A study trumpeted by the right to support faith-based programs offers little support when looked at closely.
By: Hank Kalet
Slate’s Mark A.R. Kleiman offers some necessary tonic to offset the Bush administration’s contention that faith-based initiatives are the panacea that ails us.
In June, the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society issued a report on a Texas prison program called InnerChange that apparently said that program graduates have been rearrested and sent back to prison at "dramatically lower rates than a matched control group."
At least, that’s how the report played in the news media and was sold by the Bush administration and InnerChange proponents. The coverage, however, was seriously misleading, as Kleiman points out:
"But when you look carefully at the Penn study, it’s clear that the program didn’t work. The InnerChange participants did somewhat worse than the controls: They were slightly more likely to be rearrested and noticeably more likely (24 percent versus 20 percent) to be reimprisoned. If faith is, as Paul told the Hebrews, the evidence of things not seen, then InnerChange is an opportunity to cultivate faith; we certainly haven’t seen any results."
Kleiman says InnerChange advocates cherry-picked the data, ignoring bad stats and focusing on the ones that proved their point. So advocates pointed to the success of 75 program graduates, ignoring the "102 participants who dropped out, were kicked out, or got early parole and didn’t finish."
"Naturally," he writes. "the non-graduates did worse than the control group. If you select out the winners, you leave mostly losers."
Not that the report paints a negative portrait of the program (that was left to Slate, which used the misleading tease headline "Faith-based Fraud" on its lead page, implying that the program itself was a fraud). Rather, it puts the program on the same footing as many other attempts to stem the number of recidivist inmates.
And you really can’t blame the right for trumpeting the portions of the report it thought would make the best headlines. We all tend to do this think of the way the evening news trumpets medical breakthroughs.
What was disturbing about the coverage, however, was that until Kleiman’s story on Slate, there was no real liberal rebuttal, no one to say "slow down."
So much for that vaunted liberal conspiracy.