and fewer tragedies.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Sure, it’s an old saw--and millions of Americans who are eating wisely and working out are living proof that it works. Now it is time to apply this prevention principle to our government and its domestic policy.

In the 1960s, the Great Society tried to cure America’s social ills with public dollars. In the 1980s, we involved the private sector--a vital step that still left us short. The 1990s must be the decade in which we move beyond remedial efforts and focus the power of the public and private sectors on breaking the chain of poverty, on preventing problems before they happen.

I call this approach preventive government. And it begins the moment we jettison the belief that all needs are equally urgent and all solutions are equally effective. Both state and federal government face huge budget deficits. If to lead is to choose, then we must choose to spend our scarce dollars where they will do the most good.

I have served in government at the municipal, state and federal levels. And I have seen the power of government when it faces a mortal threat from abroad, or single-mindedly pursues a great project at home. But so far it has been powerless to do anything about addicts who give birth to addicts, or to keep abused children from becoming abusive parents to yet another generation.

In short, government simply does not think ahead, or does not often enough act to prevent avoidable harm. The federal government spends $7 billion on interdicting drugs and only $755 million on drug prevention. We imprison dealers so briefly that it’s a minor inconvenience to them, and then we wonder why we are failing to deter the seemingly endless supply of youths eager to join the trade. We agonize over how to treat drug babies who become learning-disabled children, having failed to stop their mothers from using drugs during pregnancy.

We need to make a better, wiser and more humane choice.

It is better to recruit and train mentors for troubled youth now than to have to recruit and train more cops, more judges, more prison guards later.

It is better to try to warn high school girls of the dangers of drugs now than to try to cope with the hellish problems of an epidemic of crack babies later.

It is better to discover that treatable mental depression is keeping a child from learning when she is 6, rather than waiting until she is 16.

This same principle applies across the board. For example, it is better to prevent pollution than to clean it up.

At the recent governors’ conference in Washington, I found a growing consensus among my colleagues that if we do not get ahead of these problems soon, we never will.

Our priority must be prevention, or else we will quickly and tragically come to a time when we simply run out of hospitals, prisons and treatment centers. We will be compelled to practice the most repugnant but necessary fiscal and social triage--all because we lacked the foresight to see the obvious and the political will to avoid an avoidable future. By failing to anticipate and prevent injury rather than reacting to it, we risk becoming increasingly an America of recipients instead of producers.

I do not propose that we draw a bright line between the generations, shower attention on the young and ignore everyone else. But we must set priorities. And our first priority must be that of any civilized society--our children.

To protect America’s children, strategic thinking is in order. So far, we have in effect prescribed different drugs without considering how they may nullify each other or work in a lethal combination. If we are to prescribe potent social medicine, our programs must be integrated.

To reach children, government programs must also be accessible. After all, how many 8-year-olds do you know who spend their days at county welfare offices? Social services should go where children spend their days--at schools. This doesn’t mean we have to turn our schools into welfare offices or our teachers into social workers. But school is where children congregate. And that makes it the best place to spot a child’s problem and refer him or her to the right program or agency.

Local and state governments are already putting preventive strategies into action. At La Colima Elementary School in Whittier, local mental-health departments are reporting great success in working with troubled children just starting school.

Or take Alexander Hamilton Elementary in San Diego, an inner-city school where teachers are coping with severely overcrowded classes. Surrounded by neighborhoods that are threatened by drugs and drive-by shootings, some schools would try to shut their doors to the world. But Alexander Hamilton is opening it doors to whole families seeking health care, to job training, English classes and gang prevention.

If La Colima and Hamilton and many others become the rule rather than the exception, we have much more than a fighting chance.

We won’t settle for survival.

We want success--against all those odds we mean to change.

If California is wise enough, cares enough, has guts enough to choose prevention, then our future is one of trading uncertain remedy for certain enrichment--for all of California’s children.

We will be able to measure our success as a society in their success--in their Nobel prizes, their Pulitzers and Olympic medals. But we will also measure success by the decline in learning disabilities, drug use, teen pregnancies and prison populations--by crimes and tragedies that never happen.