Best movies like Scared Straight!

It took going behind bars to keep them out.

A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like Scared Straight! Starring Peter Falk, and more. If you liked Scared Straight! then you may also like: You Can't Get Away with Murder, Vampire Clan, Weeds, Wilderness, Night of the Demons III and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.

The filmed depiction of a program where convicts tell troubled kids about the horrors of prison life.

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You Can't Get Away with Murder

Johnnie learns crime from petty thug Frank Wilson. When Wilson kills a pawnbroker with a gun stolen from Johnnie's sister Madge's fiance Fred Burke, Fred goes to Sing Sing's death house. Wilson uses all the pressure can to keep Johnnie silent, even after he and Johnnie themselves wind up in the big house.

Vampire Clan

Five friends welcome real life vampirism into their lives. They cut their own wrists and let their friends drink from them. Rod, the leader, and a very psychotic young guy, ends up killing Heathers parents and stealing their car to go on a crazy raod trip. His behaviour begins to frighten his friends, though they went along with it at first. All end up in prison except Heather.

Weeds

A San Quentin inmate, sentenced to life without parole, writes a play that catches the interest of a reporter.

Wilderness

Juvenile delinquents are sent to a small British island after a fellow prisoner's death, where they must fight for survival.

Night of the Demons III

A group of young criminals accidentally shoot a police officer. To avoid being arrested they hide out in an abandoned house. When they realize that the house is haunted, they start to wish that they had turned themselves in when they had a chance.

Out of the Blue

A young girl whose father is an ex-convict and whose mother is a junkie finds it difficult to conform and tries to find comfort in a quirky combination of Elvis and the punk scene.

Raiders of the Living Dead

In an abandoned prison, a doctor has revived executed convicts as the living dead. Teenager, Jonathan creates a laser gun from a videodisc player and pursues the walking dead, aided by his girlfriend and grandfather. Also tracking down the zombies is a tabloid reporter.

Rollercoaster

In pursuit of fantasy, five teenagers hop the fence of a now defunct amusement park. While apparently a mindless diversion, for two of them the park is the setting for a more fatal bid at escape.

Jamesy Boy

Based on the true story of teenager James Burns who goes from a suburban street gang to a maximum-security prison cell surrounded by hardened criminals. He turns his life around in prison thanks to the unexpected friendship he forms with a convicted murderer who becomes his mentor.

The Knife That Killed Me

A journey through the memories of teenager Paul Varderman as he reflects on the events leading to the fatal moment his life is cut short. Paul moves to a new school and becomes involved with 'The Freaks', a group on the periphery of school life, those who don't fit in: scene kids, emo kids, indie kids. Outsiders. At the same time he attracts the attention of the schools twisted and manipulative bully, Roth. When Paul delivers a message from Roth to the leader of a gang at a rival school, it sparks a dangerous feud. Faced with growing pressures from both groups, Paul must decide where his friendship lies, a decision that may cost him his life.

Short Eyes

A young man who is charged with child molestation is placed in New York City’s infamous Tombs prison. When the other inmates in his cell block find out what he is charged with, life becomes extremely difficult for him.

Fun

Hillary and Bonnie meet one morning by the side of the road. They become fast friends, share their secrets, and, on a rising wave of frenzy, later that afternoon, murder an old woman. They did it, they say later, for fun.

Dog Pound

Three juvenile delinquents arrive at a correctional center and are put under the care of an experienced guard.

Gimme the Loot

When their latest work is buffed by a rival crew, two determined graffiti writers embark on an elaborate plan to bomb the ultimate location: the New York Mets' Home Run Apple.

Girls Town

Patti (Lili Taylor) and her posse, Angela (Bruklin Harris), Emma (Anna Grace), and Nikki (Aunjanue Ellis) have only a few weeks left of the senior year before they graduate and go their separate ways. It's a bittersweet time for these unlikely best friends, who together have shared the many challenges of growing up female. Suddenly, an unforeseen tragedy shatters their already fragile world, hurling them into a soul-wrenching struggle over loyalty, love, betrayal, and identity in this funny, raw, exciting slice of real life.

Hurricane Streets

Marcus is a kid on Manhattan's mean streets. He's turning 15, his father is dead, his mother is in prison for smuggling undocumented aliens. His grandmother is raising him. He has four close buddies who have a basement clubhouse; they shoplift and sell the wares to kids. One is moving toward selling drugs. Marcus wants to take a breather from the city and visit family in New Mexico. He also meets Melena, 14, a sweet kid who dreams of going to Alaska; her father is not just protective but angry and uncommunicative. The gang pressures Marcus to move up to burglary and car theft. He just wants to breathe open air. Can anything go right?

Penitentiary

A hitchhiker named Martel Gordone gets in a fight with two bikers over a prostitute, and one of the bikers is killed. Gordone is arrested and sent to prison, where he joins the prison's boxing team in an effort to secure an early parole and to establish his dominance over the prison's toughest gang.

Lil' Pimp

A comedy about a nine-year-old pimp, Lil' Pimp, who hustles his ho's around the neighborhood. Along with his Mom, Pop, pimpin' pals Fruitjuice and Nagchampa, as well as superfine ho's, Yam Basket and Honeysak, and his loveable pet gerbil Weathers, who has Tourette's syndrome, Lil' Pimp generates laughs, magic and brutal honesty.

