These pieces and the excerpts we’re providing all deal more or less directly with all these points. They’re not long so do click the links and give them some thought about whether/where you think we are getting/missing the point and how it applies to Corrections Sentencing now and in our Perfect Storm future. You know the depth of the thought. (Plus, one of them references “House”!! You have to at least read that one and apply to judges and Motivational Interviewers.)

A solution that will not work is for economists to second-guess how their ideas will be used or misused in public debate and to shade their public statements accordingly. . . . But few economists are sufficiently well attuned to have a clear idea of how the politics will play out.

Moreover, when economists adjust their message to fit their audience, the result is the opposite of what is intended: they rapidly lose credibility.

Consider what happens in international trade, where such shading of research is established practice. For fear of empowering the “protectionist barbarians,” trade economists are prone to exaggerate the benefits of trade and downplay its distributional and other costs. In practice, this often leads to their arguments being captured by interest groups on the other side – global corporations that seek to manipulate trade rules to their own advantage. As a result, economists are rarely viewed as honest brokers in the public debate about globalization.

But economists should match honesty about what their research says with honesty about the inherently provisional nature of what passes as evidence in their profession. Economics, unlike the natural sciences, rarely yields cut-and-dried results. For one thing, all economic reasoning is contextual, with as many conclusions as potential real-world circumstances. All economic propositions are “if-then” statements. Accordingly, figuring out which remedy works best in a particular setting is a craft rather than a science.

Second, empirical evidence is rarely reliable enough to settle decisively a controversy characterized by deeply divided opinion. This is particularly true in macroeconomics, of course, where data are few and open to diverse interpretations.

But even in microeconomics, where it is sometimes possible to generate precise empirical estimates using randomization techniques, the results must be extrapolated in order to be applied in other settings. New economic evidence serves at best to nudge the views – a little here, a little there – of those inclined to be open-minded.

These folk and many others feel that medical diagnosis is an ineffably human task, one where the best humans are always going to be better than the best machines. This is because, the argument goes, good diagnosis requires a combination of intellect, knowledge, and intuition. The intellect is innate, the knowledge is picked up through long years of study and experience in medical school, residency, and practice, and medical intuition — the ability to see more than what’s in the test results and patients’ self-descriptions — is the product of both inherent ability and accumulated experience.

Can we replicate and improve on each of these digitally with Dr. Watson? Yes, we can.

Let’s take intellect and knowledge first. As Watson demonstrated so convincingly on Jeopardy!, artificial intelligence is now astonishingly good. As I wrote, we can put all the world’s accumulated medical knowledge in a database, turn armies of algorithms loose on it, and when presented with a set of symptoms arrive at a diagnosis within seconds. No human brain can do this, and the digital ones are getting better at it all the time.

But what about intuition? Don’t human senses, minds, and guts allow us to intuit things that machines just can’t? Won’t the best human diagnosticians notice that a patient’s skin is slightly jaundiced, or that he suddenly breaks off eye contact when stating that he’s been taking his meds faithfully, or that his voice changes tone when he answers questions about illegal drug use?

Yes, the best diagnosticians will do all these things. But as I wrote before, they’ll do them inconsistently and with great overconfidence. These problems are so great that they typically negate the advantages of intuition over algorithm even for experienced clinicians, as careful research has shown. And most doctors, of course, have less than world-class intuition, yet still trust in their own ability to ‘go beyond the data’ and arrive at a diagnosis after face-to-face interactions with their patients.

. . . Jeff Leek posted something today on the same topic, but with a slightly different perspective (he refers to “the current over-pessimism about science”). Leek argues, reasonably enough, “that people are using a few high-profile cases to hyperventilate about the real, solvable, and recognized problems in the scientific process” and he worries that “the rational reasonable problems we have, with enough hyperbole, will make it look like the scientific process ‘sky is falling’” and lend support to political attacks on science more generally. I think Jeff and I should be able to agree to the following:

- Science is hard, we all make mistakes, the system has problems but all human systems have problems, in working to fix these problems we shouldn’t thrown the research baby out with the bathwater that is the changing rules of scientific communication.

