Effects of Correctional Boot Camps on Offending

By D. Mackenzie, David B. Wilson, Suzanne B. Kider. 2001

186 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A systematic review incorporating meta-analytic techniques of correctional boot camps studies was conducted. An intensive search identified 771 documents of which 144 were deemed potentially relevant, located, and evaluated for eligibility. In 37 documents, 29 studies were judged eligible for inclusion in the systematic review. The 29 studies resulted in 44 samples providing the primary unit of analysis. Quasi-experimental and experimental studies evaluated a residential program with a militaristic environment and compared the recidivism of participants to a comparison group receiving another correctional sanction. In 9 studies, boot camp participants had lower recidivism than did comparison groups; in 8, comparison groups had lower recidivism; and in the remaining studies, no significant differences were found. A meta-analysis found no overall significant differences in recidivism between boot camp participants and comparison samples. Further analyses indicated the results cannot be explained by differences in study methodology, offender characteristics, or boot camp program components.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/99edd343f4e296579caf5de664f7d3d0d5fdb618

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Randomized experiments in criminology: What have we learned in the last two decades? (2005, methodology): “For example, only five out of 44 evaluations of boot camps ( MacKenzie et al. 2001 ), only three out of 32 evaluations of prison-based drug treatment (Mitchell et al. 2005) and only four out of 42 evaluations of drug courts (Wilson et al. 2005) used randomized experiments.”