I found the program on the web (I don’t have cable)prompted by a news squib about a participant in a “Beyond Scared Straight” episode who swung at a guard. I watched the episode on line and then snippets of the Mecklenburg episode. The Mecklinburg segment had some pretty grim scenes. Besides the threat of rape and physical assault the guards were implying to the kids that they might be staying over. I also saw what I thought was a scene in which the kids were being forced to relieve themselves squatting over a hole while being filmed.

The fact alone that this very frightening and humiliating experience is graphically broadcast on national television is disturbing.

I also saw, what appeared to be actual physical abuse in the form of forced exercise, evident in the Oklahoma episode. It was difficult to tell how intense the exercise was because they only ran edited segments. But some kids were apparently in a great deal of pain during those exercises.

I had thought that this kind of public spectacle of child abuse presented as entertainment had stopped with the ending of the Sally Jesse Raphael show and Maury Povitch’s segue into “Whose your daddy.”

Apparently not.