Jeff Sessions’s praise of DARE shows he just can’t quit the 1980s

It was peak Jeff Sessions, the moment that showed exactly what the country is getting under President Donald Trump’s attorney general: Ignoring decades of scientific evidence, Sessions praised an anti-drug program — DARE — straight out of the 1980s “tough on crime” playbook.

Speaking at a DARE conference, Sessions said, “DARE is, I think, the best remembered anti-drug program today. In recent years, people have not paid much attention to that message, but they are ready to hear it again. … We know it worked before, and we can make it work again.”

DARE was largely based on one idea: If you tell kids about how bad drugs are, they will be so scared that they will not use them. The program leveraged this to try to teach kids how to say no to drugs.

Different levels of government threw money at DARE, encouraging the majority of school districts in the US to take it up. So many kids growing up in the 1980s through the early 2000s were bombarded by DARE’s messaging in their schools, warned about how drugs, from marijuana to LSD to heroin, will ruin their lives after even one instance of use — because they’ll get immediately addicted and suffer for a lifetime.

This simply did not work. Decades of research show that DARE was nothing short of a complete disaster, failing to reduce drug use among youth. Even DARE’s own leaders finally acknowledged this after years of denying the evidence, redesigning the curriculum under a new slogan — “keepin’ it REAL” — by 2012 after the overwhelming empirical evidence finally led multiple levels of government to pull back funding for the program.

What Sessions said, then, is simply wrong.

There is, however, an important lesson to draw from his comments: Sessions is simply out of touch with the empirical reality on a host of issues that he is now in charge of addressing in the federal government. From prisons to police to drugs, Sessions often comes out with retrograde statements out of the 1980s and ’90s — when research on such topics was limited at best, and politics called for harsh penalties to address core societal problems. We now know better — except for Sessions, who keeps defending programs and ideas that have literally decades of research against them.

DARE was a total failure

There isn’t much in scientific research that is nearly unanimous. Evaluations of DARE are one of the few exceptions. Time and time again, when researchers carefully studied the program, they found that DARE failed at its most basic purpose: to prevent drug use.

Here is a sampling of the empirical evaluations:

• Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency (1994): “A longitudinal randomized experiment was conducted with 1,584 students to estimate the effects of DARE on their attitudes, beliefs, and drug use behaviors in the year following exposure to the program. DARE had no statistically significant main effects on drug use behaviors and had few effects on attitudes or beliefs about drugs.”
• American Journal of Public Health (1994): “DARE’s limited influence on adolescent drug use behavior contrasts with the program’s popularity and prevalence. An important implication is that DARE could be taking the place of other, more beneficial drug use curricula that adolescents could be receiving.”
• Preventive Medicine (1996): “The findings of this 5-year prospective study are largely consonant with the results obtained from prior short-term evaluations of the DARE curriculum, which have reported limited effects of the program upon drug use, greater efficacy with respect to attitudes, social skills, and knowledge, but a general tendency for curriculum effects to decay over time.”
• US Bureau of Justice Assistance (2009): “To date, there have been more than 30 evaluations of the program that have documented negligible long-term impacts on teen drug use. One intensive, six-year study even found that the program increased drug use among suburban teens by a small amount.”

As Stanford drug policy expert Keith Humphreys said on Twitter on Tuesday, “Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) has been heavily studied and it just doesn’t work, period.”

So why did DARE fail? In short, kids just didn’t fall for the scaremongering. If a program is warning you that any drug use will absolutely ruin your life, but you know the quarterback or straight-A student at your school once smoked pot and came out okay, you’re going to be incredibly suspicious of what that program taught you. The whole thing begins to fall apart from there.

In fact, DARE has seemingly recognized its failure. As criticisms mounted and the program lost funding, the organization teamed up with researchers at Penn State University and Arizona State University to redo its curriculum. The “keepin’ it REAL” program that came out of it by 2012 is much more focused on changing children’s behaviors and attitudes instead of just scaring them off drugs — a shift so big that Humphreys told me that that the new program is “not really DARE anymore.” But it seems to be on much better empirical grounds, with some research showing it may actually reduce drug use, although other analyses say more research is needed.

Sessions doesn’t seem to be aware of any of this, instead praising DARE for its past work and suggesting it should be brought back.

Sessions is way behind the times on big policy issues

Here’s where things get really bad: Sessions’s praise of DARE is not an exception. Across the board, Sessions has consistently propped up outdated thinking on all sorts of issues that he oversees at the Justice Department.

At the same DARE conference, Sessions once again asserted that harsh prison sentences for drugs were effective for deterring crime. Criticizing the Obama administration’s decision to pull back mandatory minimum sentences for drugs, Sessions said, “What was the result? It was exactly what you would think: sentences went down and crime went up. Sentences for federal drug crimes dropped by 18 percent from 2009 to 2016. Violent crime — which had been decreasing for two decades — suddenly went up again.”

There is no reason, based on the research, to think these two trends are linked. Studies have found time and time again that harsher punishments — which mandatory minimums force on judges by requiring that they sentence offenders to a minimum amount of time in prison — and the higher incarceration rates they lead to don’t have a big impact on crime.

A 2015 review of the research by the Brennan Center for Justice estimated that more incarceration explained zero to 7 percent of the crime drop since the 1990s, while other researchers estimate it drove 10 to 25 percent of the crime drop since the ’90s — not a big impact either way. A 2014 analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts also found that states that reduced their imprisonment rates also saw some of the biggest drops in crime, suggesting that there isn’t a hard link between incarceration and crime.

As Harvard criminologist Thomas Abt said to me, “Jeff Sessions is a crime dinosaur, peddling ‘tough on crime’ policies that went extinct years ago. He tries to link violent crime to the ‘smart on crime’ policies of the past administration, but there’s simply no evidence to support his argument.” (Abt broke down his criticisms further in a series of tweets.)

Sessions has also made remarks in favor of “tough on crime” police policies. In a previous statement, he said that New York City is “soft on crime” and as a result “continues to see gang murder after gang murder” — in part because New York City has pulled away from aggressive policing tactics such as “stop and frisk.” In reality, New York City has seen its crime rate fall in the past few years — and its homicide rate is now below the national average.

But Sessions does not seem interested in the evidence. Asked about the Justice Department investigations into the police departments in Ferguson, Missouri, and Chicago — massive studies that found huge problems at these agencies — Sessions said he hadn’t read them, only looking at the summaries. A day later, he announced his Justice Department would pull back from these types of investigations into police anyway.

When reporters offer Sessions and his staff a chance to explain what they’re talking about, it’s also common to get either no response or an outright refusal to comment — signaling a lack of interest in even showing any evidence or proving that it exists. (The Justice Department did not return a request for comment for this story.)

So the country is thrown back to outdated policy ideas from the 1980s and ’90s, with no empirical explanation or basis as to why.