We can't identify who would be successful in scared straight we can't say, "Only these eight kids fit the profile of those who would be successful." There's no way to do that. The question for policymakers is, does the program help more kids than it hurts?Īt the government level, you have to look at the broader range of the population. You could cherry-pick any kid who did well in DARE or in boot camps. There'll be people such as parents, ministers, concerned siblings who call me and say, "Hey I brought a kid to scared straight and they turned around." That's great! There are kids who'll be helped by any intervention. In some jurisdictions, community support can be strong due to particular examples, like one kid being turned around. The evidence for that is not all that strong, but it fits with these common-sense notions. It also has a "common sense" appeal: A lot of people believe that if you get tougher with kids in particular, but also with adults, that you're going to deter them. Jurisdictions that want aren't getting federal money for it, but it's so cheap to implement that doing it on their own dime isn't discouraging them at all. There's a lot of interest in a low-cost panacea. Why do you think scared straight continues to be practiced despite your research and other studies? In the studies with crime data, the kids who went through scared straight were much more likely to be arrested or brought to juvenile court than kids in the control group. The pattern was pretty consistent: On average, scared straight had a harmful effect on kids versus kids who didn't get it. So we synthesized Rickenhauer's experiment, along with eight others, to look across all of them and see if there was any pattern. I had that in mind when I realized that we'd never seen a rigorous review of all the studies done on scared straight. Anthony Petrosino: I was skeptical because a professor of mine at Rutgers studied the original scared straight program at the Rahway State Prison in New Jersey, and he found not only that the program didn't have any positive impact, but kids who went through scared straight did a lot worse that the kids who got nothing. VICE: What first made you skeptical about scared straight's efficacy?ĭr. Petrosino to get his take on why scared straight programs refuse to die. A scared-straight-based TV show even went on the air in 2011 amid petitions and criticism. While the Department of Justice no longer funds these types of programs, many localities and families around the nation continue to spend their own money terrifying young people about crime in spite of the evidence that it may cause more harm than it prevents. Anthony Petrosino and a team of researchers conducted a comprehensive analysis of the various "scared straight" studies out there, and found that not only do these appeals fail to deter kids from breaking the law, they sometimes make young people more likely to commit crimes. In 2002, criminal justice and education expert Dr.
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