- We’re not there yet, we still live in a world in which it’s easier to publish and hype a elaborate flawed claim than to report a simple correction, a world in which data sharing is far from the norm, and where social and statistical biases lead to systematic overreporting of dramatic claims and systematic overestimation of effect sizes.

Leek is making the valid point that the sort of doomsaying that has been needed to draw attention to problems in scientific communication and to motivate improvements, can also be used, in guilt-by-association sense, to disparage good science. And, even in popular culture, my impression is that things aren’t as bad as they used to be. Sure, vaccine deniers and global warming deniers and all the other deniers are out there, but it’s not like the 70s when people were buying millions of copies of Chariots of the Gods, The Jupiter Effect, and The Bermuda Triangle, right?

#3 People usually get addicted to one type of substance.
At one time, we believed that most addicts had one drug of choice and stuck with it. Today, polysubstance abuse – the use of three or more classes of substances – is the norm, not the exception. Some people use multiple substances to create a more intense high (e.g., combining cocaine and heroin, or “speed-balling”) while others take certain drugs to counteract the undesirable effects of another drug (e.g, using alcohol to come down from stimulants). Some supplement their primary drug of choice with whatever is readily available (e.g., using prescription opiates and heroin interchangeably).

Polysubstance abuse appears to be particularly common among males, those who begin using drugs at an early age, and adolescents and young adults. People who abuse multiple substances are more likely to struggle with mental illness, which when complicated by drug interactions and side effects, makes polysubstance abuse riskier and more difficult to treat than other types of drug abuse.

Saw this one too late yesterday to get it in on the week’s management pieces. C’mon, you know you’re gunna click to see. Just do it already.  Found this one late, too:  "How Needing a Wee Affects Your Decision Making."  This is one you need to click on.

“Moronic Oxymorons in the Age of Climate Change” (good rant on oxymorons in Perfect Storm debates while we’ve passed the 400 ppm in carbon emissions that haven’t been seen in millions of years: “clean coal” = coal, “green growth” = growth, and so on)

“Sulfate Aerosols Cool Climate Less Than Assumed” (again making the models based on MORE cooling wrong and too conservative about the speed and extent of what’s happening and when)

POSITIVE STORIES

“Patent Filing Claims Solar Energy ‘Breakthrough’” (this could be a big time shift if the story holds up . . . or it could be the next Segway)

SC legislators pulling the same silly cr*p with the probation folks there that OK policymakers are with their DOC—claiming that money in reserve for basic maintenance and emergency uses should be used instead to make up for the legislature not wanting to foot the bill for the increased costs of its recent Corr Sent Reform 1.0 efforts. (It's basically like Bob Cratchit going in to ask for a raise to his salary and Scrooge finding out he saves money for Tiny Tim's doctor's visits that he could spend before he got more pay.)  Plus, you get a helping of ignorance about positions unfilled because of departures and new positions needed to cover the increased supervision needs caused by the reforms. To the state’s credit, it still has the senator who engineered the reforms a few years back and he’s on the ball about what needs to happen there. Were OK able to say the same . . . .

“It helps to stay off the streets, you know what I mean? Stay productive. That’s my main priority right now stay productive and stay busy. As long as you stay busy, a better chance of you not getting in trouble,” said Carr. “I think this [job fair] is a lot easier because you can network better, and you know when you’re out there on your own trying to do things it’s a little difficult. That’s all this is about, having another chance to do right.”

We noted our own experience with ZBB (as it’s known to its friends) back before its impossibility for effectiveness was clear to basically anyone with actual experience with ZBB. The idea is one of those very appealing slogans like “management by objectives” (who could be opposed??), “management by walking around” (so you know first-hand what’s going on), and “reinventing government” (simplifying by coming up with 40 something other ways of doing government programs with rare data to guide the choice) that, like all bumper sticker sayings and simple solutions are not part of Planet Reality’s landscape. We’ll save the whys and wherefors of each of these three for other days if we get a reader request for them, but for now we’re going to explain why the ZBB zombie (notice the double alliteration? You really think that’s coincidental??) isn’t what the gentleman from OK and all his fellow travelers may think.

