I’m in London for meetings on criminal justice organized by the Centre for Justice Innovation (the UK arm of the Center for Court Innovation) and Policy Exchange. A small meeting that ran for two hours today tried to figure out whether the coerced-sobriety approach of the South Dakota 24/7 project (the alcohol version of HOPE) could be used in Scotland, with social problems, customs, and institutional arrangements quite unlike South Dakota’s. (In particular, Scotland has no such thing as a two-day term of confinement.)
The answer seems to be that you could try to do something based on similar principles and with similar aims, but you couldn’t really do the program in its trademark style, and even if you’re convinced 24/7 works on drunk drivers in Sioux Falls you can’t be sure that the alternative version would work on drunken wife-beaters in Glasgow.
That suggests a more general reflection. Heraclitus said that no one can step twice into the same river. By the same token, it isn’t really possible to do the same program in two different places.