NIH had a big 3 day panel discussion with experts on juvenile violence a few days ago, and the participant’s conclusion was that juvenile boot camps & scared straight tactics did not work, and were even counter-productive in some cases.
If the results are really this crappy, when did they make sense? IIRC the push for boot camps was initiated during the Clinton’s adminstration as a response to rising juvenile violence & crime. What was the reason this was seen as a good idea in the first place? Were they effective at one time, or did the notion just “feel good”, or is the population they were originally effective with, not the population they are trying to serve now? What happened to turn them from a golden idea to an ineffective waste of money?
The article below discusses the difference between a “therapeutic wilderness experience camp” and a “boot camp”, and why confusing the two can be dangerous.
[BOOT CAMPS AND THERAPEUTIC WILDERNESS EXPEDITIONS
They work well with military recruits, but that is a self-selected population, and when I was in the military, quite a few recruits would get dropped from boot camp for physical or psychological reasons. Another thing, when I finished boot camp, I had additional training in my military specialty to look forward to, plus a job working in that specialty in the field. They didn’t ship me back to my old neighborhood. I think it was reasonable to give it a try with juvenile delinquents, to see if it worked better than the alternatives.
IANAD, but my sister is a psychologist who worked in a group home for delinquent adolescents until she became so burned out that she quit the field entirely. Her experience was that the home environment (family and friends, but mostly the parents) is often a strong contributing factor. Many of her clients came from environments with inconsistent rules, lack of boundaries, parents who aren’t involved, parents who are themselves borderline criminals, and parents who are mentally ill.
However, she acknowledged that boot camps don’t work any better than therapy.
I never thought that boot camps were a good idea. They don’t address the question of why these children were/are violent. They just try to break them, beat them into submission, and train them like dogs. Expecting that kind of treatment to teach compassion to someone who has no empathy, responsibility to someone who is callous, and patience to someone who is impulsive is completely ridiculous.
A sweaty brute who yells at you all the time because he is bigger than you and has more authority is not a good role model. What kind of person are you going to end up as if that is who is shaping your character? Either a submissive sheeple or a bully.
The appeal of boot camps is that they are “easy”, take the responsibility of raising decent human beings off of parents and communities and put it on aforementioned sweaty brutes, and satisfy our base instinct to “punish” brutality with brutality. That’s why people thought it was a good idea. It’s in the same vein as using “Babywise”, which is just boot camp for infants. It probably appeals to the same kind of people.
It’s just a lazy answer and it’s no solution at all.
I’ve watched a few talk shows on this topic (Springer-like ones), and the obvious pain a lot of the kids were in and the “straighten up and fly right” attitude applied to it, really disgusted me. The last site you linked to, has a paragraph pretty typical of what I am referring to:
When the drill sergeant is brought out, and the parent is sneering and jeering while the kid is getting dressed down, I want to reverse the roles and see the parent get a good dose as well. Unless a kid is getting some type of therapy to learn some tools for coping with what appears to be a pretty dysfunctional home environment, I don’t see much good coming out of the treatment. I’m not excusing the negative/abusive behavior on the part of the kid, and I believe parenting a child is probably the toughest job out there.
In the situations I’m describing, the parent will say they’ve “tried everything,” but never mention what they’ve done in terms of their own behavior. Trying everything seems to focus on the child and the symptoms, rather than figuring out what went wrong in the first place and addressing it. Unless the boot camp involves therapy, I can’t see them ever having made sense in the long term. One thing I will add about the boot camp lacking therapy, is that I can see it maybe working for some kids who learn some mental survival skills, that would enable them to survive their home enivronment, upon return. Not much of a solution in my opinion, since it’s surviving rather than addressing, but I can see how it could give some people a false sense of solution.
