Or: Too good to be true?

I want to be clear from the jump that the following is so far nothing but hearsay. According to this Blue Virginia post left in one of our Linkalicious lists, some Republican activists who claim to have been at a recent gathering report that former delegate Dick “plastic fetus” Black has been “gladhanding” and talking about a 2011 run for the 33rd District Senate seat occupied by Mark Herring. Unless and until there is an announcement from a reputable source, this must be regarded as merely the bloggy gossip it is.

I do note, however: Given the current leadership of the Loudoun County Republican Committee, which even prominent GOP activists  refer to as “wingers” and “Jesus nuts” (the latter seems terribly unfair to Jesus; my far more accurate suggestion would be “Farrisees”), the likelihood of primary support for Mr. Black is high, were he actually to run.  Recent history supports this as well; first, they gave us former Sugarland Run District supervisor (and Dick Black’s own son-in-law) Mick Staton. Next, it was Concerned Women for America state director Patricia Phillips (Dick Black’s wife is a big CWA activist.  As far as I can tell, the group’s activity in Loudoun is limited to harassing the school board for acknowledging the existence of gay and lesbian people.)

Maybe the GOP thinking will be that these two Dick Black stand-ins were resoundingly spanked at the polls for not actually being Dick Black.

Also, the independent committee to retire Dick Black back in 2005 has made a re-appearance, or at least the archived website has –  I suppose as a kind of memorial to those good times.

Bonus comic material: A description of the apparent event at which Mr. Black is alleged to have made these statements, found on the website of an “Emy Flor Delgaudio.” This person is the new wife of Richard A. Delgaudio (by her own statement, married to him the day after arriving from the Phillipines). Richard A. Delgaudio is of course the brother of Eugene Delgaudio – the brother who was caught photographing sex acts with a 16 year old girl in Baltimore. Seriously, people. The post is very long, and in a style very similar to a Delgaudio fundraising letter, and contains this paragraph, which I find by turns chilling and hilarious:

I am very excited today to be an American by choice, not accident of birth, writing a blog (with help from my teacher and husband) about American exceptionalism.

Frankly, it’s sometimes hard to believe that the whole thing isn’t an elaborate parody. But I don’t think it is.

Rosalind Helderman of the Washington Post Virginia Politics blog tells us that Governor McDonnell is creating a new prisoner reentry initiative:

McDonnell signed an executive order establishing a Prisoner Reentry Council, headed by [Marla] Decker and the state’s first prisoner reentry coordinator Banci Tewolde. Membership will also include representatives of 16 government agencies. The group has been asked to come up with a blueprint for its work on July 1 and a new strategy by Dec. 31.

The initiative is “designed to help Virginia attack a recividism rate that now stands at 29 percent.” According to a Catholic Eye article on evaluating reentry programs from just last month, the national recidivism rate is 60-70 percent – so that rate seems remarkably low to begin with. It will be important to carefully evaluate the Virginia plan. The article cites the criteria for such an evaluation, noting that there are many claims of successful programs but very little rigorous evaluation or data that supports those claims.  These basic minimum criteria are taken from the text Crime: Public Policies for Crime Control:

A rigorous evaluation requires four things to be done: First, people must be assigned randomly to either the prevention program or a control group…Second, the prevention must actually be applied. Sometimes people are enrolled in a program but do not in fact get the planned treatment. Third, the positive benefit, if any, of the program must last for at least one year after the program ends. It is not hard to change people while they are in a program; what is difficult is to make the change last afterward. Fourth, if the program produces a positive effect…that program should be evaluated again in a different location.

My concern about the potential for abuse of this initiative is due to the presence of Prison Fellowship Ministries as a tax-exempt organization in our county. The close ties of the governor to PFM – he appointed as a policy analyst Mark Earley Jr., who “previously worked with Prison Fellowship Ministries, where his father is president and CEO,” and the elder Mark Earley is also of course the former Virginia attorney general who happened to accompany the governor on his pre-inauguration visit to a Virginia jail. The affinity of both the governor and the current attorney general for sectarian religious approaches to public policy is well known. I would not be at all surprised to learn that PFM had already been named as the initiative’s sole service provider in a private arrangement.

Prison Fellowship Ministries was granted tax exempt status by our Board of Supervisors in early 2004, and would otherwise be paying around $250,000 per year in property taxes on its large headquarters in Ashburn. If there were evidence that the kind of program the organization administers were effective, this would all be less concerning, but that evidence simply doesn’t exist.  What does exist, however, is evidence that PFM has grossly misrepresented outcome data in order to claim success and garner political support.  For example, the apparent stunning success of PFM’s InnerChange Freedom Initiative was gleefully announced by then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, along with a White House photo-op; here was proof that the kind of sectarian faith-based programs favored by the Bush administration were the answer. But when those results were examined, it turned out that the InnerChange participants were actually more likely than controls to be rearrested, and “noticeably more likely” to be reimprisoned. When reporting the results of the program, PFM had compared recidivism rates of only those inmates who had completed their program with the recidivism rates of all participants in the comparison programs – including those who dropped out, were kicked out, or got parole.

InnerChange started with 177 volunteer prisoners but only 75 of them “graduated.” Graduation involved sticking with the program, not only in prison but after release. No one counted as a graduate, for example, unless he got a job. Naturally, the graduates did better than the control group. Anything that selects out from a group of ex-inmates those who hold jobs is going to look like a miracle cure, because getting a job is among the very best predictors of staying out of trouble… Naturally, the non-graduates did worse than the control group. If you select out the winners, you leave mostly losers. [Emphasis added]

This is a methodological no-no called selection bias. The less polite term for it is “cooking the books.”

Researcher Dan Mears, of the Florida State University College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, has reviewed many such claims – and singled out PFM for criticism.

Unfortunately, anecdotes are many and clear answers few in the spate of methodologically flawed research currently being offered up to policymakers as proof of efficacy, concluded Mears and fellow reviewers at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. “Despite the call for evidence-based programs and policies instead of belief- and emotion-driven ones, current faith-based prisoner reentry programs don’t remotely constitute evidence-based practice,” Mears said.

As an example, Mears cites the Prison Fellowship Ministries, founded by Charles Colson, the former Nixon aide who became a born-again Christian while imprisoned for his part in the Watergate scandal. Colson has touted the success of his ministries based on studies that show lower recidivism rates among participants. However, Mears noted that the studies focused only on inmates who completed the program, while comparing its recidivism rates to those of all participants-including dropouts-of selected secular programs.

In fact, if recidivism rates in Colson’s programs were revised to include all participants, “graduates” or not, results would be worse than those for the comparison groups. Where successes might be construed to exist, it’s unclear what to credit-the computer and life skills classes or its fundamentalist Christian doctrine. Where recidivism increases among its program participants, did faith-based programming play a part by leading some inmates to believe that ultimate responsibility for their actions lies with God, not them? Like arguments that faith-based programs decrease recidivism, this possibility remains to be demonstrated empirically.

“Unquestionably, faith-based programs that rely exclusively on volunteers and require no in-kind contributions from correctional systems entail few costs,” Mears said. “Yet, important questions remain about what exactly a faith-based program is, why such programs should be expected to be effective and whether they are, and not least, particularly where some degree of coercion is possible, the appropriateness of using any taxpayer dollars for religious programming.”

The costs, in our case, are already being borne by Loudoun taxpayers. “Coercion” is yet another problem with the Prison Fellowship Ministries record, a problem that will be explored in a later post.

Crossposted at Equality Loudoun.

Naturally, it has to do with those peas in an odd pod Dick Black and Ken Cuccinelli. In case you’ve been under a rock:

George Rekers, who had made a lucrative career of anti-gay activism until discovered returning from a European vacation with a lovely young man he found on rentboy.com, was paid $120,000 in Florida taxpayers’ money to “deliver expert academic opinions” in support of the Florida law (since found unconstitutional) that prohibited gay people from adopting. What did the Florida attorney general who hired him (who now says Rekers “was the best available at the time”) get for that sum? From the resulting court ruling:

Dr. Rekers’ testimony was far from a neutral and unbiased recitation of the relevant scientific evidence. Dr. Rekers’ beliefs are motivated by his strong ideological and theological convictions that are not consistent with the science. Based on his testimony and demeanor at trial, the court can not consider his testimony to be credible nor worthy of forming the basis of public policy.

Previously, Rekers had provided “expert testimony” in a similar Arkansas case. Arkansas judges found his testimony “pointless” and “worthless as evidence because it was only his personal view.”Equality Loudoun reported on the Florida case here, back in November 2008. As it happens, not only did Rekers co-found the execrable “Family Research Council” with James Dobson, he and and his good pal Paul Cameron (who is the fellow fake “expert” hired by the infamous former Loudoun delegate Dick Black to “deliver expert academic opinions” to the Virginia General Assembly in support of his 2005 bill, “Adoption; prohibited if homosexual” – for which he cited the Florida law as his model) once started a pay-to-play journal in which to publish their “research” – which of course real academic journals would have nothing to do with.

