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:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“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)