Posted on Thu, Feb. 16, 2006
IN MY OPINION
Boot Camps for Kids Should be Given the Boot
BY FRED GRIMM
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.