Various polls and surveys seem to indicate that a substantial proportion of the Canadian public desires harsher penalties for crime. While various explanations have been offered for this punitiveness, emotional reactions to crime have been under-researched. The present research draws on a Canadian dataset to test the hypothesis that the emotions of fear and particularly anger about crime are significant predictors of punitive attitudes once crime victimization, economic insecurity, internal attributions of crime causation and other variables are controlled for. This research also examines the possible indirect effects of economic insecurity, victimization and internal attributions of crime causation on punitiveness through their impact on fear and anger. The multiple regression results support the role of emotions, particularly anger, in explaining punitive attitudes. While indirect effects of victimization and economic insecurity were insignificant, 14 percent of the effect of internal attributions was through anger.

Abstract:
Since the mid-1980’s the U.S. women prison population has increased by more than 430%. More than 66% of incarcerated women are mothers. It was estimated that in the U.S. alone more than 250,000 minor children suffer from maternal separation due to incarceration. Similar trends of a growing number of children affected by maternal incarceration are also identified in Europe and other regions. We argue that, in this reality, Prison Nursery Programs, which allow children to accompany their mothers to prison, provide a valuable alternative. These programs, if properly implemented, can benefit not only the best interests of the child, but also the mother, the state and the general public.

THE SINGLE PIECE OF research that has most influenced Washington’s efforts is something called the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, a set of findings published in 1998. The ACE study—as those who cite it religiously refer to it—grew out of research on smoking. In the 1980s, a doctor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention named Robert Anda was analyzing why some smokers tended to quit in response to public health messages and why others didn’t. In one study, Anda’s research team found that people with a history of depression were more likely to start smoking, and less likely to stop.

The discovery made Anda wonder whether researchers were missing other links between emotional and physical health. Around the same time, Vincent Felitti, a researcher and physician at Kaiser Permanente, stumbled on a similar phenomenon while working on a weight-loss program for obese patients. Many of the patients who dropped out of the program and put weight back on, he found, had a history of sexual abuse.

So Felitti and Anda teamed up and devised something they called the Adverse Childhood Experiences survey. They then set about administering it to 17,000 of Kaiser’s clients in San Diego. The short take-home survey asked the Kaiser patients whether certain things had happened to them before age 18. Had their parents divorced? Had they lived with someone who had abused substances? In all, the survey asked about 10 kinds of adverse experiences.

If anything, Anda and Felitti expected that respondents would dramatically underreport their histories of childhood trauma. But the results shocked the two doctors. “The information was just mind-boggling,” Anda recalls. Twenty-one percent of respondents said they had experienced sexual abuse; 28 percent had suffered physical abuse; 23 percent had grown up with divorced or separated parents, and 27 percent had lived in a household with an adult who was abusing substances. Respondents were assigned an ACE score from zero to 10, with 10 referring to the most childhood trauma. Barely more than a third had an ACE score of zero. And in most cases, patients had experienced not one but multiple adverse experiences. What’s more, these patients came from a demographic that was not especially at risk for early adversity: Most of them were middle- and upper-class San Diegans, 75 percent white and 93 percent high school graduates.

But the most powerful thing about the ACE data turned out to be its predictive power. Because Kaiser patients receive all of their health care within one large system, which in turn collects massive amounts of data on them, Anda and Felitti were able to correlate patients’ responses to the survey with information about their long-term health. Not surprisingly, they found that childhood trauma casts a long shadow over a person’s happiness: the higher someone’s ACE score, the greater his or her chances of eventually performing poorly in the workplace, taking antidepressants, and committing suicide. But childhood trauma didn’t just affect mental health. As a person’s ACE score increased, so did his or her chances of eventually being diagnosed with cancer, heart disease, liver disease, and emphysema. Sometimes these physical ailments stemmed from the risky behaviors that people with histories of childhood adversity were prone to: injecting drugs, smoking, having sex with many partners. But even absent those bad habits, patients who had been exposed to stress and trauma at an early age were simply far more vulnerable to disease.

