Criticism
The Minneapolis study was criticized for its methods and its conclusions. The follow-up period of six months may have been too short to capture the episodic and cyclical patterns that can occur with domestic violence. Also, Minneapolis may have been unusual, in that they kept arrestees overnight in jail, whereas in other jurisdictions arrestees might be sent home much quicker.
While the Minneapolis design had many methodological strengths, randomized experiments look at the average causal effects for the group as a whole. Conclusions may be made that apply to most individuals in the group, but not all individuals, with some possibly experiencing negative effects of the intervention. In some cases, arrest may provoke the abuser and increase the possibility of more retributive violence.
The Minneapolis Experiment was based on deterrence theory, which includes the assumption that the offender is making rational decisions. In the case of domestic violence (and many other offenses), offenders often show little rational behavior. In addition, the Minneapolis Experiment did not measure whether being arrested increased the offenders' fear of future sanctions, a crucial element in deterrence theory.
Read more about this topic: Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment
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)
“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)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)