Prevention Action will be on the ground all week in Denver, Colorado, attending the Society for Prevention Research conference. Will the newest developments confirm or confound current practices?

The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Project Bluesky combines 3 of the best evidence based programs on the market to try to give judges a real alternative to locking up kids. But can they make it out of the testing phase?

The US Department of Health and Human services is putting $110 million into preventing teen pregnancy. But how much of the money is being spent on programs that have been proven to work? One critic says not nearly enough.

Save the Children reasserts its focus on child poverty with a bold new program to get parents, teachers and children all working on the same team.

After almost a decade in the making, an impact study has come to the unsettling conclusion that the US Head Start program (uncle of the UK’s Sure Start) works … kind of …

Now that the UK’s destiny is in the hands of a radically egalitarian government led by two privileged products of the English public schools, might it be the perfect moment to subject the education system to radical social experiment?

Might it be an unexpected spin-off from parliamentary deadlock in the UK to give early intervention an opportunity to secure "the same depth and permanence in the British system as the National Health Service"?

For a brief, relatively lightweight intervention, results from the University of Washington’s Preparing for the Drug Free Years alcohol abuse prevention program are impressive.

Every year about 5,000 young people die in the US as a result of car crashes, other unintentional injuries, and homicides and suicides that involve underage drinking. Laws against the "internal possession" of alcohol are among latest preventative experiments.

Your friendly local Bargain Booze manager might want to believe that responsible drinking is something in the national character that can be learned from the French. But all of the latest evidence points the other way: the less of a bargain the booze is, the less people buy.

The story so far: Britain is desperately strapped for cash. Every year, the government raises about $7bn in tax on drink. Every year, as many as 850,000 hospital admissions are attributed to alcohol-related damage. Restricting the population to the recommended safe maximum intake of 14 and 21 units would reduce annual alcohol sales by 184 million liters. What should happen next?

The Positive Parenting Program Triple P is continuing to prove its worth amid increasing concerns about the prevalence of behavioral and emotional problems among Australia's children.

The family systems approach that underpins parenting programs such as Multisystemic Therapy, Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care and Functional Family Therapy may have a value in the treatment of juvenile sex offending, psychologists at the Medical University of South Carolina suggest.

Resources may be scarce and policy makers might have to make difficult decisions about what to buy. But a more rational strategy that invests early for later benefits would make sometimes nitpicking and frequently complicated comparisons between the value of one "flagship" prevention program and another irrelevant.

Proven programs at zero net cost; more science, less ideology; standards of evidence for all – if Prevention Action was a political party on the verge of forming the next UK government, this is what it would be promising voters.

National Teen Pregnancy Prevention Month sounds like a good moment to take stock of the interventions capable of dealing with the underlying risks associated with too early conception. So where are they?

Long-term evaluation of a Wisconsin anti-poverty demonstration project identifies a return on a heavy investment in subsidies and support – but few benefits for participants’ children that stand the test of time.

The best antidote for a family under duress is a good social network, and good connections. The phrase is social capital, and any prevention program worth its salt is going to have to learn how to create it if it really wants to help kids.