PROFESSOR DAVID KIRK’S ‘AMAZING’ DISCOVERY

The Oxford University sociology professor discovered that dispersing parolees away from crime-infested neighborhoods reduces the parole recidivism rate

David Kirk, a sociology professor at Britain’s prestigious Oxford University, apparently had a lot of money and time to prove what he most certainly had to have already known - that parolees who are released to crime-infested neighborhoods have a high recidivism rate, but if they are dispersed to crime-free neighborhoods, the recidivism rate is substantially reduced.

Kirk’s study on the consequences of concentrating former prisoners in the same neighborhoods as other parolees has just been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Here are some excerpts from his study:

The results of my analyses suggest the greater the concentration of ex-prisoners in a neighborhood, the greater the rate of subsequent recidivism. I find that concentrating former prisoners in the same neighborhoods leads to significantly higher recidivism rates than if ex-prisoners were more dispersed across neighborhoods.

The results presented in this study suggest that although parole and public housing policies and practices were designed, in principle, to enhance public safety, they may in fact be undermining it.

The extreme concentration of criminals in geographic space likely produces a contagion effect that not only leads to elevated rates of recidivism among existing criminals but also pulls the previously noncriminal toward deviance.

“Put simply, the alarming rates of recidivism in the United States are partly a consequence of the fact that many individuals being released from prison ultimately reside in the same neighborhoods as other former felons,” says Kirk in summing up his findings.

Wow, double wow, this is really amazing! Who would have ever thought that releasing parolees to the same crime-infested neighborhood results in a high rate of parolee recidivism. Seriously though, here we have another example of how those in academia set out to prove what they most certainly already know.

I don’t know how much time and money Kirk spent on his study, and how many assistants he used to conduct it, but all he had to do was to ask any parole officer and he would have instantly reached the same findings.

Kirk provides us with evidence that professors in academia do not live in the real world. Yes, it would be nice if we could spread all parolees around relatively crime-free America’s middle and upper-class neighborhoods. How about Malibu, the ritzy Dallas suburb of Plano, New York’s upper west side, the Hamptons and other trendy communities? Sorry Prof. Kirk, but it ain’t ever gonna happen. The residents of those communities will not stand for any parolees residing there other than their own family members.

I am sure that Kirk and his assistants have never been involved in counseling prison inmates or in conducting pre-release investigations. Had they been, they would have learned that every counselor and parole officer tries to place each parolee in the best available free world setting.

Here is a dose of reality. Most families of prison inmates live in lower-class neighborhoods, many of which are crime-infested. Other than a halfway house, the only residence usually available to a parolee is with family members. And even if you placed him in a sanitary crime-free environment among complete strangers, he would very likely drift back to his old neighborhood to be in familiar places with old friends, many of them also on parole or engaged in unlawful activities.

Prof. Kirk, I suggest you take a lengthy sabbatical from Oxford to spend time in the real world where you do not have to waste time and money on studies to prove what you already know.