Kirsten,
I’m just going to throw some random numbers out there and hopefully they will put the hysteria into perspective. I am responding to your article about criminals working in our schools because any story that has an underlying message of “save the children” always sets off a red flag.
- In 2001, an estimated 2.7% of adults in the U.S. had served time in prison
- About 3.2 percent of the U.S. adult population, or 1 in every 31 adults, was in the nation’s prisons or jails or on probation or parole at the end of 2006
The math from your story shows that 1.4% of teachers found in this investigation were revealed to be one of four types of criminals. We are lumping drug possesion, sexual assault, indecent exposure and aggravated assault all into the same category. That means that I could make an educated guess and state that 3.2% of a normal population are criminals of *any* type. If the 1.4% of teachers that you would have us be alarmed about were also of any type of criminal, we could safely assume that whatever background checks are already in place are effectively reducing the criminal population of this group by over 50%. That’s great news.
What if we were to take it a step further and figure out what percentage of a “normal” criminal population consists of the four types of criminals you mentioned in your story? You see where I am going with this?
I am not trying to say that we shouldn’t be worried. There is nothing wrong with wanting to trust who deals with your children. When we take a look at the actual risk analysis, aren’t there better ways we can be spending that money to enrich our children? I’ll leave that thought open for others to decide.
Everybody knows that the quickest way into taxpayer’s pockets is to threaten their children. This can be accomplished by reiterating common every day risks. The secret is to make it sound like a new threat that didn’t exist before the story was uncovered. I don’t blame you for the story at all. Instilling fear into parents moves copy and that in turn holds value for the advertisers who finance your paychecks.
Would it be possible to reverse engineer this story and find out who is backing the proposed legislation? Even doing some critical thinking and researching beyond what I have provided could maybe balance things out. I have no right to call on you as a journalist as a librarian of critical thinking, but I am still inclined to do so.
I do hope that you do not take this in the wrong spirit. I feel that there should be a little bit more research involved when passing on information to the public. Especially when it concerns such emotionally charged issues. Who is really going to be taken advantage of in the scenario that you proposed?
I don’t have the answer, because I don’t know who financed the studies or who is supporting any bills concerning this subject.
Tags: criminals, critical thinking, salt lake tribune, teachers
I guess the real question is “How much are you willing to sacrifice in order to reduce your risk factor to near zero?”
Once you reduce your risk to a certain ratio, the cost of reducing it further increases exponentially.
yeah, and there is a sentence up there that does not make any damn sense at all. I fail at writing! :) (re: journalist as a librarian)