This is cause to review the facts concerning this program before the bright lights of the camera blind us again.
Bad ideas abound in the field of juvenile justice policy.
Transferring youth to adult court, capital punishment for crimes committed as a youth and recent federal legislation aimed at overturning many safeguards for children are all recent examples of bad policy. Sometimes these bad ideas stick with us for a long time and others, like chain gangs and boot camps, seem to resurface every ten or twenty years. Maybe we suffer from generational amnesia. The transformed teens and the lifers seeking redemption were neatly packaged as a panacea for solving juvenile delinquency. The scourge of feral children was surely soon to be eradicated by inmates yelling at kids.