In Popular Culture
A brief parody of Scared Straight was included in the television series The Office in the 2006 episode entitled "The Convict". Steve Carell, playing office manager Michael Scott, performs as a character of his creation, named Prison Mike, who acts out a toned-down version of the type of speech given in the original Scared Straight.
On Mad TV, Will Sasso & Aries Spears play as two convicts in a program called "Scared Straight Anywhere" in which they are literally used to Scare People straight anywhere such as shown in the Skit a Business Meeting, Boy Scout Meeting & Hollywood.
Several Saturday Night Live episodes have featured the "Scared Straight" program. One Saturday Night Live skit features Kenan Thompson's character Lorenzo McIntosh hired by a jail in their "Scared Straight" program. McIntosh tries to scare the juvenile delinquents by using movie references such as being arrested because he tried to hide an alien trying to phone home from the government.
In Arrested Development, George Bluth, Sr. is sent to a "Startled Straight" tent, only to actually present at a tent intended to change repressed homosexuals.
A 1984 episode of Hardcastle & McCormick was titled "Scared Stiff" in which young offenders were taken to Terminal Island in Long Beach in a similar program.
On an episode of Married with Children, Al Bundy told his family a story about a group of troubled high school students who were bussed to his shoe store and forced to watch his daily activities as part of the "Scared Rich!" program. Al added that it wasn't long before the most "hardened punk" was on his knees sobbing.
In episode 2 of Freaks and Geeks, after Bill doubts Neil's claim that someone who doesn't pay attention in high school will have a poor future and end up "dead or in jail", Neil asks him if he was asleep during "Scared Straight!".
In episode 42 of Beavis & Butt-Head, "Scared Straight", Principal McVicker restarts a Scared Straight program, and the duo find themselves, at first, scared in prison, but later have fun. They befriend two prisoners, who are Iron Maiden fans, and play air guitar to the Iron Maiden song "The Prisoner" with them.
In the "Long Drive" episode of Malcolm in the Middle, a day in jail tests a defiant Reese who faces a Scared Straight encounter.
The Boondocks television series used the documentary in the episode "A Date with the Booty Warrior" to remake it into an episode where Riley and Huey participate in a Scared Straight program at a local jail. Some lines and examples were even taken from the documentary and used in the episode.
In the Will & Grace episode "Prison Blues", Jack mentions this documentary while visiting Karen's husband, Stanley, in prison.
In The Venture Bros, Dean and Hank Venture find themselves in a Scared Straight program at a prison that held many of their father's enemies, including the Monarch.
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Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The best hopes of any community rest upon that class of its gifted young men who are not encumbered with large possessions.... I now speak of extensive scholarship and ripe culture in science and art.... It is not large possessions, it is large expectations, or rather large hopes, that stimulate the ambition of the young.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)