Friday, August 22, 2008

Scared Straight Programs

The goal of this paper is to discover whether or not the scared straight programs are deterrents to juvenile delinquency. “The underlying theory of programs like Scared Straight is deterrence. Program advocates and others believe that realistic depictions of life in prison and presentations by inmates will deter juvenile offenders (or children at risk of becoming delinquent) from further involvement with crime” (Petrosino and Turpin-Petrosino and Buehler, 2003: 42).

“A randomized controlled trial of the New Jersey program in 1982, however, reported no effect on the criminal behavior of participants in comparison with a no-treatment control group. In fact, Finckenauer reported that participants in the experimental group were more likely to be arrested (Petrosino and Turpin-Petrosino and Buehler, 2003: 43). The thought was that with these programs, juvenile delinquents or possible offenders would see the situation with prisons and be socialized into having a mindset that they did not want to be involved within the situation. However, it appears that the exact opposite happened. Individuals were socialized into a role of committing crimes, they learned from the criminals that were in jail how to perform criminal activities and basically how to become like them.

“Consistent with these findings, reviewers of research on the effects of crime prevention programs have not found deterrence-oriented programs like Scared Straight effective” (Petrosino and Turpin-Petrosino and Buehler, 2003: 43). A study performed by the University of Maryland that examined more than five-hundred programs that attempt to prevent crime stated that Scared Straight was one of the programs that didn’t work for its intended mission.

There was a film in 1979 and one released 20 years after the initial film that both stated the Scared Straight programs to be effective at deterring crime. However, these films only looked at small numbers of cases, and did not use control groups to compare the data. “They [Petrosino and his colleagues] found that Scared Straight and like interventions generally increased crime between one and twenty-eight percent when compared to a no-intervention control group” (Petrosino and Turpin-Petrosino and Buehler, 2003: 44).

The individuals writing this journal article examined nine Scared Straight programs throughout the nation. While examining these programs, they concluded that “whether relying on the actual data reported or measures of statistical significance, the nine trials do not yield evidence for a positive effect for Scared Straight and other juvenile awareness programs on subsequent delinquency” (Petrosino and Turpin-Petrosino and Buehler, 2003: 52). The journal article also concludes that “despite the variability in the type of intervention used, on average these programs result in an increase in criminality in the experimental group when compared to a no-treatment control. According to these experiments, doing nothing would have been better than exposing juvenile to the program” (Petrosino and Turpin-Petrosino and Buehler, 2003: 53).

On paper, the Scared Straight programs appear to be a possible answer to lowering juvenile crime rates. However, research states that the juveniles are actually more likely to commit crimes because of having being involved within the program. It appears that the individuals who participate in these kind of programs are socialized into committing more crimes because of the actions that they witness.

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