Well, that's the trick. LEOs like Drac and some of our other guys on MT, who see this stuff firsthand know, just by their own reactions, just how much impact the brutal reality of living in a max security facility would have on kids who currently don't have a clue about it... but that kind of exposure is, I would bet, all too rare for kids in toney middle-class communities. It probably takes a certain amount of guts for a school administrator to build something like a visit to the nearest state pen into the schedule of field trips for kids with household incomes in six figures or more.
The importance of reaching these kids is paramount. In Victoria, my home for many years before moving to Ohio, there have been a number of horrible incidents in which groups of kids from well-off, upwardly mobile families participated in the killing or maiming of other children who were regarded as expendable because they were socially marginal---and local law enforcement there has warned increasingly of an alarming increase in incidence of this sort of crime.
This, contrary to some of what certain previous posts have suggested,is a pattern that cannot be plausbily attributed to socioeconomic disparities (if not outright rich, these kids' familier are extremely comfortable), nor can it be associated with war (we're talking about Canada for heaven's sake---we glorify peacekeepers, not warmongers!). What we are seeing, according to Canadian law enforcement agencies, is a frightening increase in what I think of as `reacreational' violence---kind of like the vandalism that bored some kids have always indulged in, only now the thing is to throw the brick not into a storefront window but into some unsuspecting victim's face. Violence in some quarters is considered a kind of diversion---Lisa's story isn't the first I've heard about the increase in this sort of thing in Toronto. There's no apparent motive for it, and the kids who are apprehended for it virtually never express any remorse, or awareness that there are ethical and moral issues involved in their actions.
Doctors I know like to say that, if you don't know just what the matter is, you treat the symptoms and hope you can figure it out down the road. One way of treating the symptoms here is just the kind of `shock' exposure that Drac alluded to in connection with that program for kids, and which Jeff's post indicated had a substantial effect on him and his schoolmates. There are a lot of guys in prison that you're not going to be able to rehabilitate, but their lives can still be put to some good by showing impressionable young minds what it's like to get caught up in the penal system. Ideally we'd like them to do the right thing because it is the right thing, but if they wind up doing the right thing because they know what can happen to them if they do the wrong thing... I'd settle for that.
Nice phrase. 
