Why Rehabilitating Repeat Criminal Offenders Often Fails

Very recommendable!

Rehabilitation is a subject that has been discussed for at least the past 5-6 decades!

A sober assessment! There is no panacea yet! If one's calling is to be a criminal, then one probably remains a criminal for life.

I guess, besides offering help to change a criminal's life is close 24 hour monitoring of released repeat offenders is necessary plus significantly increased incarceration with every new crime.

Caveat: I did not read the entire long article.

"... We show how rhetoric has caused treatments to seem more successful than honest data analysis reveals them to be. Nearly all such programs have either failed or been almost impossible to replicate in clinical trials. We then detail how political narratives have bolstered misleading claims about rehabilitation’s successes and highlight the wasteful investments that have ensued, citing Washington State’s juvenile rehabilitation programs as the embodiment of all these issues. ...

For over a century, Americans have searched for ways to rehabilitate criminal offenders. Despite our best efforts, in the aggregate, we have been unable to produce even minuscule reductions in overall recidivism. As influential scholar Robert Martinson soberly concluded decades ago: some programs work for people some of the time. When new rehabilitation treatments emerge and show promise, advocates and officials too quickly react by overpromising and moralizing, before subsequent results fail to confirm early findings. ...

Though politically unsavory, the fact is that high recidivism rates are the historical norm and have never substantively changed. After a hundred years of theorizing, testing, evaluating, and criticizing, social science has consistently demonstrated that serious criminal behavior remains stubbornly stable over time, situation, and place.

Those who commit crimes today will be those who commit crimes tomorrow, and they will be the same people who commit crimes until they are incapacitated by age, infirmity, imprisonment, or death. ...

A large body of criminological and psychological evidence finds that recidivistic criminals are not accidental, adjacent, or incidental criminals. They share characteristics including hyperaggression, poor self-control, bad decision-making skills, disdain for conventions such as employment and education, social and economic parasitism, entitled attitudes, and manipulative behavior.

They see nothing wrong or immoral with their impolite and dangerous behavior. As several qualitative studies of active offenders demonstrate, many report experiencing enjoyment at terrorizing, maiming, and killing others. Criminals have friends and family who are also criminals, normalizing these traits. [Reminiscent of the Biden clan! 😊]..."

Why “Rehabilitating” Repeat Criminal Offenders Often Fails | Manhattan Institute

America’s Air-Traffic Control System: An International Disgrace, totally anachronistic and outdated for decades

Recommendable! On average there are about 45,000 flight takeoffs per day in the US.

Trump to the rescue!

"“The (air-traffic control) system will remain mired in mid-twentieth-century technology until it’s run by an independent corporation accountable to regulators but freed from congressional micromanagement, annual budget battles, and the federal bureaucracy’s convoluted hiring and procurement regulations. ..."

"... Long before the Obama and Biden administrations’ quest to diversify staff in control towers, the system was already one of the worst in the developed world. The recent rash of near-collisions is the result of chronic mismanagement that has left the system with too few controllers using absurdly antiquated technology. ...

It was bad enough to see such outdated technology in 2005. But they’re still using those paper flight strips in American towers, and the Federal Aviation Administration’s modernization plans have been delayed so many times that the strips aren’t due to be phased out until 2032. The rest of the system is similarly archaic. The U.S. is way behind Europe in using satellites to guide and monitor planes, forcing pilots and controllers to rely on much less precise readings from radio beacons and ground-based radar.

Overseas controllers use high-resolution cameras and infrared sensors to monitor planes on runways, but many American controllers still have to look out the window—which is why a FedEx cargo plane almost landed on top of another plane two years ago in Austin, Texas. ...

Nearly all  other developed countries sensibly separate these roles, so that a federal aviation agency oversees an independent corporation that operates the control towers and the rest of the system, functioning as a public utility. This independent operator can be a state-owned company (as in Australia, Switzerland, Germany, and Scandinavian countries), a nonprofit corporation (as in Canada), or a company with private investors (as in the United Kingdom and Italy). ..."

