Scared Straight

Scared Straight was a documentary that won an Academy Award for Best Documentary back in the late 1970s. It was essentially an intervention program based on the idea that if you exposed at-risk teens to real-life, hardened, "lifer" prisoners, that they'd be scared straight. You can see a clip below (hattip to I Watch Stuff). It's pretty terrifying. No wonder the kids start crying; I almost started crying. Here's a meta-analysis of various publications on whether the program was effective; the authors find it wasn't, and cite some evidence it increased offending behaviors in the treated groups. I haven't read the paper yet.