Pubdate: Thu, 16 Feb 2006
Source: Miami Herald (FL)
Copyright: 2006 The Miami Herald
Contact:  http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/262
Author: Fred Grimm, staff writer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?225 (Students - United States)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/dare.htm (D.A.R.E.)

BOOT CAMPS FOR KIDS SHOULD BE GIVEN THE BOOT

Failure Doesn't Matter

We've known for years that a kid like Martin Lee  Anderson, if he had
survived his six-month lock-up at  the Bay County boot camp, was more
likely than not to  get into more trouble.

Depending on the study, from 64 to 75 percent of the  kids graduating
from boot camp lock-ups are re-arrested  within a year.

Boot camps are failed concepts.

If the survival of these uber-tough military-style  detention programs
had depended on actual performance,  the Bay County boot camp would
have been shuttered long  before young Anderson was busted for joy
riding in his  granny's car.

He collapsed and died on Jan. 6 after a few horrific  hours at the
camp. At least he won't be around to add  to its abysmal recidivism
rate.

If not for Martin's death, no one would be talking  about Florida's
boot camps. A brutal beating and a dead  14-year-old gets attention. A
program's long-term  failure to rehab three-fourths of its inmates
doesn't  matter.

Failure simply isn't a deal breaker when it comes to  crime-fighting
programs. We pay $40 billion to $50  billion a year to sustain our
decades-long War on  Drugs.

Meanwhile, the street price of coke, the most reliable  market
indicator of our success in limiting supply, has  dropped from $500 a
gram in the early 1980s to less  than $170. In 2004, we spent $5
billion spraying  herbicide on Latin American cocoa leaves. Production
 went up.

But failure has no bearing on the political popularity  of anti-crime
programs. No one would dare redirect  those billions into softy
concepts that lack military  terminology or get-tough promises.

WASTE OF TIME

''Why do we still have the DARE [Drug Abuse Resistence  Education]
program in schools after 20 years when  everybody knows it's a waste
of time and money?'' asked  Aaron McNeece, dean of the Florida State
University  College of Social Work. It was a rhetorical question.
McNeece knows that symbolic solutions to crime count  more than
results. The DARE program, putting uniformed  police officers in
classrooms to warn against drugs,  has been an especially resilient
failure.

In 2001 the U.S. Surgeon General reported that studies  of the DARE
program ``consistently show little or no  deterrent effects on
substance use.''

The next year, National Academy of Sciences slammed  DARE. The GAO
reported ``no significant differences in  illicit drug use between
students who received DARE and  students who did not.''

Three-strikes-and-you're-out may be a popular  sentencing regime among
politicians. Three strikes  against DARE didn't matter.

Boot camps evolved from Scared Straight, the original  shock-the-kids
program based on the assumption that  taking children on tours of
jails would scare them into  lawful behavior. Scared Straight didn't
work. Failure  didn't matter. It just inspired the next step in shock
therapy.

WIDE APPEAL

''Boot camps appealed to everybody,'' said Jeanne B.  Stinchcomb, a
professor of criminology and criminal  justice at Florida Atlantic
University. She published a  paper last year in the Journal of Offender
Rehabilitation, entitled, tellingly, From Optimistic  Policies to
Pessimistic Outcomes: Why Won't Boot Camps  either Succeed Pragmatically or
Succumb Politically?

She said conservatives liked the get-tough image.  Liberals liked an
alternative to prison. Boot camps  were cheap to operate. The idea
simply had too many  powerful stakeholders for failure to matter.

And the public, Stinchcomb said, embraced boot camps  with an
''intuitive faith'' that this was the quick fix  for juvenile crime.
Everyone loved the images of  ''little urban wretches'' marching
around like  soldiers.

Oh, how we love to combat crime with military  metaphors. Unless some
brave political leader declares  a War on Useless Policies, the
failures just won't  matter.
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MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin