Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

The Martell and Pew articles, each gathered mass amounts of information from databases to analyze and make claims. However, in both instances there were major flaws in; the spread of the data, location of data collection, the follow-through of time related data (primarily seen in Pew) and failing to control all confounding variables. The Pew article stood out to me because the data collected for these prisons showed such high rates of recidivism, and there were still somewhere between 12-20 states that did not report. I think the percentage of released prisoners that reoffend is much higher than what the article explained, because of the underreported data. If a prison has extremely high rates of recidivism, they might not report that data because it is possible that their prison could lose funding, or be absorbed into another prison system.  Also, in both the methodology and the article, the authors acknowledged that Pew did not keep track of people who reoffended in a different state, which lessens their overall percentage.  Furthermore, the purpose of the article was to show the steady decline of recidivism, but in my opinion, there were too many uncontrolled variables to make that claim boldly enough to put in the title.

However, while mass data bases often have large information gaps, they do provide valuable information when used with caution, and with wide (and as random as possible) spreads of data.