The Granite Falls Detention Center is a boot camp for criminal offenders aged 18 to 25. ''Campers'' spend one year at the camp, during which time they take vocational courses (mainly in the construction trades), engage in vigorous physical exercise, and receive psychological counseling.
Upon completion of the program, they are returned to their hometowns. They fulfill the remainder of any sentence on parole instead of in prison. The overall mission of the center is to prevent recidivism-to ensure that, once released, the campers commit no further criminal acts and become productive members of society.
A unit of the state prison system, the center has a limited capacity, which is far less than the number of offenders who would qualify for it. Offenders who are not admitted to the camp resentenced instead to conventional jails or prisons.
Campers are subject to strict discipline, similar to that in a military training facility. Those who violate camp rules, or fail to make satisfactory progress in courses and other activities, are subject to transfer to prison.
The center is a budgeted program of the state prison system.
In a recent budget, the prison system set forth the objective of the detention center as follows:
To provide programs of vocational training, physical exercise, and psychological counseling for youthful offenders, with the aim of preventing them from commit ting criminal acts after their release and enabling them to become productive members of society.
At the end of each year the center submitted are port of its performance. Out come measures included the following:
• Percentage of campers released to society (as opposed to being transferred to other prison facilities)
• Number of campers completing vocational courses
• Number of hours of psychological counseling pro vided
1. Comment on the program's objective and its outcome measures. Do you believe that they provide a basis on which to assess the program's performance?
2. Indicate ways in which employees of the center could enhance the center's performance as measured by the outcome measures, yet which would not be consistent with the center's overall mission.
3. Suppose that the center included as one of its outcome measures ''percentage of campers that did not commit a crime within five years.'' Comment on the virtues and deficiencies of this measure.