Scared Straight — California Style

Abstract

Juvenile awareness is a controversial practice that received much impetus after the showing of the TV documentary “Scared Straight” in 1978-1979. Despite proliferation of such programs nationwide, only a handful of research studies have been conducted. This experimental study on serious delinquent youth who attended a moderately confrontive juvenile awareness program at San Quentin Prison in California, showed an improvement in attitudes for experimentals relative to controls. Behaviorally, however, it was clear that the San Quentin Squires Program did not reduce delinquency overall. The only finding overall in favor of experimentals showed those to be arrest-free longer than controls in the study. Subsample findings suggested that certain types of experimentals improved in behavior or were partially deterred from committing certain types of offenses. Other subsample findings showed certain types of experimentals doing worse behaviorally than their controls. Such inconsistency of findings will require further research before the question of effectiveness of juvenile awareness programs for lower risk youth can be fully determined.