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I don't think it's too hard to explain, Ace_O_Spades.
When I was doing my MA in criminology, my advisor would organize scared straight tours for the youth shelter/detention kids. The thing is, the people it would scare, probably I would think someone like Psycho Dad would fall into and maybe he will say if this is correct, don't really know anything about prisons or anyone in them. But they aren't likely to be in a shelter/detention center, either. They also aren't usually in troubled areas and in those schools targeted for programs like this.
But the people it wouldn't scare, the people who were often taken on these tours, have friends and family members in prison. They have significant ties to prisons and their cultures. For kids like that, it had the reverse effect of scaring them from prison.
Now, my husband was in that first category. But he was in prison for a while and so it was backwards, it wasn't as bad as he imagined it would be. But if fucked him up a lot, in my opinion. And if he had gone to a place like this, I think he would have been better off. And whatever you might think about what my husband deserved, I was always innocent--but I had to suffer, too. If smooth had been in a place like this, I would have suffered less. If we had children, and I knew other family members and some people who had children while their men were in prison, they would have felt his incarceration.
I hope that people who advocate punishment for felons also consider innocent people affected by their lives. Especially for victimless crimes, where people like me become casualties.
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