In 2010 Paul M. Klenowski, Keith J. Bell, and Kimberly D. Dodson published “An Empirical Evaluation of Juvenile Awareness Programs in the United States: Can Juveniles be ‘Scared Straight’?” in the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation. This study assessed twelve evaluations of ten juvenile awareness programs. They used the Maryland Scientific Scale for assessing the scholarly evolutions of the programs, which is widely accepted in the criminal justice field. The SMS (Maryland Scientific Methods Scale) is a five-point scale that measures the methodological rigor of the evaluations of the juvenile awareness programs. The SMS ranges from 1 (the least rigorous) to 5 (the most rigorous). If the evaluations of the juvenile awareness programs in which the researchers are looking at have a high enough rigor, they “can classify the effectiveness of a program into one of four categories: ‘what works, what does not work, what is promising, and what is unknown’” (258). A program that can be classified as working has to have at least two evaluations that are 3 to 5 rankings on the SMS scale.
In the end, this meta-analysis is yet another study showing the lack of effectiveness of juvenile prevention programs on recidivism. However, while this study shows that youth are likely continue or even increase their delinquent behavior after attending these programs; Klenowski, Bell, and Dodson suggest that certain aspects of these juvenile awareness programs, like non-confrontational programs in conjunction with other promising crime prevention strategies, should be taken into consideration. While this study is another study pointing to the lack of effectiveness of juvenile awareness programs, like scared straight, it is one of the few that suggests that non-confrontational programs in conjunction with other crime prevention strategies should be looked into.