From 2011 until 2015, American cable channel A&E broadcast 9 seasons of a show called “Beyond Scared Straight”. This show depicted young offender intervention programs in the USA. Troubled teenagers were taken into prisons and harrassed by the inmates and prison guards. The idea was that this would ‘scare them straight’.

In one scene from the show, a teenager is forced to stand in front of a jail cell containing an adult male. The prisoner blows kisses through the window and begins to lick the windowpane in a repulsively suggestive manner. The youth is being threatened with rape. In many other scenes, teenagers are viciously insulted and threatened with physical violence.

Instead of attempting to help these teenagers to develop resiliency, the A&E Television network attempted to terrify and shame its victims for the sake of entertainment. A&E is actually owned by Disney, and there’s something particularly insidious about the notion of Disney, the world’s most popular supplier of children’s entertainment, being responsible for the torture of extremely vulnerable teenagers.

Unsurprisingly, the approach of ‘scaring kids straight’ is not very effective. A study has  shown that the teenagers who go through these kinds of programs are actually more likely to get into trouble in the future.