At Schneier on Security I see the British are at it again, this time with DNA-tracking of youngsters.

Our unproductive and sometimes deadly system of public and private teen boot camps were first a British idea, one that wasn't working there when they became all the conservative rage here, and still don't work.

Yet we've enshrined Boot Camps as if they were a benevolent industry.

Apparently much of British law enforcement is drooling for this latest self-destructive thought-crime innovation, and they have Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard on board as DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo).

Forces of British good sense are pushing back, as Roger Graef of The Guardian did in his blog The usual suspects: Listing at-risk children on the DNA database risks breeding anger, resentment and defiance.

Shami Chakrabarti director of the British civil rights group Liberty takes a somewhat harder swing that the proposal, saying:

Targeting innocent children to expand the DNA database is the Government playing the wolf in sheep's clothing.
Any child who is stopped by police, even if under 10, can have his DNA taken and retained for life without being charged or cautioned.
If the Government wants a National DNA Database, they should say so and hold a public debate, not pick on our kids who can't fight back.

Bear in the mind the historic arc of the teen boot camp debate, and you can see that this isn't merely a British debate. Schneier isn't just being proactive by pushing back here, now. It's time.

              

Codependency, Enabling and Tough Love are the damning trinity of the residential addiction treatment industry to which we Americans frequently consign our most troubled offspring.

All three are so thoroughly wrong-headed and scientifically upside down that they won a Psychology Today Loose Screw Award in January of 2005.

Yes, two years ago, and there had been evidence for years before that all three ideas were or had become little more than profitably well-marketed quakery.

All three partake of the view that young people and adults alike who are suffering from addiction or some other disorder are best-served by receiving less family support, less love and perhaps regular doses of meanness.

Yet the evidence indicates that abandoning a substance abuser in the name of "Tough Love" can result in a relapse (and death). Likewise, abandoning someone who suffering from acute depression in order to end and alleged co-dependent relationship with them can result in suicide.

"Enabling" is of course refusing to be mean (withholding "Tough Love" -- the solution which should never be applied) or refusing to abandon someone who is suffering (thus remaining "co-dependent" and perhaps keeping them alive so that they can recover). Altogether, (in a fit of paradoxical logic) the result is said to make it possible for the afflicted to remain afflicted.

Thanks to the Governmental Accountability Office we have seen in recent weeks that applying the wrong-headed idea of Tough Love within the misconceived setting of some form of "boot camp" results with alarming frequency in a form of treatment failure called death.

In light of the evidence, it is gullible to accept National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs claims that boot camps and their offspring, wilderness residential treatment for teenagers, have done so much good for so many.

Psychology Today was by no means the first to report a National Institutes of Health panel evaluation of "get tough" programs which concluded that "All the evaluations have shown [the programs] don't work."

Boot camps were already well-known as non-solutions abroad when they were profitably imported from Great Britain in the 1990s.

Because the evidence was clear, allowing American teenagers to be brutalized, traumatized and in some cases killed in them could be seen as an act of collective criminality -- one we are all obligated to move forcefully to correct.