They finally gave 'Shouting' a TV series

Flipping through the channels the other day, I came to rest on a commercial for a series on A&E entitled, Beyond Scared Straight.  The commercial showed several different shots of little a-hole kids getting yelled at by hardened criminals and the guards sworn to protect us from them, though it appears just this once they're letting that slide a bit.  There were kids crying, angry black dudes, hair pulling, tattoos and threats of serious physical and emotional injury.  This sounded like perhaps the best show ever made.  I quickly changed the station to A&E, and to my great fortune, there was a whole marathon going on!  Homework and responsible adulthood were going to have to take a rain check (as if they haven't already been doing that my entire "adult" life) because today, there were more pressing matters at hand.

         This woman has a tattoo beard.  Fighting and Yelling are the only things on her to-do list today




 The show did not disappoint, which is a tough feat considering how astronomically high that commercial had set my expectations.  Each episode begins with profiles of the little brats who are about to meet their match in the form of 300 pound murderers named T-Bone and Carl.  The kids think they're pretty fearless, and the intros seem to follow the same lines as those on Maury Povich, except we still don't know who the fathers are here.  The little devils are then taken to a local maximum security prison, where they get to spend the day on a little field trip of sorts.  But there's no bagged lunches and boring tour guides here, as those things have been replaced by lifers shouting threats of rape at young children.  Most of the kids start out alright, but the further they go into the prison, the slimmer their chances of ever having an emotionally stable youth become.  The inmates guide them through all different parts of the prison, from the cells to the showers to the shakedown room, where possibly the best line in television history is uttered ("Do you want another man lookin' in yo butt hole?!?").  They even display how easy it is to get killed, or at least have your ass removed and handed back to you, when they pull kids into certain "blind spots" where guards can't see you being beaten to death with a rusty pipe.  They don't actually beat the kids up, which is a shame since most of them totally deserve it, but regardless of the lack of beatings, the kids are still pretty ready to go home by lunch time.
      After a lunch of slop and dead rats, the kids are taken to have a heart to heart with the inmates who have more than likely removed a few hearts of their own in the past.  The inmates tell the kids how much ass it sucks being in here, and how much ass they kicked while in the outside world.  Some kill, some rape, some download music illegally, all of them are as cold as ice, and willing to sacrifice....any of these kids if they ever end up in jail.  They tell the kids not to sell drugs and beat women like they did, and how group showers are about the least fun you'll ever have whilst soaking wet and slippery. Then bro hugs are had, prison tats exchanged, and the kids leave the slammer changed forever, probably in a bad way.  The show is wildly entertaining for anyone who's a fan of justice, freedom, and seeing those things taken away from people who don't deserve them.  But the real moral of this story is this:  Listen to everything your TV tells you.  It is always right.  How can it possibly make a wrong choice?  It has no sense of judgement, it only knows how to magically find out what you want and then give it to you.  What better friend could any of us ask for?