Week 5 Discussion Questions

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Houston Community College *

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Political Science

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Apr 24, 2024

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Week 5: Discussion: Part 1 After reading Problem 7-1: Cost-Benefit Evaluation of DOJ’s Implementation of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (EGN, pp. 732-35), write 3-5 sentences discussing all of the following questions: How does DOJ’s analysis comport with what you’ve learned about cost-benefit analysis? Do you see any problems with DOJ’s analysis? What would be your critiques? Do you think DOJ’s standards will reduce the incidence of prison rape? Why or why not? What additional information would you want if you were going to reevaluate PREA and its regulations under a cost-benefit approach? The cost-benefit evaluation of the DOJ’s implementation of Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA) conducted a pretty thorough and extensive analysis of what ultimately came down to a fairly expensive cost, but the question was whether the benefit would properly anticipate and evaluate the consequences of the rules – examining the actual purpose of the PREA. The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA) was created to curb the issues of rape in the U.S. prisons and was deemed to be voluntary for state and local facilities – local governments had the option to adopt it on these levels but would lose five percent of Federal grants unless the funds were used to fully comply with said standards in future years. By enacting the PREA, it would help reduce the number of people in jail being raped. As to whether PREA actually reduced the number of rapes in jails, I’m not exactly sure if it has brought down the number. Since most jails have been privatized, it’s extremely hard to see what benefit, if any, was there. A question I would also pose is did the analysis consider outside factors of cell mates being threatened with violence if the rape was reported. Did the cost outweigh the benefits and are those true numbers? If I was to reevaluate PREA, I would question former inmates and how they handled the rape if it did occur to them. Another idea would be to make this mandatory as opposed to voluntary – therefore state and local governments did not have a choice.
Week 5: Discussion: Part 2 Address any of the following questions on scientific analysis: What is the role of science versus politics in agency regulation? The role of science is an important one as science is based on factual evidence, research, and experimentation, and is non-biased if it’s pure science, whereas politics is extremely biased, based on opinion and can and has been used in helping shape policy. The application of science to agency regulation is an important one as it allows for facts to be applied to regulation – and for policy to be properly applied. When politics are involved, they can be used to sway policies in a manner that is dangerous to the general public. We have seen the effect of politics involved in agency regulation through several Presidential administrations including, Bush, Obama and Clinton where interference hurt the public. One prime example would be under the Bush Administration’s Secretary of Department of Health and Human Services rejected CDC-selected experts for a lead advisory committee and replaced them with appointments and after a congressional review was done, they found that at least two of the new appointments had financial ties to the lead industry.
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