Scared Straight — Juvenile Awareness Project

Summary

Scared Straight is one of the most important cautionary tales in social policy evaluation. The program was widely adopted across the United States in the late 1970s and 1980s, depicted in award-winning documentary film, and intuitively appealing — surely, the thinking went, showing juveniles what prison is really like would deter them. Rigorous evaluation found the opposite: youth who participated in Scared Straight programs were re-arrested at higher rates than controls. The likely mechanism is iatrogenic: group exposure to prison culture and inmate networks may have increased criminal identity and social connections to crime. The systematic review of 9 RCTs by Petrosino and colleagues became a landmark in the evidence-based policy movement — not because it found a positive effect, but because it documented clearly that a widely-used, government-funded program was actively making things worse. The lesson is fundamental: good intentions and intuitive plausibility are not substitutes for evidence.

Research question

"Does exposing juvenile delinquents to graphic confrontations with incarcerated adults — depicting the realities of prison life — deter future criminal behavior?"

Methodology

Result

Negative

Scared Straight programs produced a 13% increase in re-arrest rates compared to controls (pooled RCT estimate); individual studies ranged from −3% to +28% on re-arrest; no study found significant positive effect

Evidence strength

Strong

Randomized trial, replicated across multiple sites or studies.

Replication status

Replicated