The second season of “Beyond Scared Straight” begins Thursday night and with it come renewed questions about its effectiveness. The reality program follows at-risk teens as they are threatened, screamed at, and harassed by prison inmates in an attempt to get them to change their ways. The show was A&E Network’s most watched debut in…

A few months ago, I spent the day meeting with a group of family members who have had their lives changed forever by acts of violence. Nobody there would have chosen to be a member of this group — all of us had either lost a loved one to murder, or had lost a loved…

The recent riots in Britain have forced policy makers to look anew at a juvenile justice system that has historically focused on rehabilitation and diversion. An AP story details growing public outrage and frustration of officials within the system to what they see as a soft approach to juvenile crime. The change in tone has…

It’s always good to have someone to turn to when you are going through a tough time. And life, as we all know, can be full of those bumpy patches. That’s especially true of the teen years. Toss yourself for a moment back into that tumult of peer relationships, galloping hormones, bad judgment and all…

We all want our schools to be safe and orderly. Our teachers should be able to focus on teaching and our children should be able to focus on learning. Sadly though, the effort to instill greater discipline into our schools has backfired. Instead of creating classrooms conducive to learning, schools have enacted policies that criminalize…

It has been a bad week in the United States in a bad year marked by remarkable international turmoil. The recession and high unemployment persist at a time when the powerless seemed poised to fight back, creating a recipe for insurrection—as happened first  in the Middle East and now in Great Britain. According to Wednesday’s (August…

You will break your neck. That jumping rock you did the perfect gainer off of yesterday, into the swirl of dark river water below? Well, today the sandbar has shifter so the water is four-feet deep, not 12. Or a log has drifted into that hole, or maybe a stump has rolled into it, or…

Nationwide, child pornography cases increased 330 percent from 1999 to 2009, according to a recent article in the Washington Examiner. “Before the Internet, child pornography had almost been eradicated,” U.S. Attorney Neil MacBride told a reporter for the paper. More than nine million U.S. computers were identified as having shared child pornography between October 2008 and…