Anna McCarthy claims that, “Trauma, whether deployed clinically or in cultural critique, names experiences at the limits of rational knowledge and of sovereign selfhood, exposing the challenges that terrifying experience pose for any coherent expression of history, memory, and individual autonomy” (McCarthy, 25). Our group connected this definition with the “weird” success of a show like, Beyond Scared Straight. Beyond Scared Straight is a hour long series that follows a handful of “at-risk teenagers” as they attend a program, which includes an intensive one-day session in a prison. Beyond Scared Straight is a part of a legacy of television that positions the affect of trauma for the subjects in between their personal failures and personal responsibilities.
Unlike examples such as Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, where the ‘welfare state’ more generally and state support institutions specifically are merely absent, and in their absence condemned as either illegitimate or inefficient, Beyond Scared Straight centralizes the state as a carceral force. The prison marks the space where the state apparatus becomes entirely disciplinary or punitive and loses any possible traces it might otherwise have as a force for social cohesion.
Beyond Scared Straight’s coda takes form with juvenile participants returning to the initial corrective setting following an extended rehabilitation period in the “real world.” During this time they return to the family and are not under the watchful aegis of the show’s cameras or the state itself, expected to perform a kind of regulatory self-discipline for their own supposed well-being. The success of the show and its realism thus hinges on this corrective performance at its conclusion, wherein the viewer and televisual subject alike are extended the pleasure and reward of self-governance gone right, even going so far as to joke and cheer with prison guards and corrective officers. Offering what Hay and Ouelette describe as “an extension of government – even as this extension in another respect makes government more reliant upon privatized, commercial resources” (218), the work of the state institution and its disciplinary procedures are partially obscured and limited to the “proper” structures of governance, highlighting the ultimate relationship between state subject and corrective institution in a more benevolent configuration. There are winners and rewards to be found here as long as unruly subjects learn to behave, thereby participating in active systems of (our collective) oppression.
This is a compilation of clips that shows the hyper-racialized young teens on their prison visits, talking to their tearful mothers through a glass visiting booth. These moments, even before reflecting on the teen’s time in prison, tend to emphasize the broken structure of the family.
The theme of the absent father seems to be rampant in this show, making the institution of state incarceration almost secondary to the punitive role of the father. Simply put, had fathers been around, the assumption is that the teen would not have devolved into the situation they find themselves in. This furthers the “neoliberal cultural logics of privatization” by tying law and order to gender roles within the domestic sphere (McCarthy 17). Interestingly, it seems to be the mother’s suffering, along with state intervention, that remedies the effects of the absent father. It is precisely the mother’s inability to regulate the behaviours of their children that paradoxically inspires the child to change and allows the state institution to function properly. It is almost a good-cop-bad-cop dynamic, in the sense that the state is the bad cop to be constantly avoided and that the mother is the good cop, reinforcing the same corrective effect in a stereotypically feminine warmness. Beyond Scared Straight therefore not only articulates a role for the state institution of imprisonment, but also determines the best way the institution of family can work in harmony with the state. The show blames the familial realm for the children’s developmental issues, positioning the family as the first line of defense and taking pressure off the institution of prison, even though state incarceration is its main focus.
This program’s premise lies in exposing teens, who are considered as troublemakers, to either terrible violence or touching stories in prison is conducive to correcting their tendency to make mistakes. This teleological approach is indeed a disguise of the ultra-authority of law enforcement and prison system. There exists a lack of concern for their individuality demonstrated by overlooking gender or age difference: girls are brought to male prisons while children of different ages are exposed to similar levels of threats. Evoking terror, fear or pathos in this case works to naturalize the prison system and the rhetoric around it on screen. Not much conversations about their past and the reasons for their later change are featured. Viewers are prone to be impressed by intense physical or emotional expressions, leading to the final transformation which aims for a comforting feeling, a relief. The premise appears persuasive by imposing the dramatic for strong visual impact or even a convincing sense of the necessity of discipline, further preventing them from questioning the legitimacy and ethics of the prison, the prison-visit education program or the filming and production of all these.
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