The Scared Straight Program

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The Scared Straight Program The recent media obsession with the scared straight program, juvenile boot camps and other scare tactics has lead to the question as to whether they actually are beneficial or not in treating adolescent criminal recidivism. On television programs like Maury (Pauvich) the answer to treating the troubled young girls who are brought to the show is boot camp. Those in charge take these girls to prisons, dangerous streets at night and often morgues to make a visual argument as to where they will end up as a result of the path they've taken. They also go through a rigorous run with drill sergeants to break down their egos. Of course it only last one day as opposed to any length of time a judge would sentence, but they get a small taste of it. Without surprise, at the end of every program of this nature, all the girls are rehabilitated and promise to go back to school, quit drugs, stealing, prostituting, and stop the abusive behavior. Adolescent criminal acts, which include but are not limited to murder, rape, armed robbery, violent assault, mugging, arson, vandalism and robbery are a large portion of the crimes represented in the media. Alternative options to throwing these kids in juvenile detention centers is a rehabilitative boot camp where they have no control over even their own bodies or programs similar to scared straight where they see possible consequences to their actions. The importance of the success or failure of these programs is important because right now it is the popular solution. If these programs are going nowhere, time should be invested in creating new ideas and methods to treat these children before they become adults in the prison system. This paper will address mainly... ... middle of paper ... ...ntin Squires Program. Criminal Justice and Behavior 1983; 10(2): 209-226. 6. Lipton D., Martinson R, Wilks J. The Effectiveness of Correctional Treatment. New York, NY: Praeger, 1975. 7. Petrosino AJ. 'What Works?' Revisited Again: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Experiments in Rehabilitation, Deterrence and Delinquency Prevention. Ann Arbor (MI): Rutgers University, 1997. 8. Petrosino A, Boruch R., Rounding C., McDonald S., Chalmers I. Assembling a Social, Psychological, Educational and Criminological Trials Register (SPECTR). Evaluation Research in Education 2000. forthcoming. 9. Sherman L., Gottfredson D., MacKenzie D., Eck J., Reuter P., Bushway S. Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising. A Report to the United States Congress. College Park, MD: University of Maryland, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 1997.

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