‘Scary’ Larry Foy opens up about his criminal past on The New Stanford Prison Experiment

“Scary” Larry Foy is one of the participants in Netflix’s The New Stanford Prison Experiment who’s spent time behind bars. He’s since reformed his life, but the experiment still doesn’t go as planned for him…

Larry is a 42 year old glass blower from St. Louis, Missouri. “But pretty much everybody calls me ‘Scary Larry,'” he reveals to Netflix. 

“My mom spent lots of time calling out of work, having to come pick me up for being in trouble in school,” he says about his childhood.

“If you add up all the days I’ve ever done behind bars since I was born, it’d probably be like 350 days,” he reveals. “Just a guesstimate.”

“I was doing a lot of dumb things when I was younger,” Larry explains. “Skipping school, smoking weed with my friends, experimenting with other things.”

He says that he became an adult when he had his first child, which is what motivated him to change his ways. 

“And now that I’m older, I live my life off of the more good you do for other people, the more good’ll come back to you in your life,” Larry says. 

Despite Larry already having spent some time in jail, he says the safe word “pineapple” in the first episode and drops out of the experiment. “Get me the f**k out of here.”

 “The word ‘pineapple’ is intended to be used when participants feel under threat of psychological or physical harm or distress,” Dr. Alison Wood Brooks, the show’s behavioural psychologist from Harvard explains.

“Nobody that has changed their life to not come back to this place, um… They shouldn’t be put back in here,” Larry says. According to the show’s executive producer, Jane Lipsitz, “Larry had done a lot of recovery work and works as an advocate now for reform.”

“He had changed his life pattern,” Jane said. “It was very important to us to not put people into the population who posed a threat.”

Larry eventually decides that going home is the best decision for him. “I already did that, and I’m not trying to do it no more.”