Drug Rehabilitation Program - Essay Example

This work particularly discusses papers about drug rehabilitation programs that governments have initiated so as to curtail crimes including drug addiction. These papers intently look at the benefits of the programs, how they have helped achieved goals of drug use reduction and crime reduction and on the other hand, how the programs have failed to address the problems. The US Department of Justice through the National Institute of Justice has conducted a research to ascertain the effectiveness of different crime prevention programs.

Defining crime prevention program as "any practice shown to result in less crime than would occur without the practice", the research divided the effectiveness of the programs into what works, what doesn't work, what's promising and what's unknown (Lawrence W. Sherman, 1998). This article particularly relates to the endeavor of this paper in providing a valid measure and a legitimate result to the questions of effectiveness of crime prevention. This is done with a special focus on the cure for drug addiction among the juvenile.

It basically constitutes a review of the existing crime prevention programs of the government. The evaluation made use of scientific measure to "provide a consistent and reasonably objective way to draw conclusions about cause and effect" (Lawrence W. Sherman, 1998). The research methodology consisted of three steps: the search for impact evaluation, the use of Maryland Scale of Scientific Methods and deciding what works, what doesn't work, what's promising and what's unknown. The first step was some sort of literature review.

It examines the existing reports that evaluate the effectiveness of crime prevention programs. Next, the researchers adapted the Maryland Scale of Scientific Method ranking each study from 1 as the weakest to 5 as the strongest (Lawrence W. Sherman, 1998). The research design is composed of 5 levels which includes correlation between a crime prevention program and a measure of crime or crime risk factors at a single point in time. To reach the conclusion of effectiveness, a program should at least have a two level 5 studies (Lawrence W.

Sherman, 1998). The research showed that "preschool and weekly home visits by teachers, building school capacity to initiate and sustain innovation through the use of school teams or other organizational development strategies, clarifying and communicating norms, training or coaching in thinking skills for high-risk youth, ex-offender job training, extra police patrols in high crime hot spots and rehabilitation programs for adult and juvenile offenders" are among the policies that work. On the other hand, gun buyback program and increased arrest or raids on drug markets are found to be ineffective.

To properly label the programs, they used both the secondary analysis and the scientific scale. This is the loophole in the study since there it lacks the quantitative and objective measure is categorizing the program. The only justification provided was the secondary analysis done. The problem however with secondary analysis