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.