With proper treatment and early intervention, the cognitive decline and cortical damage associated with certain subtypes of neurocognitive disorder may be reversed

One of the authors knew a little boy named Jerry. He was about 3 years old. Jerry

was a terror. He would throw stones at cars and people, knock over other children's bikes, etc. His mother would smile at him and tell him to be a good boy whenever he did these things, but when her irritation mounted she would explode and punish him for some trivial thing. One of the main problems she had was (a) insensitivity to the effects of regression to the mean (b) lack of consistency (c) she generalized her responses inappropriately (d) she did not take into account the possibility that spontaneous recovery would occur

The text concludes that

(a) the death penalty has reduced the murder rate (b) the increasing crime rate has led to an increase in the severity of penalties (c) for an extended period, both the crime rate and the percentage of people in prison increased, but we do not understand what the causal relationships are (d) increasing the severity of punishment reliably produces corresponding decreases in the crime rate, but there are ethical reasons preventing us from increasing the severity of punishment still further