It was an experiment that failed. People thought that instilling a military tyle discipline would be a cure-all. That type of discipline works for people who are motivated and well adjusted, and for weeding out those who can’t handle pressure. It works for the people it was “designed” to work on. That said, it does not work, and was never “designed” to work on someone with problems. Compounding the problem, this sort of training assumes the trainees are mature enough to handle it. That eliminates a lot of people. Also, the true military method does “break a person down” to some level, but not completely, and after the “breaking” builds them back up so they have a feeling of pride and accomplishment. These “boot camps” seem to be skipping that last step.
On the other hand they might have learned a little something about teamwork, responsibility, and maybe a little self-respect. The same traits they attempt to instill in recruits at military boot camp. People saw this as a way to avoid sending relatively young offenders to real jail and becoming hardened criminals. Although it hasn’t worked (for reasons others have pointed out) it wasn’t such a bad idea at the time. Lazy would have been just saying “Fuck it, send 'em to jail.”
They were probably never a great idea, but I don’t think that they were simply a “feel good” response, originally. (Certainly, once the idea made it to the public, a lot of people endorsed the idea af “making” those “thugs” straighten out.)
The very first programs were the “scared straight” groups that were actually organized by people who worked in distressed neighborhoods in cooperation with ex-cons. They did have a moderate amount of success with some borderline kids (on a very small scale on a very local level). They were never successful with kids who were already entrenched in the culture of criminality. However, when someone looked at that idea, misread the small successes, and decided that expanding it into a “boot camp” that would churn out good, obedient citizens, the original idea was lost and we descended into creating little torture camps that did no good at all.
I am not too contemptuousof the original efforts, but I certainly think that we should abandon any continuation as a counterproductive waste of effort.
I’ve run into this pattern repeatedly in my years of corrections. Someone establishes a pilot program to demonstrate a new concept in rehabilitation. It shows some promise with the initial test groups and attracts publicity. The program has demonstrated an ability to help rehabilitate some criminals. The public and the politicians then overlook the limitations of the program and declare this is the cure for all crime. The program is expanded far beyond its limits and as many criminals as possible are shoehorned into the program regardless of whether they are suitable for it. This flood of unsuitable criminals overwhelms the program, not only gaining no benefit themselves but most likely making it impossible for the program to help the few people who might have benefitted. The program is unable to rehabilitate the mass of criminals it was fed and when this result becomes clear, the program is declared a failure.
There was a book on the effectiveness of military training after World War II, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command, by S.L.A. Marshall. It’s something of a classic, although it has its detractors.
Are you kidding? History is full of tales of their glory and they’re regarded as being some of the finest warriors of all time. Helen was a Spartan. 300 Spartans fighting the evil forces of Xerxes the Persian ring any bells?
They were also unbelievably cruel to their children, and the nation they occupied and repressed for hundreds of years with terrorism and unchecked violence. That’s not a good model of boot camp being an effective tool for reducing teen [criminal] violence.
I’ve always been under the impression that since there are MPs, maybe boot camp doesn’t eliminate the propensity to commit crimes. It may train people effectively, but that doesn’t mean that it turns them into more civic-minded people. That’s what I’m wondering about.
I think you nailed it. A friend of ours sent her kid to one. Her kids are both adopted, and when her husband died she lost control of them - and at an age where she could have controlled them. There seemed to be a lot of things more important to her than parenting, and so it was easier to send him off. He’s back, and there doesn’t seem to be any improvement.
The “trick” of bootcamp is collective punishment. You don’t yell "all the time’ you yell when someone has done something that has been previously outlined as against the rules. All you learn from the drill instructor is what the rules are. You learn to obey the rules from your fellow recruits.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not advocating that we live with the Spartan lifestyle. I am calling phooey on anyone who claims that Spartan deeds didn’t leave an impact on history.
I just don’t think there’s that much time to commit all that many crimes while in boot camp. I’m sure there is some time but I would think all the activity would cut into their criminal activities.
Many of these “boot camps” are actually overseas gulags. Kids are kidnapped from their own homes by goons who work for the camps (at the parents’ request), then taken outside the reach of U.S. laws to places where they’re physically abused and denied adequate nutrition and medical care. I started a thread about one a long time ago.