KID ADDICTS: ANOTHER SHOT OF REALITY TV

BLACK TAR HEROIN 11 p.m. Wednesday
HBO SCARED STRAIGHT! 20 YEARS LATER 8 p.m. Thursday Ch. 44

DARE to care. Dare to scare. That's the mission of two gut-grabbing
documentaries about kids, drugs and crime, premiering this week.

"Black Tar Heroin" is a grim and inevitably slightly titillating tale for
adults about young junkies scrounging to shoot up in San Francisco. It was
produced by Steven Okazaki, who snagged an Oscar for his 1990 short
documentary "Days of Waiting" about U.S. internment camps for
Japanese-Americans during World War II.

"Scared Straight! 20 Years Later" is a surprisingly hopeful tale about the
horrors of prison life and how those very horrors have saved young people
gone bad.

"Scared Straight! 20 Years Later" is produced by Arnold Shapiro and narrated
by Danny Glover. Shapiro's 1978 documentary "Scared Straight!" showcased New
Jersey's groundbreaking, ongoing Rahway State Prison program in which tough
long-term convicts and youthful offenders are brought face to face. The cons
try to terrify the kids into turning their lives around, getting
spitting-close to them, screaming graphic stories about doing hard time --
from prison murder to forced sex.

Revisiting the original

"Scared Straight!" won Shapiro an Oscar for best feature documentary -- plus
two Emmy Awards. On Thursday, the complete "Scared Straight!" airs as part
of "Scared Straight! 20 Years Later." The rest of the documentary
chronicles, in candid interviews, what happened to the youths who braved
Rahway's prison gates 20 years ago, and the cons who verbally tormented
them.

Some of the half-dozen or so cons went straight after release; some didn't.
Fourteen of the 17 kids in "Scared Straight!" were shocked into going good.

"Believe me; don't underestimate scaring somebody," Shapiro says. "However
traumatic (the Rahway program) looks on film, you ought to try being there.
I've interviewed youth counselors, judges, police and probation officers who
regularly take kids to the prison, and they said to me, if we didn't see
results, why would we do this?"

In a rare move for broadcast TV, the "Scared Straight!" portion includes
much uncensored explicit language by convicts, as it did when it first
aired. "The vast majority of viewers understand that the real offense is not
language, but juveniles breaking the law and hurting innocent people and
destroying their own lives. If I were a parent, I would know that my child
from age 10 has probably heard all these words anyway -- and I would plan to
watch with them."

Focus on parents

Okazaki is less upbeat about saving kids. "In our film, it's sort of an
unrelenting downward spiral, kids coming up HIV-positive, going to jail,"
Okazaki said. "I feel like it's 90 percent really about parents. And I
personally think drugs should be decriminalized."

Shot in 1995-98, "Black Tar Heroin" details the lives of five young San
Francisco addicts hooked on the cheap, potent Mexican drug. You see the
heroin plague in detail in Okazaki's documentary, sharp and close as a
needle in a bloody vein.

You see a lot of trust, too. Okazaki's subjects -- Tracey, Jake, Jessica,
Alice and Oreo -- are astoundingly open about their lifestyle that includes
fixes, kicking, relapsing, dealing, becoming HIV-positive, turning tricks,
going to hospital and jail.

"Initially, they all thought it was pretty cool, like they were movie
stars," Okazaki said.

"In the beginning, some cared about music and video games. In the end, it
was just heroin."

Okazaki doesn't think you could scare these addicts straight. "Kids take
dope because they want to obliterate everything else. And there's a lot of
mystique to heroin. It was rare to talk to a kid where there wasn't a
reference to a rock 'n' roll band."

Meanwhile, Shapiro's scare tactics are apparently gaining ground. MTV
recently asked him for yet another "Scared Straight!" sequel. It will air in
late July.