Summaries of Important Research
Edited By Iain Murray
CULTURE AND SOCIETY
Incapacitate Yes, Rehabilitate No
David Farabee, Rethinking Rehabilitation: Why Can't We Reform Our Criminals? AEI Press, 2005 (aei.org)
Ever since flamboyant sociologist Robert Martinson proposed that "nothing works" in rehabilitating criminals, a vast army of prison reformers, social workers, and probation officers has been striving to prove him wrong. Advocates have sung the praises of "Scared Straight" programs, boot camps, drug rehabilitation therapy, and American Indian-inspired "vision quest" adventures, but hard evidence for the effectiveness of these programs is surprisingly difficult to find.
The reason is simple: Such evidence often doesn't exist. UCLA research psychologist David Farabee casts a cold, analytic eye over the reformers' claims and finds many of them exaggerated. "An objective assessment of the research literature reveals that the majority of rehabilitative programs have little or no lasting impact on recidivism..."
After reviewing the methodological shortcomings common to virtually all studies of rehabilitation programs, Farabee finds that most programs based on intuitively appealing ideas--such as "Scared Straight" programs, adult education, and life-skills training--seem to have little or no effect. ("Scared Straight" programs may, in fact, make juveniles even more delinquent.) Even faith-based programs have a dubious track record. Only cognitive skills training--for instance, getting offenders to realize that crimes are committed by criminals, not because of circumstances--seemed to have any effect.
Farabee traces the failure of these programs to two main causes. First, they are rarely implemented properly. Second, the programs are generally based on misguided assumptions, such as the idea that crime is caused by one solitary factor--whether low self-esteem, childhood trauma, or lack of education.
Farabee concludes by suggesting that programs concentrate on the expectations of potential recidivists. His program would insist on "no excuses" for crime, while increasing deterrence by ensuring that parolees are more closely monitored. He would also eliminate rehabilitation as a goal of prison management. Prisons keep criminals away from innocent people, and that may be as much as we should expect from them.
Ill Literacy
National Endowment for the Arts, "Reading At Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America," Research Division Report #46, June 2004 (arts.gov)
Conservatives looking for further evidence of cultural decline will find more grist for the mill in the National Endowment for the Arts' 2004 study, "Reading At Risk," which gauges the reading habits of Americans from 1982 to 2002. With a sample size of more than 17,000 people, the study was "one of the most comprehensive polls of art and literature consumption ever conducted." The central question of the survey asked if a person, over the last 12 months, read any part of any novel, short story, poem, or play--excluding material required for work or school. Reading the first three pages of a Harlequin romance would be enough to count the person as a literary reader. Despite these lax requirements, the results are not encouraging.
The main finding of the 20-year survey is that the proportion of Americans reading literature has declined from 56.9 percent in 1982 to 46.7 percent in 2002. This is not entirely surprising, considering the growth of "electronic media, including the Internet, video games, and portable digital devices." However, the findings also show that the decline is occurring despite increases in educational and income levels. In fact, some of the fastest rates of decline are found in the two groups with the highest educational levels: individuals with "some college" and individuals with undergraduate or graduate degrees.
Why should the decline in literary reading matter to Americans? Leaving aside the intrinsic value of literature, the survey suggests a strong correlation between literary readership and civic participation. For instance, literary readers are more than twice as likely to perform volunteer and charity work as non-literary readers (43 percent to 17 percent). As more Americans stop reading literature, "our nation becomes less informed, active, and independent-minded," says NEA chairman Dana Gioia. (See "Live with Dana Gioia" in our March 2004 issue.) "These are not qualities that a free, innovative, or productive society can afford to lose."
--Douglas Ott
POLITICS
Kids Will Rebel
Brian Anderson, "On Campus, Conservatives Talk Back," City Journal, Winter 2005 (city-journal.org)
Conservative ranks appear to have swelled at American universities. The number of College Republicans has tripled over the past six years to 120,000 (more than the College Democrats). Among students, political views in general--on taxation, the environment, and abortion--have moved considerably rightward since 1995.
