Many people feel as though offenders cannot be scared straight, and sadly, I agree. Below is a video from the A&E TV series Beyond Scared Straight. In this clip you clearly see that the main purpose of this program is to instill fear in youth offenders in hopes of turning them around so that they do not commit crimes.
As much as we would all like to believe that just taking youth and throwing them in jail, it never works and there are many reasons as to why this will never work.
The main purpose for the Scared Straight programs, and jail visits, is the idea that organising these things and putting youth through these programs will deter the youth from future delinquency. the main idea for these programs is deterrence with the hopes that the realistic and aggressive look at what really happens in jail will cause youth from future delinquency because of fear or what they call being "scared straight." The main problem with programs f this nature is the fact that they put a major emphasis on the "punitive nature of punishment" and they fail to look at reducing crime through restraint, discipline or rehabilitation. The use of these programs to provide specific deterrence assumes that every offender is the same, and every offender can be changed through fear and we all know this is not true.
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| Guards Carrying Youth Offenders into County Jail to being program. |
One of the main reasons why the Scared Straight Programs will never work is because the youth brought into the prisons are protected by guards. The guards that bring them into these prisons protect them in the sense that, they ensure the inmates do not touch them and no one harms them. How are youth supposed to get the really "jail feeling" if they are not really experiencing jail.
Model | Odds Ratio | 95% Confidence interval |
Fixed Effects | 1.68 | (1.20-2.36) |
Random Effects | 1.72 | (1.13-2.62) |
The table above illustrates the odds of re-offending are higher for youth going through the scared straight program then those that do not.
The Odds ratio is used to illustrate the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of the program versus a control group. a ratio of 1 means that for every one youth in the program that re-offends, 1 youth from the control group re-offends as well. The 95% confidence interval is there to say that they are 95% positive that the odds ratio provide falls between the interval provided.
This anaylsis reasearch shows us that the scared straight program actually increases the odds of offending by between 1.6 and 1.7 to 1 compared to youth that do not go through the rogram. These findings help reasearchers conclude that participating in the scared straight program directly correlates with an icrease in re-offending compared to a control gourp of youth who received no inervention at all. These findings remind us that even though programs run with the very best of intentions we as a society must continue to evaluate these services and treatments that we provde to our youth.
