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Scared Straight Programs

The idea for dealing with youthful offending that became known as “Scared Straight” first came to light in 1976, when it was known as the Juvenile Awareness Project. It was then that a group of hardened prison inmates at New Jersey's Rahway State Prison, called the Lifers Group, began their project to make juveniles aware of what being in prison is like. Over several years in the mid-1970s, police departments, probation officers, youth groups, and high schools in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania brought over 7,000 boys and girls, most of them teenagers, into the maximum security prison for grueling two-hour sessions with the Lifers. Using well-practiced routines, the inmates berated, menaced, and tried to impress the youth with the sordid side of prison life: the loss of privacy and individualism, and the constant threat of assault and homosexual slavery. Following some newspaper and magazine articles, the Juvenile Awareness Project attracted the attention of a Hollywood filmmaker. This resulted in the film documentary Scared Straight, which won an Oscar in April 1979. From that point on, the Juvenile Awareness Project became known as Scared Straight. With the explosion of attention and interest that followed, Scared Straight clones sprang up across the country and in many foreign countries as well. The spin-offs were not identical, but they usually contained the core element of raising awareness in order to deter delinquency. The program is believed to have appeared in some thirty-eight states, and in Australia, Norway, and the United Kingdom. Its popularity is attributable to its “get tough” deterrent approach, its simplicity and low cost, and to what appeared to be a constructive use of prison inmates.

The Rationale for Scared Straight

Although not stated explicitly, deterrence is the main attraction and the underlying rationale for Scared Straight. The fundamental deterrence principle holds that we are all rational creatures who govern our behavior by weighing the costs and benefits of contemplated actions. The Lifers' exhortations, and the prison experience surrounding them, were intended to hammer home the costs of criminal behavior to their audience. What criminal justice experts know about deterrence—what it is, how it works, how effective it is—is critically important to understanding Scared Straight, because the theoretical goals of deterrence make it necessary to ask questions about the effectiveness of the program.

There are two broad kinds of deterrence, general and special. General deterrence refers to the influence of observing what happens to other people as a consequence of their actions. Special deterrence is the influence of what happens to a person as a direct consequence of his or her own actions. That consequence has three aspects, which can be viewed as the three legs of the deterrence model: (1) how swiftly the consequence follows the behavior, (2) how severe the consequence is, and (3) how probable the consequence is. One of the questions to be asked of the Scared Straight approach is, how effectively does it deliver on each of these three aspects?

Scared Straight shows the consequences of criminal behavior in a particular way. Inmates suffering the pains of imprisonment inform the juvenile attendees about those pains (general deterrence), but in addition, the youth receive this information while themselves experiencing in a limited way the prison setting (special deterrence). They do not, however, truly experience what being in prison is like—doing so only vicariously. A second question about the approach is, how effective is punishment that is merely experienced vicariously?

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