City Journal senior editor Brian Anderson decided to examine this phenomenon by interviewing about 50 campus conservatives from around the country. He found these next-generation conservatives' opinions to be remarkably trenchant in many areas. They are firmly behind the war on terror and deeply opposed to affirmative action. They are reliably pro-life and favor the traditional family. They dislike forced "diversity," but have no general objection to gay marriage. As one Vanderbilt student quipped, "Heterosexuals have already done a decent job of cheapening marriage on their own."
Anderson advances several plausible reasons for the rightward shift. September 11 taught them that there are genuinely evil enemies in the world who want to kill Americans in large numbers. More generally, this generation was raised in an era in which the Left's broad intellectual and political agenda could easily be seen to be full of holes. These students realized "a good portion of what they'd been taught was drizzly pap."
Another source of the revival of campus conservatism is the suffocating atmosphere of political correctness in academia. Students singled out activist professors for scorn: "The worst professor I ever had...was for a course in administrative law. Every class--no exaggeration--included at least five references to 'Bush was selected,'" not elected. One Harvard junior says campuses are "like an ivory echo chamber, where only the 'right'--subversive, anti-Western--ideas get a hearing." The rise of conservative views, clubs, and newspapers is a direct reaction against being told how to think.
ECONOMICS AND REGULATION
Better Ways to Slake Thirsty Cities
Gary Libecap, "Rescuing Water Markets: Lessons from Owens Valley," PERC, January 2005 (perc.org)
In the early 1900s, the potential of Los Angeles to be a major city was obvious, except for one serious problem--lack of available fresh water. The city's solution was to purchase land in western California--specifically, the Owens Valley--that had plenty of agricultural water.
These purchases became a byword for urban exploitation of rural folk, a characterization immortalized in the Oscar-winning 1974 movie, Chinatown. University of Arizona professor Gary Libecap recently re-examined L.A.'s water buy, and found a picture quite different from the Hollywood version.
The Owens Valley landowners were not bowled over by the Los Angeles government. Libecap relates their hard negotiating tactics with the L.A. Water Board, and finds their property values increased by millions of dollars more than they would have if Los Angeles had not initiated the purchase.
Libecap does identify three problems with the Owens Valley approach, with present-day applications. First, there need to be neutral mechanisms for resolving disputes about the value of assets being dickered over. Second, "bilateral monopolies"--only one seller and one buyer--make for long, drawn-out negotiations, because there are few alternatives for either side. Finally, government needs to compensate third parties for unintended consequences of their resource purchases.
While major water trades have been rare since the Owens Valley experience, they will likely make a resurgence soon. "Given the booming cities in the semi-arid West...there is no doubt that water will be reallocated away from agriculture," writes Libecap. "The experience of Owens Valley lets us know what the obstacles are; the challenge is for entrepreneurs to come up with ways to overcome them."
NATIONAL SECURITY
Secure ID At Last
Paul Rosenzweig and James Carafano, "Federal Standards for State-Issued Identity Cards," Heritage Backgrounder, February 2005 (heritage.org)
The fact that so many of the 9/11 hijackers traveled with identity documents obtained from state agencies has led many to call for a national identity card, or some similar scheme. These proposals have caused howls of protest from civil libertarians over privacy implications.
Paul Rosenzweig and James Carafano suggest a middle-ground proposal which would satisfy the genuine security need for identity verification while not falling foul of the concerns of libertarians. They propose a federal standard for state-issued identity documents (mostly driver's licenses). The standard would require the documents to display full name, date of birth, gender, license number, address, photograph, and signature; to have a physical security feature to prevent tampering or illegal duplication; and to feature a machine-readable component containing the cardholder's basic data.
