Beyond Scared Straight: Totalitarian Brainwashing for the Police State?

Is Beyond Scared Straight police state break down-brainwashing? Do you notice our society is brainwashing everyone with "might" makes "right" and conforming for obedience sake, not for any higher ideals of a civilized society? Those kids all want to join gangs to be part of something which should tell you how bad things are for them. It's like they want to put everyone through boot camp. For the kids, it's threatening them with lock-ups, bad food and push-ups on the floor.

 "Learn to obey so you don't get locked in a cage and not made into Brutus's girlfriend!" That's not exactly forming an inner moral code. This is a God-less society that is breaking down and they are not asking the young people to aspire to goodness but to conform to avoid the punishment of jail.

This is why Josh Duggar doesn't have one, because his parents basically kept him locked in cage on the moral and emotional level. Now his overbearing parents have had him lock himself into a rehab.  I  imagine myself as a teen standing there, being screamed at by one of the inmates, or guards, and think, well I would just stand there and say nothing. My face would go blank. What would they do? Hit me? Well I got screamed and hit and had my hair pulled.. Maybe they screen all the abused ACONs from that show ahead of time. Most ACONs could just stand there and take it and not cry unlike most of the teens. That's a sad fact not a good one.

 I suspect I would have been escorted out and told I was not suitable for the jail program. What is a screaming guard in my face inches away who can't even legally hit me when most ACONs with physically abusive parents especially have had far worse? Those guards and even most of the inmates would seem like cuddly teddy bears in comparison.

 Some may say, but Five Hundred Pound Peep, you've never been to boot camp or jail, but I worked within places run like them with violent people and sociopaths galore including living in the "war zone" gang filled neighborhoods. I worked with teen inmates including one kid who murdered both parents and came to my art room and drew Satanic symbols all over his art work. The kid was in shock when I recognized the symbols.  [This was during my pre-Christian days when I read books on everything and yes that included esoteric books] They didn't know he had killed his parents yet, and the bodies hadn't been discovered yet but was in for stealing a car. His next stop was adult prison.  Some were in for assault, rape, drug dealing and everything else you can think of. The last art teacher got knocked out. I got the job for being big.

 I saw enough violence at my residential counselor job that was a taste. One thing I learned in the feral streets, is show fear and you are toast. It was like a repeat of my childhood, remain in the background and try not to trigger the wolves surrounding you into a feeding frenzy.  Life for me was odd when violent teens would scream at me at that one job. I had to put on the mask of "professionalism".

I never screamed or ranted or raved at any of my charges. Treating them this way even for all their bad behavior or crimes would have been horrible to me. I had to be firm at times, but one thing I remember thinking is, "They must be led away from darkness, not be given more of it". I saw the streets and bad neighborhoods many of them came from as producing the behavior in the first place. The Satanic kid I had less hope for and the full blown sociopaths, but for the majority that was the way I thought. So watching this show out of curiosity last week, I find myself asking "What do they expect to gain?" It seems the majority of the teens are "scared" into compliance at the end of the show, but will it last? Some seem to have loving parents who care, so that may give them more of a chance.

Will fear of jail keep a kid on the straight and narrow? I don't know....I would rather the desire for goodness went deeper.

I never have been arrested and or taken to jail in my case. I am scared of jail and believe a medically fragile person like me would be dead within days in the local county where they make people sleep on the floor and feed them old bologna sandwiches. I once told my husband if I ever get arrested [like in a wrong place wrong time scenario--I'm law abiding], he has to go to court the next morning and file a petition for medical custody on my behalf if he can't come up with bail. There's too many horror stories where people didn't get needed medicine for weeks, and other things in county jail. Many Americans don't realize what goes on in those fortresses that sit on the edge of their town or how much of a juggernaut the entire legal system is, where it can chew you up alive.

 These kind of shows give us a taste but what makes me want to vomit is some of the "professionals" seem so proud of the brutality and debauchery of their jails and the some of these "Beyond Scared Straight" shows hit a huge low, when some of the "scare em straight" professionals and their inmates who use the threat of prison rape to try to make their charges go straight like the inmate on the video who goes on about how they use Kool-Aid as lipstick in jail or the one that makes the teen comb his chest hair.

Jail can serve as a discouragement for criminal behavior for many people. We don't want to go to jail if we steal, fight, drive drunk or cause mayhem but isn't it better to teach a kid, not to steal, fight, drive drunk because it hurts other people and to hope they develop a conscience?  Have things digressed so far the only motivation to be good is to avoid the cages at a rapid rate, they have built all over this nation? Are these kids so far gone, that they have to taught to be "good" or at least act like it, out of fear? Where's God in this mix?

The show seems to me to be total brain-washing for the police state. They are high on supposed law and order and advance an authoritarian code that submission to authority is the greatest good instead of developing a conscience and being a citizen who wants to give to society.  These won't be kids that grow up to question or change the system or to expect anything better then submission to the gulag or life in a criminal gang. I don't see already abused kids responding well to more abuse and trauma. Some will toe the line out of fear, but it hasn't addressed the inner problems that plagued them to become troubled youth in the first place, the most that will happen is they will learn to operate more in darkness, keeping their mouths shut and getting away with things without being caught.

How does it help a teen to be screamed at by some of the resident inmates, narcissists and sociopaths within the prison system? How does brutalizing people make them less brutal? Is the aim to make them learn to operate within the totalitarian system of "might makes right" by letting people more powerful then them [whether inmate or guard] intimidate them and force them into submission or the appearance of submission? What does it say about our society that these kind of shows even exist?

One disturbing moment is when the tattooed up gang member and inmate says to a young teenage girl, "Be very F***** afraid!". I don't like that mixing up of young women and criminal older men. Will this girl be helped by more trauma? Maybe she is acting out from being raped or abused already. I'm not sure how that is supposed to help her. She's a troubled teen already, unless sociopathy is leading her down a bad path, she's afraid already.

It seemed strange to me, that on the one reality TV series Behind Bars: Rookie Year starring new guards or COs at prisons, they show this one thin young woman working with hardened male inmates. That seems dumb to me like asking for trouble. Anyhow there are endless shots of yelling inmates and guards getting right in the faces of all the "bad" kids. I watched a few of these shows and on almost everyone, they yell at the young juvenile delinquents, "Hit me!", "Take a swing!". On the above video one of the girl's does. I found that stuff stupid, like they were just playing set up the teen. Repercussions are swift for poor Leigh as two jail guards restrain her and then arrest her.

Then they have the weird thing where they give the kids a tray of prison food and make them eat it. That seems kind of exaggerated. I saw a kid unable to eat a simple hot dog watching one of these shows yesterday and the guard tossed the Styrofoam tray on the floor. What was the big deal? Jail food isn't that good but they have the teens acting like they are being poisoned. It's also more control freak time when they are forcing them to eat.

It seems like this show somehow thinks more child abuse is going to help young people who in most cases probably have already been abused. How is being humiliated going to help anyone? When they smear the girl's faces with Kool-Aid, that is disgusting and just abusive. The double message of teaching "Don't bully" while bullying is one of those mixed messages. The one guard in the second video goes, "We care about you." Double-bind messages do not create good mental health.

This show is a bad sign for American society. This is a society that is lacking "natural affection" more and more. One sees spiritual darkness in this show. This definitely is a show that comes out of a narcissistic society.