Preventing crime rather than waiting for a crime to be committed is appealing. Identify the guy who will commit a crime, and intervene. What could be more sensible? First though, how do you identify the incipient bad guys? Bumps on the skull were once thought by phrenologists to provide a major clue. The hypothesis fell on its sword because its predictive power could not climb above zero. Such predictive ambitions remain entirely alive, however, though importantly, the methods for identification have been upgraded. Advice: Don’t bother looking at the skull. Look under it. At the brain itself. And also at the genes that make the brain.

In The Wall Street Journal, (Saturday/Sunday April 27-28 2013) psychiatrist/neuroscientist Adrian Raine posits a brain signature of the criminal mind. The suggestion is that there is a link between low levels of activity in the prefrontal regions of the brain and psychopathy. A second result involves not brain activity but brain structure: allegedly the size of the striatum is larger in criminals, on average. Raine also claims that genetics has begun to “pinpoint which specific genes promote [criminal] behavior”.

Buzz-wise, this is the scientific analog of a Kardashian wedding.

Seriously, anybody who can come up with a line like that should be read more even if she’s talking about extraterrestrial recipes for fish tacos, right? (And, yes, that would be really cool, too.)

STATELINE gets into the act of questioning whether pot legalization will generate new revenues in the adopting states. Notice the dog not barking in this or the other stories on the topic recently? The money saved from not running these folks through the criminal processing system, money now available for better treatment and reentry services to get crime down more, if used intelligently (!!), resulting in other savings associated with crime victimization. LOT of dollars there, as the pro-prison people like to use to justify their “tough on crime” malarkey, but not “new” money, so not worth talking about, we guess. The second article from one of the leading pot legalization people in the US demonstrates other costs and non-costs that could be added to that total. Finally, one of the supposed costs that anti-pot legalization frequently claim turns out not to be true when, you know, researched.

As someone who started as a state budget analyst, I hear every clueless policymaker uttering the pointless “zero-based budgeting” with both amusement and nausea. I’ve been through zero-basing, and it’s as constructive as the coaching of soccer plays to 7-year-olds that I’ve also done. IOW, given the complexity of workplaces and their environments, it’s better to get a grasp of that complexity and resulting uncertainties and learn how to white water raft than to turn to Sigma Alpha Betamax Practices as a sure-fire cure-all. In The Perfect Storm, there’s no better recipe for failure and capsizing than “one size fits all” dogma that will blow up with the first shift from calm to white water.  That's why long-time practitioners roll their eyes with every "new" idea that comes along, why The Little Hoover Commission a few years back said we've got all the reports and commissions and everything we need, we know what works, let's just do it.  (You can add the "for God's sake" that you've felt in your own worklife here if you would like.)

Fad 5. Management by Consensus
Consensus management is usually seen as an alternative to "top-down" decision making common inside hierarchical organizations. In theory, important decisions are to be made with the agreement of everybody in the group.

Since everybody has a say in the decision, anybody can effectively veto any decision. As a result, only decisions that are completely innocuous and support the status quo are ever made. Difficult decisions--ones that might ruffle feathers--tend to get shunted aside.

When tough decisions are made, they're subject to what's called "the Abilene paradox," where a group will unanimously agree on a course of action that no individual member of the group desires because no one is willing to go against the perceived will of the group. . . .

Fad 7. Management By Objective
With MBO, you define objectives within an organization so that management and employees agree to the objectives. Then you compare the employee's actual performance with the agreed-upon objectives.

On the surface, there's nothing wrong with this idea. However, it becomes a fad when people turn what should be a fairly simple exercise into a paperwork nightmare. In this case, the process of planning and evaluating work takes more effort than the work itself.

What's worse, the explicit laying out of objectives--and basing compensation on them--makes it difficult for organizations and individuals to change gears when something unexpected happens. . . .

Finally a bit of real journalism in Oklahoma concerning the fake controversy drummed up by private prison-pushing legislators and the governor to try to embarrass the OK DOC director and make his life so difficult that he’ll resign or to keep throwing so much cr*p at the wall that the state Board of Corrections members can’t take anymore. Their problem, of course, is that the director is one of the most respected corrections people in America, gets named to boards, is asked to train other directors, for goodness sakes. The last time you had this bushwa going on, his opponents in the legislature spent almost $1m. very scarce dollars on an independent audit of the department that came back verifying that the state had one of the most efficient and effective departments in the nation. That audit became That Which Will Not Be Spoken Of after the nitwits who commissioned it took major rations from media and the public for months after, but you can still find it here. Now they’re back with trumped-up accusations of malfeasance involving revolving funds. (We apologize to nitwits everywhere for the insult of comparing you to OK legislative leaders.)

