An Audience for Mature Films

Note: Here’s the second column about the Scared Straight program that I wrote five days after the first many years ago, during and after class discussions when the suburban Chicago high school where I was teaching wouldn’t allow or approve me to show it in the documentary unit of my journalism class. Most of the students had seen the documentary. It probably still wouldn’t be allowed in today’s politically correct world when the prison population is exploding, and it looks like there is no end in sight for why people are sentenced and sent away from the community. The Scared Straight program has continued, and After Scared Straight was aired on the History Channel this fall. There are pros and cons of the program. Google “Scared Straight” to see them for yourself. Nothing works for everybody, but it seems worth continuing.

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There’s something about today’s high school students that we tend to overlook sometimes. Maybe it’s called maturity. Here’s an example of it, anyway:

     A review of sorts about a controversial documentary called Scared Straight appeared in this space last week. The program from which the film came was designed to scare kids away from prisons. It seems to be succeeding.
     The Los Angeles Times said the film is “one of the most powerful and unusual television programs ever broadcast … the medium at its finest.”
     Gary Deeb, television critic for the Chicago Tribune, reported that the reaction to the program in the Chicago area “has been so heavy and favorable that WFDL-Ch 32 has scheduled the documentary for a repeat on May 20 (1979).”
     Many high school students watched the program, too. According to an informal poll conducted at a suburban Chicago high school for this piece of writing, about one-forth of the students in some upper-division classes watched the documentary, mostly with their parents. This 25 percent figure is close to the 3 percent of the 10 p.m. audience Arbitron said the film had.
     And during class discussions over the next few days, the students continued to be interested in the film. They talked about the changes in the kids’ personalities who appeared in the film from the time they were first interviewed to the time they were last interviewed.
     The students had seen the changes the kids had undergone from the time they got to the prison to the time they left. Everyone noted the changes in the juveniles serving the sentences from the moment they entered the prison gates on to where they heard the catcalls and looked around at the unfamiliar walls.
     Some students were shy talking about the film, but the shine in their eyes and the nods from their heads showed agreement. Others talked excitedly and waved their hands wildly. Their comments and observations kept the discussions going.
     “Did you see when that one convict told them to take all their shoes off and put them in the middle of the floor?” one student asked who rarely spoke in class. “He asked them how it felt to be ripped off.”
     Those who hadn’t seen the film looked from speaker to speaker and asked questions when they had a chance. Some of the questions were ones that had been asked by skeptics of the program.
     “You mean a three-hour sentence in a prison is going to change a bunch of juvenile delinquents? From New York?” a girl in another class asked. She always questioned anything she didn’t believe. “Uh-huh.”
     “Oh, yeah,” one of the girls who had seen the program said. “If you’d seen it, you’d know why a three-hour sentence would do it. Those kids were scared to death. I would have been, too. So would you.”
     Several students mentioned the violence or the threat of violence in the film. They talked about the relationship between Scared Straight and Night and Fog, a French documentary the class had seen contrasting the comforting color of the present with the dreary black and white of the past to portray the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps.
     They saw the similarities between the degradation and the hopelessness of the convicts and the Jews in the concentration camps. But they also saw the difference. They saw there was no hope in the concentrations camps, and they saw that a few inmates in the prison were able to find some meaning in their lives by helping some kids avoid prison.
     They also saw how the film showed effective use of the medium of television and that of the documentary format by bringing a very real and worthy program to the tube. They expressed appreciation that the media could be used for so much benefit.
     They wanted to see the film in class. It seemed possible. And when they found out it would probably have to be after school, it didn’t matter to most of them. Some did say they had to work.
     Then when they found out they couldn’t see the film after school, they didn’t know what to say. Oh, they were angry. But they didn’t know what to do.
     One quiet boy in the front row asked why they couldn’t see the film. He had seen it and thought it was a good film, worthy of seeing for more reason than one. He was told that the people who made the decision didn’t think the film was appropriate to show students their age.
     He looked back for a minute before he said, “I wonder when it would be appropriate to show it to us? When it’s too late?”
     “It was on television,” another student said.
     “That’s censorship,” still another said.
     And they said a lot of other things about the film and the situation. But not once did they mention the foul language, except to say they had heard it all before. They saw the language as a part of the whole, not as something offensive or to snicker about.
     Nor did they snicker about the varying sexual preferences of the inmates. They didn’t comment about the race of the convicts, either.
     Oh, two kids who hadn’t been coming to class at all did smile crookedly and giggle to themselves about something from time to time. But they’re coming to class now… That’s something for them.