Studies of the effectiveness for these programs are available online and can be found at With the results of the original scared straight program leaning more toward the negative side of the scales it is interesting that the show would come back 40 years after it originally aired. All Right Reserved | Site by

: Lessons from experiments in Scared Straight and other like programsTraumatizing at‐risk kids is not the way to lead them away from crime and drugsPreventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising. Ryan is completing his MA in professional writing at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, and has a BS in media studies. Understanding why something works or fails is of great interest to evaluators, program designers, and criminological theorists.

examined 29 randomized trials that evaluated the effects of some diversionary alternative (services or outright release) and compared it to official processing or progression deeper into the juvenile justice system.

There are troubled teen programs and boarding schools that have good success helping youth in these age ranges. I shook my head no out of nervousness and this C.O. The Michigan department of Corrections found that 43% of the experimental group re‐offended, compared to only 17% of the control group. Simply put, participating in the program was These randomized trials, conducted over a 25‐year period in eight different jurisdictions, provide evidence that ‘Scared Straight’ and other ‘juvenile awareness’ programs are not effective as a stand‐alone crime prevention strategy. The investigators also reported on two educational measures: school attendance and drop‐out. Perhaps administrators can encourage motivated offenders in penal institutions to engage in benevolent activities that do not pose harm to juveniles (or the communities they offend in).

To create a behavior change, you must replace negative behavior with positive behavior and actions.

The program received considerable and favorable media attention and was soon replicated in over 30 jurisdictions nationwide, resulting in special Congressional hearings on the program and the film by the United States House Committee on Education and Labor, Subcommittee on Human Resources (US House Committee on Education and Labor 1979).The underlying theory of programs like ‘Scared Straight’ is deterrence.

hit me in the head with a collapsible baton and screams at me to “Shut my face!” I didn’t say a word for the whole day. Criminological interventions, when they cause harm, are not just toxic to the participants. As we explain later, it was possible to conduct meta‐analysis for “first effect” only.These were repeated, and additional analyses run, using Meta Analyst software created by Dr. Joseph Lau of the New England Cochrane Center. One of us (our earlier co‐author, the late John Buehler) also created meta‐analytic formulae in Excel to double‐check three of the analyses. The wiki also covers pop culture references.

This large negative result curiously receives little attention in the original document.This program at the Menard Correctional Facility started in 1978 and is described as a frank and realistic portrayal of adult prison life.

In two cases we retrieved unpublished Masters' theses from University Libraries to see if they contained this information (We ran statistical analyses using Comprehensive Meta‐Analysis (CMA) version 2.

It is an attempt to scare kids who are starting to have legal, social, and behavior issues from falling into a life of crime by trying to show them the reality of prison. Thus, because the data rely on dichotomous outcomes, both analyses report Odds Ratios (OR) for each study and their 95% Confidence Intervals (CI). We found two.A meta‐analysis of juvenile prevention and treatment programs by Lipsey (Gendreau and his colleagues (1996) also reported a meta‐analysis of “get tough” or “get smart” sanctions.

This was an evaluation of the ‘Project Aware’ program conducted in a Wisconsin prison (Our search strategies resulted in relatively few citations to new literature; for example, some of these were to our own earlier published reviews and papers.

He then followed them for six months in the community, using official court records to assess their behavior.