Open AccessPROTOCOL: “Scared Straight” and other prison tour programs for preventing juvenile delinquency
Author(s) -
Petrosino A,
TurpinPetrosino C,
Buehler John
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
campbell systematic reviews
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.295
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1891-1803
DOI - 10.1002/cl2.24
Subject(s) - prison , presentation (obstetrics) , juvenile delinquency , life imprisonment , criminology , psychology , sentence , deterrence (psychology) , medicine , computer science , artificial intelligence , radiology
In the 1970s, a group of inmates serving life sentences at a New Jersey (USA) prison began a program to "scare" at-risk or delinquent children from a future life of crime. The program, known as "Scared Straight," featured as its main component an aggressive presentation by inmates serving a life sentence to juveniles visiting the prison facility. The presentation realistically even brutally depicted life in adult prisons, and often included stories of rape and murder (Finckenauer 1982). An award-winning television documentary on the program aired in 1979 and provided anecdotal evidence of Scared Straight's effectiveness in deterring young people from future crime. "Scared Straight: 20 Years Later" was shown on United States television twenty years later and claimed similar results (UPN 1999; "Kids and Crooks," 1999). As in the 1979 television program, no data on a control or comparison group of young people were presented.