PS501 Unit 9 Critical Thinking Paper Example

A Tour of the Adult Side: A PS501 Unit 9 Critical Thinking Paper on a Proposal to Show Detained Youth the County Jail

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS501: Foundations of Professional Psychology

Unit 9 Critical Thinking Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the detention center, the county commissioner and the proposal are composite and illustrative; the sources cited are real.

The Proposal

At a county board meeting in January, a commissioner proposed that young people held at our detention center be taken, in groups of six, on a 90-minute tour of the adult jail that shares our parking lot. Adult inmates selected by the jail would describe their lives inside. The commissioner's reasoning was simple and sincere: "If they see where this road ends, some of them will get off it." The proposal would cost little, since the jail's staff would run the tours. My director asked me to prepare a written response before the board's March meeting.

Critical thinking starts by stating the claim in a form that can be tested. The commissioner's claim is that exposure to adult incarceration will reduce later offending among detained youth. That is an empirical claim about an intervention, and it has been tested.

What the Evidence Says

Petrosino et al. (2013) conducted a Campbell systematic review of programs like the one proposed, often called Scared Straight or juvenile awareness programs. Such programs bring young people who have offended, or who are considered at risk, into adult prisons to see conditions and hear from inmates. The review included nine randomized or quasi-randomized studies carried out in the United States, with 946 participants aged 14 to 20. None of the studies found that the programs reduced delinquency. When the authors combined the seven studies that reported reoffending rates, young people who went through the programs were significantly more likely to offend than those who did not. The review concludes that these programs do more harm than doing nothing at all.

That is a strong finding by the standards of the field. It comes from experimental studies rather than opinion or anecdote, it pools several trials and the direction of the effect is consistent. A careful reader would still note that the studies are old, that most were small and that the programs varied, but no study pointed the other way.

Nine trials looked for a benefit from showing young people prison, and the combined results found harm instead.

Why a Program Can Backfire

The commissioner might reasonably ask how seeing prison could make anyone more likely to go there. Two lines of research suggest answers. Dishion et al. (1999) review studies in which interventions that grouped high-risk adolescents together increased the problem behavior they were meant to reduce. In a family and peer program for young teens, those placed in groups with other high-risk peers showed more problem behavior later than comparison youth, and in a long-term follow-up of an early delinquency prevention program, boys who attended summer camps with peers more than once fared especially badly. The authors argue that peers reinforce one another's talk about rule breaking, a process they call deviancy training. A jail tour for six detained teenagers at a time could produce exactly that kind of group: young people bonding over bravado in front of adult inmates.

Lilienfeld (2007) argues that psychology has paid too little attention to treatments that harm. Lilienfeld proposes that a treatment be considered potentially harmful when replicated studies show it worsens outcomes for some recipients, and the review lists Scared Straight programs among them. The broader point applies to the commissioner's reasoning: an intervention that seems obviously helpful can still hurt, and good intentions are not evidence.

Considering the Other Side

Critical thinking also requires taking the strongest version of the opposing argument seriously. The commissioner could argue that our proposal differs from the programs reviewed, since it involves no shouting or confrontation, only a tour and a conversation. That is a fair point. The review covered programs with many formats, from aggressive confrontations to milder orientations, and the authors did not find that any format worked. The burden of proof for a new version lies with the program, not with the people who doubt it.

The commissioner could also point out that some young people say the experience scared them. That is likely true, and Petrosino et al. (2013) note that participants and staff often report such impressions. Feeling scared and changing behavior are different outcomes, however, and the trials measured behavior.

What Else Could Address the Commissioner's Goal

The commissioner's underlying goal, reducing the number of young people who end up in adult jail, is one I share. The response I drafted recommends declining the tours and offers two alternatives grounded in evidence our center already uses. The first is expanding the screening that releases lower-risk youth to home supervision, since Unit 3's article suggested that formal processing itself can push some young people further into the system. The second is funding more mentoring pairs with the community college volunteers who run our reading program, which brings youth into contact with adults whose lives point somewhere other than jail. Both options keep young people out of the large peer groups that Dishion and colleagues warn about, and both can be measured with records the county already holds, such as later court contacts and school enrollment after release. That matters, because the commissioner will reasonably ask how the board would know whether an alternative worked, and a response that applies the same standard of evidence to its own proposals is easier to trust.

How I Will Present It

A response that only says "the research disagrees" is unlikely to persuade a commissioner who proposed the idea in public. My draft acknowledges the goal, summarizes the review in plain language with the key numbers, explains in two sentences why grouping teenagers can backfire and offers the alternatives with their costs. It also invites the commissioner to tour our center instead, so the discussion starts from what the county already does.

Limits of This Analysis

The studies in the review were conducted mostly decades ago and in other states, and a tour run differently might have different effects. No one has tested this exact proposal. But the decision does not require certainty; it requires weighing an untested program against consistent evidence of harm from similar ones, and that weighing favors declining.

Conclusion

The commissioner's proposal rests on an intuition that research has tested and found wanting. A systematic review of nine trials found that programs exposing young people to adult prisons increased later offending, research on group interventions offers a mechanism for that harm, and the field's own standards call for avoiding treatments with such evidence. Critical thinking here means respecting the goal, rejecting the method and offering better options.

References

Dishion, T. J., McCord, J., & Poulin, F. (1999). When interventions harm: Peer groups and problem behavior. American Psychologist, 54(9), 755-764. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.9.755

Lilienfeld, S. O. (2007). Psychological treatments that cause harm. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(1), 53-70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6916.2007.00029.x

Petrosino, A., Turpin-Petrosino, C., Hollis-Peel, M. E., & Lavenberg, J. G. (2013). Scared Straight and other juvenile awareness programs for preventing juvenile delinquency: A systematic review. Campbell Systematic Reviews, 9(1), 1-55. https://doi.org/10.4073/csr.2013.5