America’s Air-Traffic Control System: An International Disgrace "After the Reagan Airport disaster, will we finally reform the FAA?"

Empty Desks: The Policy Response to Declining Public School Enrollment

Food for thought! Maybe the recent mass illegal immigration/invasion across the southern border will fill class rooms again. Caution: satire.

The drop of enrollment was around 1.1 million between 2013 and 2023. As usual governments just keep throwing more money at the public school system. A well known waste of taxpayer money for many years.

If my wife and I were a parent of small children today we would probably enroll them in a private school of our choice or opt for home schooling.

Unfortunately, the Executive Summary of the article/report below is poorly or amateurishly written.

"In many parts of the country, enrollment in traditional public schools has fallen to its lowest point in decades. However, states, cities, and school districts have been slow to respond to the reality of empty desks. This report examines trends in school enrollment, focusing on several of America’s most populous cities, as well as the budgetary and staffing responses to those trends. It also examines the states where these large cities are located. ...
Between 2013 and 2023, public school enrollment fell nationally by 2% from 49.9 million to 48.8 million. Other studies have documented large declines in K–12 student enrollment in public schools at the state and district levels since the Covid-19 pandemic. However, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the number of public school teachers was 11% higher in 2021 (3.8 million) than in 2011 (3.4 million). Furthermore, NCES reports that public schools spent an average of $16,280 per pupil in 2020, an increase of 13% from 2010. Roughly 80% of school spending is on salaries and benefits for staff (teachers, administrators, paraprofessionals, and so on). ..."

Empty Desks: The Policy Response to Declining Public School Enrollment | Manhattan Institute

Goldwater Institute Frees Texas Higher Education from Radical DEI’s Tentacles

Headline of the day! Bravo Goldwater Institute and Manhattan Institute!

"Radical, racist political ideologies are crippling higher education, but the Goldwater Institute is showing the country how to rein in the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) regime. This week Goldwater enacted a powerful reform in Texas that completely defunds the bloated apparatus of DEI administrators currently swarming the state’s public colleges and universities.
Every year, “woke” bureaucrats divert millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours away from academic enrichment and toward politicized, race- and gender-based DEI programming. That’s why the Goldwater and Manhattan Institutes released a landmark reform earlier this year, “Abolish DEI Bureaucracies and Restore Colorblind Equality in Public Universities,” that fully eliminates all DEI offices in public higher education. ..."

Goldwater Frees Texas Higher Ed from Radical DEI’s Tentacles

The Only Thing That Can Re-Elect Joe Biden Is Donald Trump. Really!

There are still intellectuals suffering from serious Trum Derangement Syndrome! Even at the Manhattan Institute!

And Trump is not a "thing", but a human being or candidate! It is not "can re-elect", but "can get Biden reelected". Poor choice of wording!

Here is my opinion on why Trump may not want to run again!

The Only Thing That Can Re-Elect Joe Biden Is Donald Trump | Manhattan Institute by Jason L. Riley

Bernie Sander's Agenda of Impoverishment

I like the headline! Bernie Sanders is just another cheap populist in a long line of previous populists in U.S. history! 

Famously, one of these early populist movements was so revealingly called The No Nothing! Bernie Sanders and his acolytes fit right in! 

Agenda of Impoverishment Bernie Sanders’s proposals would destroy America’s economic vitality

The Manhattan Institute announced today another interesting headline:
The Second Coming of Eugene V. Debs
"Bernie Sanders says he’s another FDR, but he's more closely related to the early 20th-century labor leader who ran for the presidency five times as a Socialist."

What about any semblance between Bernie Sanders and William Jennings Bryan?

On another note, it is quite shocking that the Dimocratic Party had a dozen or more presidential candidates and none of them represented a middle of the road approach to win over ordinary citizens and voters. A democracy works best if the opposition party has representative candidates and not almost exclusively fringe candidates!