Criticism
Two Justice Department officials have written an op-ed piece describing scared straight programs as “not only ineffective but is potentially harmful” to the kids involved. The op-ed appears in the February 1, 2011 edition of the Baltimore Sun, written by OJJDP Acting Administrator Jeff Slowikowski and Laurie O. Robinson. They say that, "when it comes to our children," policymakers and parents should "follow evidence, not anecdote."
A 2002 meta-analysis of the results of a number of scared straight and similar intervention programs found that they actively increased crime rates, leading to higher reoffence rates than in control groups that did not receive the intervention.
In 2004 the Washington State Institute for Public Policy estimated that each dollar spent on Scared Straight programs incurred costs of $203.51.
Read more about this topic: Scared Straight!
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“Parents sometimes feel that if they don’t criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn’t make people want to change; it makes them defensive.”
—Laurence Steinberg (20th century)
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)