Note how their story has shifted from “stashing” funds as the governor’s stenographer at the statewide newspaper originally put it before it turned out the governor’s office had been fully informed but hadn’t paid attention (or it was too complex for their three combined synapses) to “well, yeah, it was reported but it’s all wrong. And evil. EEVVVIIIILLLL.” Of course, using revolving funds for a maintenance budget to help policymakers who don't want to cut into other items or raise taxes has been traditional practice for years in OK, so you might think even a substance-less governor and her staff, including the state finance man and her puppet on the Board of Corrections should be able to see the long-term benefit. (BZZZT!!! You lose, but here are your nice parting gifts!!)  But that’s the deal. These particular cronies are only there for the short term profits they can wangle and could care less about Oklahoma long term. It was their predecessors using the same logic that now has the state Capitol there caving in on itself, as we've oh-so-sadly reported over and over lately. (Two governors back, the guy moved back to OK to run, then had the U-Haul idling as he finished his last day.  That's the length of perspective for Oklahoma these people have.  The current governor was a Congressperson who ran for governor on the platform of protecting Oklahomans from DC, that is, herself.  That's the brains.)

This is what happens when you have elected officials who see the state treasury as primarily something to be raided for contributors, friends, and other cronies, who see office only as personal power and mirror gazing. I once worked with the top criminal justice person in the OK Attorney General’s office now and will never forget her asking me in all seriousness why the OK DOC was opposed to the district attorneys’ version of reform in the mid-90s, a reform that my projections had increasing prison pops 150% in 20 years (I’m not kidding). “Why wouldn’t they want all that power, get all those dollars?” she truly wanted to know. That those professionals actually believed in “correcting” offenders and public safety threats was clearly beyond her. And her colleagues then and now. That’s what public dollars are for. Power. Winning.  (It also shows why she and her allies don't really care about cutting crime and victimization either, why they shout proudly about being "tough on crime" with crime rates annually 15%-20% higher than the national average, since that would cut all that, you know, power, which can be wielded against "bad guys" but clearly not against crime, which also clearly has a pretty sweet deal in OK.)

Once you understand that about the people currently in office in Oklahoma, you understand everything that’s happening with this hacked-up, bogus story about revolving accounts that's really about a rolling disaster that's either already in your state, too, or coming if your state doesn't watch out. Private prisons fund you, you fund private prisons. Someone’s getting in your way, you get him outta the way. You can’t say it out loud, of course, so you get a hack “investigative” reporter (who has the real story blaring WOCKA!, WOCKA!! in his clueless face) on the statewide newspaper to print the twill for you to give it credibility. “Why, we’re just responding to what’s been brought up in the news . . . .” You hide behind your appointees to the Board of Corrections, to the state finance office to gain from their professionalism [sic] about your concern, even as they’re parroting your same political bilge. And clueless readers don’t know whom to believe, believe it’s all the same old, walk away from attention, let it all happen.

So, as we’ve said, the long-term result will be the governor winning, the state losing one of the most respected DOC directors in the nation, as we described, and the OK taxpayer opening his/her wallet up to private prisons to rifle through at leisure. But those taxpayers will deserve it, as you’ll see next election when this governor who is so weightless she can’t cast a shadow in the brightest sun gets reelected by 15%-20%. In a democracy, you get the government you deserve. And, unfortunately, give it to the good people there who don’t deserve it, too.

