"The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population.
But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners...Americans are
locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that
would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in
particular they are kept incarcerated
far longer than prisoners in other nations" (LIPTAK, 2008, paras1-2).
Recidivism rates are a huge dilemma in the criminal justice field
because parolees who are unprepared to live a life without crime often
reoffend and go back to prison, and a solution to this is providing
programs that teach convicts how to be adjust to society once they are
released. My source for this information states that the tested "package
allocated $241 million to increasing the capacity of treatment slots
and beds in lieu of spending $2 billion to build and operate the 17,332
new prison beds that the Legislative Budget Board projected in January
2007 that the state would need by 2012" and that recidivism rates
dropped by 14% in their programs (Right on Crime, 2011). I would create a study to
prove that cost effective and more humane approach to prisoners is
rehabilitation programs in lieu of spending more money on prison beds.
The null hypothesis is that rehabilitation programs don't drop recidivism rates. The alternative hypothesis is that recidivism rates are significantly lower amongst parolees participate in rehabilitation programs than amongst those who do not. I expect a one-tailed test statistic that is directional because the expected (population mean) and the observed (sample mean) will be in a one particular end of the distribution (Steinberg, 2011). I would choose the alternative hypothesis and reject the null hypothesis. The true value of the population mean can be found in a range of values termed confidence intervals (Steinberg, 2011). The confidence values of 95% and 99% tells us that there is that much probability that the population parameter is within that value range.
LIPTAK, ADAM. (23 April, 2008). U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations. New
York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/
Right on Crime. (6 May, 2011). Texas Rehabilitation Programs Reduce Recidivism Rates. Texas
Public Policy Foundation. Retrieved from http://rightoncrime.com/…/
Steinberg, W. J. (2011). Statistics alive! (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
The null hypothesis is that rehabilitation programs don't drop recidivism rates. The alternative hypothesis is that recidivism rates are significantly lower amongst parolees participate in rehabilitation programs than amongst those who do not. I expect a one-tailed test statistic that is directional because the expected (population mean) and the observed (sample mean) will be in a one particular end of the distribution (Steinberg, 2011). I would choose the alternative hypothesis and reject the null hypothesis. The true value of the population mean can be found in a range of values termed confidence intervals (Steinberg, 2011). The confidence values of 95% and 99% tells us that there is that much probability that the population parameter is within that value range.
LIPTAK, ADAM. (23 April, 2008). U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations. New
York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/
Right on Crime. (6 May, 2011). Texas Rehabilitation Programs Reduce Recidivism Rates. Texas
Public Policy Foundation. Retrieved from http://rightoncrime.com/…/
Steinberg, W. J. (2011). Statistics alive! (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
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