Round up the youthful suspects!
John Lettice at The Register - British Children's Minister Hilary Armstrong is proposing cradle to grave tracking of children "at risk" of criminal activity due to their childhood environment.
Actually there's every reason, as we will explain shortly. The point worth hanging onto here, however, is that there is a world of difference between taking action to deal with existing problems (which of course will usually grow if left alone) and predicting that problems will exist, and attempting to head them off via early intervention. If you're 'successful', how do you know for sure? And can you be sure that the 'clear' signs of developing problems you've identified have not to a large extent been generated by the monitoring systems you've put in place? This road leads into a swamp of junk science, hokum and voodoo, and down that road we find Tony Blair, who believes that it is possible to predict which two year old is going to turn out to be a troublemaker.
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