Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Even the "Influencers" Are Clueless

I have a couple of posts below on how the research needed to inform cost- and victim-effective corrections sentencing policy gets lost in the ether despite the best efforts of orgs and individuals. I keep thinking about that great quote from the Little Hoover Commission in CA that they didn't need more reports, they had shelves full of reports, they needed real structure and action. This post gives a classic example of why. The blogger, for those of you not into the blogworld, is one of the more popular and cited bloggers, frequently on radio programs these days, and widely respected as one of the top, most informed intellectuals on the Internet. And she is just now figuring out that juveniles are being tried as adults, sentenced to adult prisons, and that can have a bad impact later on. (The story she emphasizes about two nine-year-olds looking at felony rape charges is also a classic example of our system run wild.) If the leading "influencers" in the blog world, who are usually a few weeks ahead of the mainstream media newsreaders and blowhards, are this far behind despite the reports that are always out there (and nowhere does she mention Jim Austin's study from yesterday), then there's a lot of spit in the wind out there.

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