![]() ![]() Kids were taunted until it almost seemed one of them would blow. And they were stripped of their images, sitting helplessly under the wrath of the angry inmates. ![]() The inmate gave him the cigarette and “bought” the kid. A black inmate took a young kid by the belt and guided him to a white inmate and asked him if he had a cigarette. One by one the inmates talked about homosexual rape, prostitution among the inmates and other acts of violence. The inmates described what prison is really like. And the kids didn’t know the inmates wouldn’t hit them. The only thing the inmates couldn’t do was hit the kids. The teenagers were dominated, harassed, threatened, educated, intimidated, cajoled and cursed by inmate volunteers. ![]() As they toured the prison, they walked down a cellblock, inmates called after them, expressing their sexual preference-young boys sometimes. They were no matches for the older, tougher and wiser inmates who began teaching them almost as soon as the kids stepped foot in the prison. Nor could they use their own terror tactics to control life around them. The tough kids showed none of their earlier cockiness. Seventeen of them, black and white, male and female, visited the prison for their three-hour sentences. But these kids weren’t afraid of going to prison-at first. Their language was tough, but it didn’t have the bite the older inmates had. One of them bragged that he might get stopped once in a while, but you figured he would be back again. They liked their way of life, were proud of it. The youths in trouble were introduced and talked about their image of themselves, their goals, their lives. Peter Falk hosted and narrated the one-hour “Scared Straight” presentation. That was replaced with the sounds of a Marine Corps brig. Like the brig, testing and diagnostics were not a part of the experience at Rahway Prison. It purported to show that “scaring the crime out of kids isn’t pretty … but it works.”Īfter my experience in the Marine Corps brig, where the rate of recidivism was close to zero, I believed in the program. Juveniles from youth homes were sent to Rahway to serve “three-hour sentences.” Three hours of participating in the program was reported to have a lasting effect on a teenager’s life. The program was called the Juvenile Awareness Program. It took me back to the days of my service in the Marine Corps, the redline brig I worked at in the Philippines, and my counseling days at Menard Penitentiary in southern Illinois.Īt Rahway (N.J.) State Prison in 1976, inmates had established a program to show kids in trouble what it’s like to be in prison. I heard language on the program that I didn’t even hear in the halls of the school where I was teaching. When I first came across it, the warning in an ad in the Chicago-area TV Guide said, “This program contains explicit crude language and graphic descriptions that may not be suitable for some viewers.” And that was quite accurate. ![]()
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