Before issuing such a document, states would also be required to examine a picture identity document, proof of date of birth, Social Security number, and documentation showing the address of principal residence; required to ascertain the validity of these documents; and required to verify U.S. citizenship or immigration status. Three years after the passage of such a statute, the federal government would no longer accept any non-compliant state identification card for purposes of fed-eral identification.
Such a proposal, argue the authors, would satisfy civil liberty concerns. It would not create a national ID card, and there would be no federal bureaucracy overseeing it. Nor would federalist principles be threatened, as states would be free to issue documents such as driving permits that do not require the full range of checks, albeit knowing that these would not be valid federal IDs.
The authors recognize that there would be arguments over the status of illegal immigrants once secure identity documents were in effect. But that issue, they say, should be debated separately.
SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT
How Not to Clean Up
Dana Joel Gattuso, "Mandated Recycling of Electronics: A Lose-Lose-Lose Proposition," Competitive Enterprise Institute Issue Analysis, February 2, 2005 (cei.org)
Americans trash 2 million tons of old computers and other forms of electronic waste annually. While that's only a tiny fraction of the nation's total waste stream, the issue has been creating heaps of hype and hysteria about what to do with the "e-waste." One result: in California, if you buy a TV or home computer from a manufacturer this year, you will pay a $6 to $10 fee to finance a costly, statewide program to collect and recycle all used monitors. Moreover, the plan demands that manufacturers phase out all lead, mercury, cadmium, and other substances crucial to personal computers by 2007.
Researcher Dana Joel Gattuso contends that lawmaker panic is based on misinformation from powerful eco-activist groups who insist that electronic waste reflects the intolerable ills of a "throwaway" society. Such groups have propagated myths: that e-waste is growing at an "exponential" rate, that heavy metals in computers are leaking out of landfills and poisoning our soil.
In reality, e-waste has remained steady at only 1 percent of the total municipal waste stream since the EPA began calculating electronics discards in 1999. Gattuso also points out the lack of scientific evidence that e-waste in landfills presents health risks. A year-long, peer-reviewed study released last March by the Solid Waste Association of North America concluded that "extensive data...show that heavy metal concentrations in leachate and landfill gas are generally far below the limits...established to protect human health and the environment."
Moreover, manufacturers are moving on their own to recycle their products, and they're doing it better and cheaper than government. Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Gateway, and IBM are just a few of the many manufacturers operating their own recovery programs, recycling more than 160 million pounds of e-waste a year.
OTHER COUNTRIES
Hate Crime Hooey
Kenan Malik, "The Islamophobia Myth," Prospect, February 2005 (prospectmagazine.co.uk)
Commentators and journalists frequently claim that Britain and other Western nations are amidst a huge backlash against Muslims, with racist attacks and police harassment becoming commonplace. Writer and broadcaster Kenan Malik was commissioned by a British television station to make a film about this scandalous "Islamophobia." The problem is, he could find no evidence of it.
Summarizing his research for the liberal British magazine Prospect, Malik writes, "My personal experience and the statistics that do exist both challenge these claims. When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, racism was vicious and often fatal." Stabbings and firebombings, racist murders, and racially motivated attacks plagued certain areas. "Britain is a different place now--even for Muslims. There are still racist attacks.... Yet we have moved a long way from the 1970s and 1980s."
Malik outlines the statistics. Random searches of Muslims are not particularly disproportionate. The number of racist attacks now is tiny--a European Union investigation into anti-Muslim attacks in the four months after 9/11 found only a dozen serious attacks. Most of the 344 "attacks" claimed by the Islamic Human Rights Commission for the year after 9/11 involved shoving or spitting.
What accounts for the false perception of increased attacks? "For Muslim leaders, inflating the threat of Islamophobia helps consolidate their power base, both within their own communities and wider society," says Malik. Also, exaggerating the problem is "useful for mainstream politicians, and especially for a Labour government that has faced such a political battering over the war on Iraq and its anti-terror laws. Being sensitive to Islamophobia allows them to reclaim some of the moral high ground."