Explanations for the persistence of high-crime places have traditionally drawn upon routine activity theory (one variety of opportunity theory) which suggests that the routine activities of offenders, victims and what have sometimes been termed guardians contribute to the likelihood of crime occurring in particular places. Less often noted as potential explanatory factors are the physical features of these places. These are emphasized in other varieties of opportunity theory including crime pattern theory and situational prevention. To take high crime street segments as an example, these latter theories would emphasize such factors as (1) the type of street (e.g., commercial or residential, variations in land use), (2) the presence of “criminogenic facilities” (bars and taverns, betting shops, check cashing businesses, pawn shops, porn shops, liquor stores, gun stores, late-night fast food outlets), (3) signs of disorder (drug market, teen hang-out prostitution stroll, graffiti, abandoned vehicles, abandoned buildings, litter) and (4) other generators of street activity (e.g. bus routes/stops, parking lots, and street lighting). The authors include many, but not all, of these factors in their analyses of the role of criminal opportunities in generating higher levels of crime at specific street segments.

Weisburd, Groff, and Yang develop a new perspective on the street-to-street variability in crime patterns. They suggest that collective efficacy, usually defined as “social cohesion among neighbors combined with their willingness to intervene on behalf of the common good,” could also be a powerful explanation for the uneven distribution of crime within neighborhoods. In their analyses, indicators of social disorganization (measured as the value of residential property and the amount of housing assistance) are significantly related to the level of crime at particular street segments. Crime hot spots are much less likely at places with wealthier residents. Voter participation on the street segment is used as a more direct measure of collective efficacy in specific places. Contrasting street segments with no active voters to street segments where all registered voters are active voters, the authors find that the more involved residents are in public affairs, the less likely the street segments are to have chronic crime problems. Perhaps the most important single finding in The Criminology of Place is that both opportunity and social disorganization perspectives matter in understanding crime at place and, taken together, these factors permit a stronger way to predict spatial and temporal variations in crime.

The general policy implications drawn from other investigations of crime and place are that crime hot spots are good targets for scarce crime prevention resources and these interventions should be tailored to address the place dynamics, situations, and characteristics that cause a “spot” to be “hot.” Most discussions of place-oriented crime prevention focus on what police, place managers, and others can do to manage recurring problems in crime hot spots. Weisburd, Groff, and Yang concur with these perspectives and then advance this line of reasoning by encouraging policy makers, practitioners, and scholars to recognize a broader range of risk and protective factors at high-crime places. The authors rightly note that the concentration of crime at micro places provides an important opportunity to “lower the scale” of social and structural interventions designed to mobilize community leaders, increase social cohesion, and enhance economic investments. The authors suggest that refocusing these types of crime prevention initiatives on specific places, rather than diffusing resources across larger geographic areas, could improve their effectiveness.

Deep Thoughts on research news related to Corrections Sentencing this weekend, perhaps more “outside the silo” than “inside” but still related. This piece explains how requiring people to describe how a policy works actually tends to lead them to less extreme attitudes toward the policy, something that might be of value to Corr Sent education efforts, yes? This actually goes along with what we found in MD when we ran “deliberative focus groups” there with the state sentencing commission over a decade ago. That process asks participants their views on policy options, then has them discuss them in groups for different views. In doing so, the participants hear other ideas and are forced to describe their own. Then, at the end, we surveyed them again for changes in their opinions on the policies discussed. We found shifts toward moderation in their opinions, especially on items like whether or not violent offenders should be allowed to participate in diversion to community programs. At first the opponents were thinking of people like the Boston bombers, but then in conversation realized it could be that relative of theirs (or themselves) who got in that bar fight. So it’s nice to see verification of what we did and we encourage those of you interested in similar approaches to contact us if you want to move on something.

One of the greatest dangers in attacking and/or sanctioning behaviors is always that you will end up adopting the behaviors that you want to punish and stop, ends, means, all that. Bad stuff has to be stopped and good stuff rarely is enough, at least so the belief goes. Of course, then you tend to turn into what you were trying to protect yourself from. History is funny (not ha ha) that way over and over. We haven’t solved that one after thousands of years, but that’s not the point of this piece. It’s simply to call attention to how that applies to our zeal to stop bullying and our adoption of policies and behaviors that can turn us into bullies in our zeal. The author relates a scary but kinda funny (ha ha) story from her own experience (not really funny to her, though, apparently) and then gives other hypotheticals that are very worth paying attention to. Especially since the line between what we do to stop bullies, to define what a bully is, how they get that way, and how they’re different from “good” people and how we do the same thing with crime and offenders really isn’t that sharp as you might discover when reading this. Or maybe not. It’s your Deep Thought.