You can get a good idea of the George Rekers/Paul Cameron sideshow by listening to the interview with Dick Black by “Concerned Women for America” included in the aforementioned Equality Loudoun post. And this is a detail I had forgotten about, but is even more relevant to Virginia now:

Meanwhile, a thread germane to this case is currently unwinding over at Too Conservative; it seems that there is disagreement among local Republicans over whether state Senator Ken Cuccinelli (R-Fairfax) is electable statewide (he’s one of three potential Republican nominees for Attorney General). His weakness, according to some, is that he’s too closely associated with idiocy exactly like this. Cuccinelli did indeed cast the lone dissenting vote against an apparent effort to kill Black’s dumb bill before it became even more of an embarrassment. It’s an encouraging sign that this sort of thing is being flagged as a liability for statewide office in Virginia.

That’s right, our current attorney general cast the lone vote to report Dick Black’s bill, one almost identical to the law later found unconstitutional in Florida, and well after the embarrassing performance by Paul Cameron. Given some of his behavior since he took office, maybe he would still find Rekers “expert academic opinions” convincing, too. Hold on to your wallets, Virginia.

President Obama, in his National Day of Prayer Proclamation, pointedly says:

“We are blessed to live in a Nation that counts freedom of conscience and free exercise of religion among its most fundamental principles, thereby ensuring that all people of goodwill may hold and practice their beliefs according to the dictates of their consciences. Prayer has been a sustaining way for many Americans of diverse faiths to express their most cherished beliefs, and thus we have long deemed it fitting and proper to publicly recognize the importance of prayer on this day across the Nation.”

In case it still wasn’t clear that it’s supposed to include everyone, he adds:

“…let us remember in our thoughts and prayers those people everywhere who join us in the aspiration for a world that is just, peaceful, free, and respectful of the dignity of every human being.”

In Loudoun, we are blessed with an astoundingly diverse community of faiths. For just a cursory sense of that diversity, take a look at Loudoun Interfaith BRIDGES, a relatively new organization that has brought together for dialogue and mutual service just a few of the communities that have made their home in Loudoun.

Why, then, was the local event claiming to represent the National Day of Prayer – which occurred on public property and with the participation of elected public officials – a sectarian Christian event? Called the “Loudoun Awakening,” it consisted of a six day Bible reading marathon, culminating in the Board of Supervisors Room at the Loudoun Government Center.My purpose here is not to get into the question of whether there can constitutionally be a National Day of Prayer; that is yet to be resolved by the courts, and as such the president obviously chose to issue a proclamation endorsing the event. And clearly, the congregations and individuals who organized and participated in Loudoun Awakening have every right to celebrate the National Day of Prayer “in accordance with their own faiths and consciences,” in the words of President Obama’s proclamation – in fact, they have every right to do so any day of the week with or without a National Day of Prayer. That right includes the right to reject other faiths; in no way are these folks required to participate in interfaith worship or to alter their beliefs.

I have no doubt that many of those who took part in Loudoun Awakening were very well-meaning and certainly had no thought of doing harm. The problem is that an event that was consciously designed to exclude most of the residents of Loudoun County was presented as the local National Day of Prayer celebration, and given the imprimatur of government. Not only were non-Christian faith communities not approached by the organizers, but only a very narrow segment of Loudoun’s Christian community was involved. Looking at the website of one of the major players, the Purcellville-based “Intercessors for America,” it’s hard not to notice that the list of “Crucial Prayer Topics” reads very much like a version of the Republican Party Platform. Where on that list, for example, is the topic of people without access to health care? (Although there’s quite a bit about “stopping Obamacare.”) Where’s the concern for the human rights of persecuted LGBT people in Uganda? What about caring for the poor, or better yet, addressing the root causes of poverty? Hello? Not there.

While it should come as no surprise that certain religious leaders with certain political ideologies would present themselves as speaking for “people of faith,” as if the rest of us don’t exist or matter, it is surprising and a little disappointing that the stewards of our public buildings and the people we’ve elected to represent ALL of us didn’t tell these organizers at the beginning that they could only get public endorsement for an inclusive event. My hope and request of these public stewards is that they will ensure that any future events celebrating a public National Day of Prayer will actually look like Loudoun.