Word: shocks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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ACCORDING to the October 16 issue of U.S. News & World Report, Harvard-Radcliffe ranks third among national universities. This came as quite a shock to an acquaintance, a "Harvard man" if ever there was one. He's not used to being second-best in anything; third is simply anathema...
...path to respectable citizenship. But the all-volunteer armed forces eliminated that option for what are now called youthful offenders. In a growing number of states, however, the purported benefits of paramilitary discipline are being showered on young criminals through programs known as "shock incarceration...
...Georgia, experts say 35% of boot-camp graduates are back in prison within three years, roughly the same rate as for those paroled from the general prison population. Blitzing young people into acceptable behavior through terror has been tried before and has failed. Ohio experimented with "shock probation" in 1965, sentencing first offenders to the penitentiary for 90 days. The disastrous results were indolence, sodomy and violence. ) Prisoners at the East Jersey State Prison in Rahway played real-life roles in which they confronted juvenile offenders on probation to demonstrate the violence behind the walls. Subsequent studies by Rutgers University...
...inherent fault with such scare tactics, says David C. Evans, Georgia's commissioner of corrections, is expecting too much from them. Says he: "Too many middle-class whites see it as the answer, a panacea." But with minimal counseling or after-shock guidance, the boot-camp experience "is just a car wash for criminals who are supposed to be cleansed for life," says Pat Gilliard, executive director of the Clearinghouse on Georgia Prisons and Jails. Edward J. Loughran, commissioner of the department of youth services in Massachusetts, dismisses the whole idea of shock therapy because "you cannot undo...
Drug czar Bennett agrees with those correctional officers who believe shock incarceration is no cure-all for street crime, though it can help "build character." It seems to have the most effect on nonviolent young men for whom crime has not become a hardened way of life. The program appears to work best for youngsters who might have been helped just as much by a resolute kick in the pants and some productive community service and victim reparation. Perhaps that is a more realistic way of coping with the burgeoning problem of youthful crime...