WFLD Channel 32 - Scared Straight! (Part 3, 1979)

Here's Part 3 of the controversial Academy Award-winning documentary Scared Straight! (hosted and narrated by Peter Falk) as aired on WFLD Channel 32. This was from an "encore presentation." Includes:

Disclaimer notice on screen (with accompanying voiceover by Peter Falk):

The remainder of "Scared Straight!" contains crude street language and graphic descriptions not suitable for children.

Inside the room where the teens are a captive audience (literally) to convicted murderers and armed robbers (and a chalkboard nearby), one convict (shown on the lower-third screen as "27 Years - Armed Robbery") demands to know if anybody in the room has seen the cards he's holding in his hand - and demands they answer him. He wants them to see all the cards, but when one looks through them the convict abruptly throws them from his hands and demands the teen "pick them up and look at them right," and to top it off threatens to break the teen's neck and then demands he pass the set of cards to the next one down. The cards are all I.D. cards of various convicts, shown to the teens to emphasize how these convicts, hardened all, "ain't no social workers." He demands the audience look at the convicts at all times, and that looking at the wall is like "choppin' them off."

After him, another convict shown as "Double Life Sentence - Murder" on the lower-third screen, disabuses the attendees of the notion of this show being entertainment, advising how he sees "nothin' funny" about the situation he's in and calling the captive audience "clowns" for even faintly cracking a smile. One of the teens is kicked out of the room by "Double Life," and "27 Years" orders another to "move over." "Double Life" then gives a blunt talk about sexual desires and acting on them, and while in the middle of his talk the teen who'd been driven out returns; "Double Life" mentions that no matter how tough any of them think they are, they would be brutally beaten, abused and molested in prison. His talk then shifts to prison life and the brutality thereof, and concludes this section by noting that after they die, only their number would be on their tombstone.

This aired on local Chicago TV on Sunday, May 20th 1979 during the 10:00pm to 11:30pm timeframe.

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