Abducted!

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Bob Frankston [Bob19-0501 () bobf frankston com]
Sent: Sunday, July 20, 2008 3:32 PM
To: David Farber
Cc: 'Dewayne Hendricks'
Subject: Abducted!

This is a very good article – it gives perspective on our efforts to do good, especially when children are involved. 
It’s very rare to have a sober look at this issues.

The article doesn’t address the issue of “Internet porn” directly – what makes it different is that it has a strong 
political agenda that goes well beyond concerns about children.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/20/abducted/

Excerpts:

Of the 17 children Massachusetts has issued alerts on since it created its system in 2003, all have been safely 
returned.

These are encouraging statistics - but also deeply misleading, according to some of the only outside scholars to 
examine the system in depth. In the first independent study of whether Amber Alerts work, a team led by University of 
Nevada criminologist Timothy Griffin looked at hundreds of abduction cases between 2003 and 2006 and found that Amber 
Alerts - for all their urgency and drama - actually accomplish little.

[later the article notes that it isn’t obvious that the Amber alert played a vital role in most of these cases]

####


What Amber Alerts do create, its critics say, is a climate of fear around a tragic but extremely rare event, pumping up 
public anxiety. Griffin calls it "crime control theater," and his critique of Amber Alerts fits into a larger complaint 
on the part of some criminologists about crime-fighting measures - often passed in the wake of horrific, highly 
publicized crimes - that originate from strong emotions rather than research into what actually works. Whether it's 
child sex-offender registries or "three strikes" criminal-sentencing rules, these policies, critics warn, can prove 
ineffective, sometimes costly, and even counterproductive, since they heighten public fears and distract from threats 
that are at once more common and more tractable.

[And ruin lives]

"The problem with these politically expedient solutions is that they look good but do very little to solve the 
problem," says Jack Levin, a professor of sociology and criminology at Northeastern.

###

Critics, however, measure the price of the program not in money but in broader social costs, in anxiety, panic, and 
misdirected public energy. Amber Alert and other measures "generate the appearance, but not the fact, of crime 
control," Griffin and Miller wrote. In so doing, such crime-fighting efforts reinforce misconceptions about what we 
should and shouldn't be afraid of.

###

This is, of course, little consolation to parents who have lost children to kidnappers. But, according to Fox, if we 
want to save children's lives, we'd do better to worry about loosely enforced bicycle helmet and seat-belt laws, or the 
safety standards of school buses - all of which are much more statistically dangerous but lack comparably high-profile 
systems for stoking public concern.


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