Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success by Matthew Syed

Author:Matthew Syed
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2015-09-09T14:00:00+00:00

III

In 1999 Scared Straight! 20 Years Later was broadcast in the United States. The documentary was fronted this time by Danny Glover rather than Peter Falk, and revisited those seventeen, scrawny teenagers who had appeared in the original film. The results were as seemingly miraculous as the original programme had led audiences to believe.

Many of the interviewees talked about their new lives. Almost all credited the three-hour visit to Rahway two decades earlier as having turned their lives around. Terence, the young black kid who had once stolen cars and broken into stores, was now a part-time preacher at his local Baptist church, with a wife and two sons. ‘Chances are, if I wouldn’t have gone to Rahway, I would probably be locked up and could be in my grave,’ he said.

Lori, the sixteen-year-old with the wide smile and big earrings, who had been dealing drugs, was now a thirty-six-year-old bookkeeper and mother. ‘I just thought it was a day away from school,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I have ever been as afraid in my whole life . . . It made me not want to be an idiot any more . . . I started going to school more after that.’

Angelo, the kid with the unkempt hair and wispy moustache, was now thirty-seven years old, tiled floors for a living and had three kids. He said ‘If I didn’t go to Rahway, I think I would have done hard time,’ he said. ‘If that one day didn’t happen, I might not have my family. And my family to me right now is everything; it is the most beautiful experience in the world.’

This, then, is how the phenomenon of Scared Straight looked to millions of TV viewers. The statistics look good, too. This was a scheme, unlike most social programmes, that actually bothered to collect data. According to the evidence, around 80 to 90 per cent of people who attended the programme went straight. As stated in the documentary: ‘That is an amazing success story. And it is unequalled by traditional rehabilitation methods.’

But if we rewind to the late spring of 1977, a rather different picture was starting to emerge. In April of that year, James Finckenauer, a professor at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, decided to test Scared Straight. He wasn’t just interested in the observational statistics. As a scientist he knew that these could be misleading. He was not interested in hype or slickly presented documentaries either. He wanted to know if the scheme really worked. In short, he wanted to run an RCT.

Finckenauer has silver-white hair and enquiring eyes. He has published dozens of papers and won multiple awards for his research, but his most striking quality is his conversational style. He is cautious, considered and attentive. He also has a laser-like quality, as if he is trying to cut through the surface to find the truths lying beneath. These qualities would serve him well as he forensically unpicked the Scared Straight phenomenon.

Before starting the RCT, Finckenauer probed the existing evidence for Scared Straight.

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