Scared Straight! (1978)

Directed by

Arnold Shapiro

Genre

documentary film

Country

United States

Runtime

52 min

Rating

7.4 of 10 from 12 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A camera crew follows a group of young offenders into a prison where convicts verbally harass and intimidate them. The aim is to frighten these teenagers away from a life of crime.

rawconfrontationalintenseunsettlingstarkgrittydisturbing

What happens

Scared Straight! is a 1978 American documentary directed by Arnold Shapiro. Narrated by actor Peter Falk – known for playing a police detective on the TV drama Columbo – the subject of the documentary is a group of juvenile delinquents and their three-hour session with actual convicts. Filmed at Rahway State Prison, a group of inmates known as the "lifers" berate, scream at, and terrify the young offenders in an attempt to "scare them straight", so that those teenagers will avoid prison life. The documentary aired on television in the late 1970s, uncensored; it marked the first time that the words "fuck" and "shit" were broadcast on many networks. Some broadcasters (an example being CFQC, a CTV Network affiliate in Canada) added locally produced segments in which experts discussed both the content of the documentary and the rationale behind airing it uncensored. The documentary received several awards, including the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It found that most of the participants did not reoffend. However, studies that compared and evaluated the effects of various Scared Straight programs against a control group have concluded that they increase the likelihood of participants later committing crimes. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

• Short Eyes (1977)
• Tattooed Tears (1978)
• On the Yard (1978)
• The Killing of America (1982)
• Midnight Express (1978)
• Doing Time: Life Inside the Big House (1991)
• Scum (1977)
• No Lies (1974)