Confirmation from a fairly reputable source of what we mean by the ongoing economic component of The Perfect Storm well past the “business as usual” period that leads to “return to good old days” thinking. Looks like a brief improvement for the next year or two, followed by sharp decline around 2020. If we can get Corr Sent 2.0 in place by 2020, it’s weatherable (is that a word?)—but notice there’s not one variable reported in the models they used that factors in The Storm’s other components. As we’ve noted about people and organizations whose work we admire and who are doing good jobs informing the public, in virtually all of them the writing is about a planet completely unaware of The Perfect Storm news updates we hit you with every week—no climate change, no shifts in energy sources and costs, no infrastructure decay and failure, no narrowing of water and food access, no associated physical and mental health declines or rising social needs. So, since the GAO is really being very liberal in its scary forecast as a result, it’s a good bet that their projections are very likely to happen earlier and be steeper than they believe. Still, while not the 2X4 to the forehead that policymakers need, this report is a step forward, unlike most.

We’ve harped on WV in the past, based on stories here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (!!!), here, and, yes, here.  (That counts as "harped," doesn't it?)  The state had a bill designed with home-grown development ready to pass in a bipartisan vote, but the governor used the opposition of the House Minority Leader as an excuse to put that vote off. Better, he said, to have JRI consultants come in to tell the state what’s best in Corr Sent policy reform. We predicted at the time that, based on past performances of JRI theater and on the House Minority Leader’s opposition, the new legislation would be inferior in scope and impact to what had already passed the Senate and would have the House with a large majority. While the House Minority Leader didn’t get everything he wanted in the final bill, it nevertheless lived down to our expectations, as the critique of JRI issued a few weeks back documented. For pretty much the same reasons and with the same firm [sic] justifications and expectations that we described for their subsidiary drug court reforms. Just as the playwright’s words for drug courts invoke studies of the best ones, the script for WV’s JRI reform incanted Texas as proof of the reform’s effectiveness. Texas, which has seen direct sentences to prison go up, had crime rates going down for a couple of decades prior to JRI there, and, according to the JRI critique, has not had the prison population declines rehearsed in the usual recitations either. But the governor got to pronounce success, as other governors before him, JRI got one more bill passed to count as another “success,” and the traveling road show moved onto another state for more performances.

For funders considering whether their past expenditures have been as unfortunately used to this point as we’re relating, I would just say this. Prove me and those who wrote the report critical of JRI in WV and elsewhere wrong. Hire independent consultants, the Latessas, Taxmans, Pryzbylskis, Careys, etc., to come in and do the process evals for all programs and the impact evals for those with a few years of outcomes. Ask yourself how much of what you’re getting as “outcome” or “impact” measures/results are really simply input/output measures. If the theory between the former and the latter is in fact good, there should be causal correlations, but those correlations also depend on implementation and good faith of the state players. IOW, inputs/outputs should not be definitively accepted as indicators of goals being met unless/until independent evaluators can make that connection for you. As we noted in the first part, the “don’t ask the barber if you need a haircut” rule comes into play here, not because your fundees are dishonest but because they are vested and have clearly become embedded in the trees.

We’ve expressed our admiration for David Kennedy, his perspective, and his work in the past, but this is why you should pay attention to him. He’s one of our premier experts on “outside the silo” and he’s not resting on his record of greater accomplishment than any Reform 1.0 effort in any state to now. He absolutely gets that it’s a fool’s game by this point and waste of time and resources playing inside the lines of “workgroup→legislation→maybe something happens, maybe not.” One of the reasons why I’ve said in the past that, had Adam Gelb been given the freedom to do with Reform 1.0 what he had in MD back in the 1990s when I worked with him, he would have done more and better than 1.0 has accomplished is because one of his causes has always also been Kennedy’s—focus on “hot spots” and “hot offenders” instead of broad measures and programs that are more “one size fits all” than serious attention. Yes, I understand the constitutional concerns, and I’m confident that those can be accommodated in what Kennedy does, even if not general urban police departments as a whole, at least a lot easier than we can deal with overincarceration. I can guarantee that, if David Kennedy had the resources that have been committed to most of those 1.0 states, you would have what he’s talking about in this piece in more places and real advances against violent crime. If/when we get serious about “outside the silo” changes in Corr Sent Reform 2.0, he should be the first number on speed dial.

