Within our society, there is a push to appease the public by using marketing techniques similar to propaganda to encourage a push in the public mind towards “crackdowns on crimes” to “save the children.” Politicians often utilize such terminology throughout campaigns to appeal to the three key pillars of appeal: ethos, logos, and pathos. Logos, or the appeal to logic, encourages the public to follow the politician’s logic to push hard punishments to “protect children” from the dangers of crime. Pathos, or the appeals to emotion, are brought about through flourish-y language, such as imagery and word connotations intending to elicit intense emotional responses to topics that are deemed emotionally significant. Lastly, appeals to ethos, or the ethics of the public, convince listeners that their character is dependent upon their conform to the popular opinion.

Often these individuals are utilizing data which has been optimized for their opinions, rather than blanket data to realistically portray the effectiveness of such programs.

This is extraordinarily evident through the popularity of boot camps as a correctional sanction.

While boot camps show no data to support lower recidivism rates and are costly, they remain popular, as politicians utilize the kairos of intense media coverage and emotions to appeal to what is “accepted” as platforms from previous candidates, as “dropping crime rates” are attributed to these boot camps due to their high prevalence within the media. In a society which is pervaded by constant messages from the media, when the media is bursting at the seems with a topic, such as candidate platforms, it spreads like wild fire, and becomes common place. Therefore, the public accepts it and such behaviors withstand the tests of time, even though they are severely outdated. Such factors will discourage studies of criminology in the coming years, providing a disservice to criminal justice policy.

In a constantly evolving society, it is crucial to adapt to environmental factors and search for the most effective means of changing criminal behavior. Unfortunately, as a result of the recent election, the reoccurring theme of roughly cracking down on all criminals regardless of environmental factors and the return to the classical system of thinking will result in a permeation of ideas of “hard crackdowns” without any substantiated data to prove their effectiveness.