Analysis Of Beyond Scared Straight

Beyond Scared Straight: A Fixed Mindset In a 2008 Sally Forth comic strip, Sally attempted to offer her daughter some encouragement before taking her final exams. She declared, “You’re going to ace your finals, sweetie.” Sally expanded on this explaining, “And you know how I know? Because you’re the smartest, most gifted, brilliant kid there is!” Her daughter responded with, “You’d say the same thing if I were a full-blown idiot, wouldn’t you?” Sally replied with, “I guess you’ll never know” (Marciuliano & Keefe, 2008). Although this situation was used for the purpose of entertainment, did Sally tell her daughter the right thing? The purpose of this story was to illustrate the importance of how people view themselves and their abilities.

A juvenile is a person under the age of 18. If he or she commits an offense that is considered a crime in the law of a state, including theft, assault, drug abuse, disorderly conduct, and curfew violations, that person is labeled as a juvenile delinquent. Similarly, if a juvenile commits an offense that is considered a crime in the juvenile code, including running away from home, truancy from school, and disobeying the lawful orders of parents or legal guardians, that person is also labeled as a juvenile

The program garnered success by reporting that out of the total 8,000 juvenile delinquents that were exposed to the program, an overwhelming 80% of them remained law-abiding citizens (Shapiro, 1978). The program was even revisited 20 years later in a television special which followed up 17 of the juvenile delinquents that went through the original program. The special concluded that only one of the juvenile delinquents became a career criminal (Muhammed, 1999). Following the success of the Scared Straight program, similar programs were replicated in more than 30 jurisdictions throughout the United States in addition to several foreign countries, including Australia’s Day in Prison Program (O’Malley et al., 1993) , Norway’s Ullersmo Project (Lloyd, 1995), and Germany’s Neo-Nazi Prevention Program (Hall, 1999). Along with their claimed success, these programs gained popularity since they are inexpensive (some programs estimated a cost less than 1 U.S Dollar per participant) and they also provide prisoners with an opportunity to make positive contributions to society (Finckenauer,