[rebelmouse-image 24748152 original_size="295x475" expand=1]I've been meaning to write on this situation that Lindsay blogged about for awhile, and it's good, I suppose, I put it off, because there's been an illuminating amount of follow-up. To summarize: Windsor High School in Wyoming has, like a lot of high schools, a routinely administered "torture them for being teenagers" program of the "scared straight" variety. When I was in high school, the big scary things that we teenagers were assumed to be doing were at least tangentially related to the horrible punishments that were trotted out---the naughty was drugs and the consequences were long prison sentences. Those were more innocent times, I suppose, since at least drug paranoia was equal-opportunity and, objectively speaking, based in the reasonable belief that kids shouldn't do drugs. That said, the scared straight programs I bore witness to were ineffectually maudlin and, in the classic tradition, seemed to be rooted in fear and loathing of teenagers for being teenagers, so the sum total effect was that if you didn't want to do drugs before the program, you sure did afterward.
