Strange this wasn't up here before.

I love this movie so very, very much.

It's entertaining & fascinating in its own right: you get to see what appear to be the honest internal workings of various people who most of us rarely get to meet: convicts and convicts-to-be. And it all has the veneer of providing a solution to the portrayed problems. ("You just gotta scare those kids away from crime! Education will fix everything!")

But if you do a bit of research, this movie becomes awesome for almost the exact opposite reasons. Several studies have repeatedly shown that you can't scare people away from crime. The approach just doesn't work at all. Our little ape minds don't work that way. Oh sure, the people in this movie *say* all the right things, and your testimony after testimony about how each one has seen the light. Hallelujah! But the statistics clearly demonstrate that this program didn't help at all. Kids who went through this program offended at the same rate as similar at-risk kids who didn't go through the program. (I vaguely remember reading that graduates of this program offended at slightly higher rates, but I don't know if those analyses were reliably & correctly done.)

Put simply, we evolved apes need to strive *for* things. Striving *away* from things isn't really how we operate. So these kids may not want to go to jail, but if they aren't shown a different lifestyle, taught different skills, or acquire different goals, they'll eventually return to whatever illicit activities that put them "at-risk" in the first place.

So the narrative of this movie is complete bullshit. And rewatching this film with that knowledge makes it even more compelling. You're thinking to yourself "A large number of the so-called reformed kids in this movie are going to end up in jail anyways. All the well-meaning efforts of the convicts & program administrators accomplished nothing." And that somehow makes this thing even more interesting.

We must have had an abridged version in 2008
http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=35604

Because I remarked there was a penis visible at 5:24 and I'm not seeing on this one. Anyone see the penis?

Sacred straight since 1978, that's why we live in a Gene Rottenberry utopian paradise.