South Central

During a 10-year sentence for murdering the leader of a rival South Central Los Angeles gang, Bobby Johnson finds religion and rehabilitation with the help of Muslim inmate Ali. Upon his release, Bobby returns home to find that his young son, Jimmie, has joined the Deuces, his old crew. Tensions rise as Bobby struggles to convince Jimmie to leave the gang that was his only family during the painful years his absent father spent behind bars.

Prison Song

Elijah has been bounced from group home to group home throughout his turbulent young life. What has sustained him is his art. After a promised scholarship is taken away, Elijah ends up in a fight that result in the death of another boy. Now, sentenced to a minimum of fifteen years, the young man must find a way to keep his soul alive behind bars or turn into a hardened bitter criminal.

A Lesson Before Dying

In the 1940s South, an African-American man is wrongly accused of the killing a a white store owner. In his defense, his white attorney equates him with a lowly hog, to indicate that he didn't have the sense to know what he was doing. Nevertheless convicted, he is sentenced to die, but his godmother and the aunt of the local schoolteacher convince school teacher go to the convicted man's cell each day to try to reaffirm to him that he is not an animal but a man with dignity.

Life of a King

The true story of one man's mission to give inner city kids of Washington DC something he never had - a future. After being incarcerated for eighteen years, Eugene Brown established the Big Chair Chess Club to get kids off the streets and working towards lives they never believed they were capable of. This is his inspirational story.

Big Town Scandal

A crusading editor and his star reporter aid underprivileged youths and crack down on racketeers out to fix basketball.

96 Minutes

The story of 4 lives slammed together in a shocking moment. Intercutting between a carjacking and the separate stories of the 4 kids, we watch as they hurtle toward a life-changing end.

Manito

Fifteen years ago, their Washington Heights neighborhood was dubbed the crack-cocaine capital of the world, but today it is transforming into one of the most vibrant, Spanish-speaking communities in the United States. While the drug dealers continue to disappear, their violent legacy still casts a shadow over the neighborhood and its residents. Junior, an ex-convict struggling to get his life back on track, is a product of this legacy. His younger brother Manny, the salutatorian of his high school class, embodies the hope of the future. On the night of his graduation party, Manny finds himself faced with an ill-fated decision that could change his life forever

Transformations

Wolfgang is traveling in outer space when a monster, which he sees as a beautiful woman, appears in his spaceship and makes love with him. Then the ship is forced to land on a planet which is a penal colony. Here he meets Miranda who falls in love with him. A group of prisoners uses him and his spaceship to fly away from the planet. But the monster which is by now inside Wolfgang arouses and only Miranda's love can save him.

Bloody Kids

The slender premise springs from the actions of two listless 11-year-old boys, the cold, manipulative Leo, and his weaker, more impressionable friend, Mike. Contemptuous of the fallible police force (Mike has already filched a police hat from an accident scene), the boys arrange a staged knife fight outside a football stadium with the aid of a bag of stage blood and a real blade.

Hard Choices

A teenaged boy goes for a ride with his brother and the brother's friends, who proceed to rob a store and murder the clerk. They are caught and, despite the young boy's protestations, he is convicted of murder and sent to prison. A female social worker assigned to the boy's case not only believes him, but begins to fall in love with him, and determines to either help him prove his innocence or escape.

Gang Girl

A troubled girl involved in a female gang called The Croniks, commits a crime and is sent to a "Scared Straight" program to meet the reformed leader who created it 25 years ago.

Boot Camp

A group of troubled teens are sent to a rehabilitation program housed in a remote camp on the island of Fiji. What their parents believe is a state-of-the-art deluxe institution in a beautiful natural environment turns out to be a prison-like boot camp where they are abused and brainwashed.

Scared Straight! 20 Years Later

Adults meet up with the people who changed their lives twenty years ago by confronting them about their lifestyles as teenagers.

In the Custody of Strangers

A teenage delinquent who goes on a drunken joyride is left in jail overnight by his parents in the hope that he might learn a lesson from it. But events follow which result in the boy spending far longer behind bars than anyone had foreseen.

The Graffiti Artist

Adrift in the lush, nocturnal urban landscape of THE GRAFFITI ARTIST, Nick (Ruben Bansie-Snellman) is a post-modern urban hero asserting his anarchistic agenda on the endless maze of virgin exterior walls that comprise downtown Seattle and Portland. For this iconoclastic young visionary, the vast wall surfaces of deserted alleys and train yards are at once a daunting symbol of capitalist oppression and a texturally rich, seamless tableau ripe for exploitation to amplify his artistic dialectic of anger and rebellion.

Scared Straight! Another Story

A group of young delinquents well on the road to careers in crime, are given a shock course in prison life. Brought face to face with hardened criminals many serving life sentences for rape and murder, they are suddenly confronted with the harsh realities of a top-security U.S. Penitentiary.

Garden of the Dead

Convicts on a chain gang sniff formaldehyde fumes to get high. They attempt a prison break and are shot down by the guards. After being buried, they rise from the dead, killing all in their path with shovels and hoes.

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