'Scared Straight' program scares truants back into class

(Old news, but still important) To Joel, the choice was simple: Go to school and be ridiculed because he had a hard time reading or stay home and smoke pot with his friends. So the 16-year-old Santa Ana boy skipped hundreds of days in his first two years of high school, until ditching caught up with him and an Orange County judge gave him another simple choice -- school or jail. "I didn't want to get locked up," Joel said after a recent court appearance to check on his progress. "Being scared about that made me get over being embarrassed about how I couldn't keep up in school."
Forum Post: Fuck the 'Scared Straight' program!
Read full article (or comment)  |  Original article source