Yes, and cigarettes also kill more people than pot annually. That’s why they’re illeg . . . uh, . . . hmm . . . . (Note the what seems kinda desperate spin by the lead researcher not to jeopardize future funding from the anti-pot feds at the end.) Next piece speculates about Oregon’s chances to reverse its last anti-legalization vote and why better understanding of the “myths” of anti-pot rhetoric could make that happen. Color us skeptical. Meanwhile, the third article spells out once more why we call it The War on Some Drugs Used by Some People. But don’t worry about those predominantly wealthy white kids: "It's not like they're using it as a party drug on the weekend," Hanson said. "This data suggests that they're using it as a study aid. . . .” Oh, all righty then. As long as it’s not something stupid like alleviating physical pain, mental trauma, or just stress relief. Now we know what those OR pot advocates should have been claiming about pot all these years.

But then . . . what if she’s right? Put aside her trauma drama and think about the claim by itself. How is it different from what was said in the books we’ve reviewed recently here and here?  Rehab varies tremendously and not just by participant. The quality of programs is widely divergent and the bedspace pressures can rot even quality offerings. It’s become pretty clear that, when we’re running around telling policymakers to divert offenders to treatment rather than prison in our efforts to get populations down, we’re doing it not based on the actual availability of demonstrated effective treatment programs (with LiLo as Exhibit A) but on hopes and guesses as to actual impact. IOW, the evidence upon which we base those recommendations is less grounded in reality than part of a mantra, a rehearsed script, a policy play with regular performances around the country.

“I always look at them and say, ‘Yes, I can guarantee it because by policy
I can reduce your recidivism rates.’ We just decided to revoke people
under different things. We all know that game. That's just a shell game.
Okay. Let's don't violate technical violations. I can get that down. Okay.
Let's just decide we are going to let people fail three or four times and not
violate them. I can get your arrest rates down. I can get a lot of things
down. But have we really changed behavior? And so that's a much
different thing.”

Even if this guy weren’t talking our pet cause that we see as absolutely vital for returning inmates to their communities with skills that will be not just meaningful but essential, you need to read about him just to find out about him. In a sane world, the Kim K’s and the Lindsay (“Rehab Is Pointless”) Lohan’s would be skating our orders out to us at the drive-in, and this guy would be on our TVs 24/7. Here’s the basic point, but you really need to read the whole thing, we promise:

In a city where an elite few fuss over $13 plates of escarole wedges, too many others eat at 98-cent stores and drive-throughs or go hungry altogether. Mr. Finley estimates that the City of Los Angeles owns 26 square miles of vacant lots, an area equivalent to 20 Central Parks, with enough space for 724,838,400 tomato plants.

His radical fix is to take back that land and plant it, even if it’s the skinny strip between concrete and curb.

It was the barren 150-by-10-foot median outside Mr. Finley’s house that inspired his first act of crab grass defiance. In 2010, he planted a sidewalk garden to reduce grocery expenses and to avoid the 45-minute round-trip to Whole Foods.

“I wanted a carrot without toxic ingredients I didn’t know how to spell,” he said.

A few months later, neighbors were gawking in delight at the sight of pumpkins, peppers, sunflowers, kale and corn in an area better known for hubcap shops. Late one night, Mr. Finley, who is a single father, noticed a mother and daughter sneaking food from his garden. He conceived L.A. Green Grounds as a way to share the abundance with people like them.

The city was less magnanimous. As do other metropolitan areas, Los Angeles owns the “parkways” that run alongside the curb, and the Bureau of Street Services cited Mr. Finley for gardening on his median without the required $400 permit.

Outraged, he and a band of green-thumbed activists petitioned a member of the City Council, who convinced the city to back off.

“People in my neighborhood are so disconnected from the fresh food supply that kids don’t know an eggplant from a sweet potato,” Mr. Finley said. “We have to show them how to get grounded in the truest sense of the word.”