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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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We are careful not to duplicate the efforts of other organizations, and as a grassroots coalition of prisoners and social reformers, our resources (time and money) are limited. The vast expertise and scope of the various drug reform organizations will enable you to stay informed on the ever-changing, many-faceted aspects of the movement. Our colleagues in reform also give the latest drug war news. Please check their websites often. |
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