What happened
In the 1970s, inmates serving life sentences at a New Jersey prison started a program to scare at-risk and delinquent teenagers away from crime. The teenagers visited the prison and sat through aggressive presentations about prison life, often with exaggerated stories of violence. A television documentary that aired in 1978 reported that 16 of the 17 teenagers it followed stayed law-abiding for three months afterward, a 94 percent success rate. There was no comparison group. The program was copied in more than 30 jurisdictions, and Congress held hearings on it.
It is easy to see why it spread. The idea is deterrence, which matches a common intuition about how to stop crime. It was cheap, too: one Maryland version cost less than a dollar per participant.
Then the evidence came in. A randomized trial of the New Jersey program, published in 1982, reported that participants were more likely to be arrested than similar teenagers who didn’t take part. In 2013 a Campbell Collaboration review led by Anthony Petrosino pooled the results of randomized trials run over 25 years in eight jurisdictions. Across them, the programs made later offending more likely: the odds rose by a factor of about 1.6 to 1.7. “Doing nothing would have been better than exposing juveniles to the program,” the authors wrote.
The programs didn’t stop. The review notes that when a California version produced negative results, the response was to end the evaluation, not the program. A 2011 television series, Beyond Scared Straight, revived interest. That year two senior U.S. Justice Department officials wrote publicly that the department did not support such programs, and Maryland and California suspended theirs. The department’s juvenile justice office added that bringing court-involved youth into contact with adult inmates could violate federal law.
Where it sits in the system
The aim was prevention (level 2) on the depth scale: stopping crime before it happened. Its failure is a lesson about the system’s signals. A documentary carried the story further than any data could (Story Bias). The people who saw the program in action, such as inmates, staff, parents and viewers, saw what happened in the room, not arrest records a year later (the Missing Feedback Loop). And before-and-after counts without a comparison group looked like evidence when they weren’t (the Measurement Gap).
What carries over
Good intentions and a plausible theory are not evidence. A randomized controlled trial was the only thing that showed this program was doing harm. See the myth If a program sounds logical, it works, and for the wider question of when help hurts, Open Problem 20, When Charity Harms.
Lessons for the system
- Success stories without a comparison group can’t show that a program works. The original documentary reported that 16 of 17 teenagers stayed out of trouble for three months, and compared them with no one.
- A program can feel right, cost almost nothing and still cause harm. Only randomized comparisons revealed it.
- Evidence of harm does not stop a program by itself. In one case, negative results ended the evaluation instead of the program.
- The more dramatic, cheap and intuitive a program is, the faster it spreads, so those are the programs most in need of testing.