The murder last week of Jetseta Gage, the 10-year-old Cedar Rapids girl kidnapped and later found dead in rural Johnson County, has brought heightened interest to a book written by an ISU professor.

Matt DeLisi, assistant professor of sociology, published his first book, “Career Criminals in Society,” in February.

The book gives a two-pronged approach to dealing with people involved in criminal behaviors: prevention and punishment.

Early prevention, DeLisi argues, helps to curb criminal behavior. He said most chronic criminals are a direct product of their childhoods.

Usually, they are children of young parents and were often abused.

By providing services to young parents and troubled youth from the start, it would save money in the long run, DeLisi said. He said it costs about $10,000 per capita to provide prevention services, but the cost of a habitual offender skyrockets to $1.2 million to $20 million per capita.

In the case of Jetseta Gage, the man charged with her murder, Roger Paul Bentley, had previous criminal offenses and was placed on the Iowa Sex Offender Registry for a crime for which he was convicted in 1994.

A search of Iowa court records suggests he has been a habitual offender. Bentley’s brother, James Bentley, is also being tried on sexual abuse charges, according to the Iowa Judicial Branch Web site.

With two sexual offenders in the family, DeLisi said he wonders if they were sexually abused as children. He said ignoring those problems early on may have caused bigger problems down the line.

“Why didn’t we intervene when [the Bentleys] were kids?” DeLisi asked.

This particular case illustrates the points made in his book.

DeLisi said although many sociologists believe prevention works, it is not as popular when dealing with criminal behavior. Even DeLisi was not entirely certain of its merits.

“I didn’t really even buy into it before I wrote this book,” he said.

Andrew Hochstetler, assistant professor of sociology, agrees with funding prevention efforts.

“Money spent on prevention, the earlier the better, is the best money you can spend,” he said.

It is often hard to get the funding for prevention, however.

Karen Mills is the Ames Police officer for Ames Middle School and Ames High School.

She said her job is to monitor student behavior and check in on delinquent students, but that is hard because she has so much territory to cover and kids know her schedule.

“I’m only one person,” Mills said.

DeLisi said treatment programs rarely work, although they can sometimes be effective.

“Lots of criminologists are firmly against the death penalty — I’m not. But you also have to realize that prevention works,” he said.

“The two-pronged approach is the way to break the cycle.”

The research in the book came from the time he spent working at the Boulder County Jail in Boulder, Colo.

DeLisi, who was working on his doctorate degree at the time, interviewed almost 4,000 defendants, many of them habitual offenders. He said interviewing the habitual offenders was different than interviewing the non-habitual offenders because their anxiety over being arrested wasn’t there.

“You simply don’t meet people like that in everyday life,” DeLisi said.