'Beyond Scared Straight'

Inmates at Valley State Prison are scare tactic for at-risk teen girls in 'Beyond Scared Straight'



Leanna is 13 and if she just keeps doing what she's doing, she has a bright future as raw meat for the murderers and lifers at the Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla, Calif.

With that message as an opener, "Beyond Scared Straight" will get the attention of a certain portion of the viewing audience.

What's less clear is whether that message is getting through to Leanna.

So even though we know what the "Scared Straight" program is about - scaring potential inmates away from prison before they land themselves there - this revived edition has some new wrinkles and still can't promise a story with a certain ending.

For one thing, while past rounds of "Scared Straight" tended to focus on at-risk teenage boys, this one turns to at-risk teenage girls.

That may seem like a minor change. It turns out that it isn't. Girls, particularly teenage girls, seem blithely convinced they are different - that because they are girls, they won't face the kind of hard-core sanctions as boys of the same age who do the same kind of crimes.

So the first message of "Beyond Scared Straight" is that, girlfriend, you are, like, so misinformed.

This show follows five at-risk girls, whose crimes range from shoplifting and drugs to fighting and whose attitudes are uniformly bad, on their field trip to Valley State. There they are introduced to a crowd of inmates whose attitudes make the teens look like Dora the Explorer. For starters, the inmates do not look feminine. They do look mean.

After a round of implicit threats of what could happen to these newbies if some of the lifers got hold of them "off-camera," there are lessons in prison etiquette.

This starts with keeping your hands at your side and not smiling, because nothing is funny. It moves from there to the bathroom facility - an outdoor pit semi-enclosed by three low brick walls and equipped with no amenities.

The visitors, who probably thought taking this tour would be cool and might make them look tough by association, start off giggly and "whatever."

Not far into the tour, some of that façade starts to break down. Their hosts are not the kind of women who indulge fantasies.

The larger question, unanswered here and maybe unanswerable, is whether this sobering reassessment will last longer than most of the other thoughts that can skip through teenage heads.

What's also a little disconcerting is that these girls seem to think that being on TV is a big enough achievement that the reason doesn't matter.

That's a pretty scary thought itself - but not as scary as Valley State.