How to Turn Around Troubled Teens – In a 2010 review of 69 controlled studies, criminologists revealed that such programs produced little or no overall improvement in offender recidivism. The negative data on get-tough programs remind us that we should be wary of our subjective impressions of strategies that simply seem right or that we feel ought to work. Although we lost track of Mike S., we now know that a concerted effort to teach him more adaptive behaviors would have been more likely to put him on a productive path than would any attempt to scare him straight.