#community prison

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“Under the ideology of 'reintegration', the offender has to be taught some lessons in reality: he has to cope and find a legitimate role in the community. And this is supposed to be done using 'modalities' which look suspiciously like the old one-to-one treatment relationships which have dominated the [penal] system since its inception. It is still the offender who has to change, not the community. Community control emerges as another round in the game of blaming the victim. Ryan's original expose of the ideology which justifies inequality and injustice by finding defects in the victims of inequality and injustice, still applies. The new control agencies are less interested than the old in rooting out original causes - faulty psychic plumbing or subcultural status frustration - but in other ways they are the same. 

The community is deemed to be vaguely responsible but intervention skills are directed at the individual, resulting in what Ryan calls the 'terrifying sameness in the programmes that come from this sort of analysis'. There is, though, one ironic difference. Certain older victim-blaming strategies actually allowed for genuine forms of social intervention in the form of compensatory education, neighbourhood-renewal projects, attacks on racial discrimination, improving health. care and creating job opportunities. Whatever their problems or results, these programmes had the central virtue of connecting with the real master institutions of society. The new community professionals think of prevention in a quite different way. The stress is either on disembodied 'situations', 'behaviour sequences' or 'environments', or else remains individualistic. There is now less room for genuine reform and social intervention - who needs this if the offender is, after all, more or less ambulatory and back in the community? Away from the prying eyes and narrow minds of the old custodians, the offender's values, behaviour, cognitive skills or cultural defects can now really be corrected. Of all the modes of community control, only 'community service' (restitution, reconciliation, reparation, compensation) evokes most directly the vision of community. These schemes have been heavily criticized as forms of net-widening, cheap labour, new sanctions in the sentencing tariff, and as a version of the same ideology of work and discipline developed in the prison, but they do come close to the original vision of involvement and integration. This is particularly so when punishment takes the form of direct victim compensation - vandals repairing the windows they have broken.

There is another quite different· sense, however, in which the move from individual to 'community' is happening. All the forms of community control I have discussed here are punitive or treatment efforts directed at individual (usually 'soft-end ') deviants after they have offended. For many more visionary ideologues and observers, however, the day is ending for all forms of individual intervention. The real master shift about to take place is towards the control of whole groups, populations and environments - not community control, but the control of communities. In this movement technology and resources, particularly at the hard end, are to be directed to surveillance, prevention and control, not 'tracking' the individual adjudicated offender, but preventive surveillance (through closed-circuit television, for example) of people and spaces.” - Stanley Cohen, Visions of Social Control. Crime, Punishment and Classification. Polity, 1985. p. 126-127.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“The segregated and insulated nineteenth-century institutions made the actual business of deviancy control invisible, but its boundaries visible. That is to say, what went on inside these places was supposed to be unknown. Institutions like prisons gradually became wrapped with an impenetrable veil of secrecy. Segregation came to mean insulation and invisibility. This was the transition which Foucault charted - from the visible, public spectacle (torture, execution, humiliation) to the more discreet form of penitentiary discipline. The public trial remained the only visible part of the system. But a condition for internal invisibility was to have the boundaries of the punitive system more visible and .obvious. We should not See or know what went on behind the walls of the prison, but we should definitely know that these were walls. Whether prisons were built in the middle of cities, out in the remote countryside or on deserted islands, they had clear spatial boundaries to mark off the normal from the deviant. These spatial boundaries were reinforced by ceremonies of social exclusion: prisoners were sent away or sent own, their bodies were symbolically received at the prison gate, then - stripped, washed and numbered - they entered another world. Those on the outside would wonder what went on behind the walls, those inside could try to imagine the 'outside world'. Inside/outside, guilty/innocent, freedom/captivity, imprisoned/released - these were all distinctions that made sense. In the new world of community corrections, these boundaries are no longer nearly as simple. The way into an institution is not clear (it is just as likely to be via a post-adjudication diagnostic centre as a police car) the way out is even less clear (graduated release or partial release is just as likely as full freedom) nor is it clear what or where is the institution. There is, we are told, a 'correctional continuum' or a 'correctional spectrum': criminals and delinquents might be found anywhere in these spaces. And so fine, and at the same .time so indistinct, are the gradations along the Continuum, that It IS by no means easy to know where the prison ends and the community begins or just why any deviant is to be found at any particular point. Even the most dedicated spokesmen for community treatment have Some difficulty in specifying just what 'the community' is; one early report confessed that the term community treatment has lost all descriptive usefulness  except as a code word with connotations of "advanced correctional thinking" and implied value judgements against the "locking up" and isolation of offenders. Even the most cursory examination of the new programmes reveals that many varieties of the more or less intensive and structured 'alternatives' are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. A great deal of energy and ingenuity is being devoted to this problem of definition: just how isolated and confining does an institution have to be before it is a prison rather than: say a 'residential community facility'? Luckily for us all, criminologists have got this matter well in hand and are spending a great deal of time and money on such questions. They have devised quantitative measures of internal control, degree of community linkage, normalization (harmony with neighbourhood, type of building, name of programme) and the like. There are now any number of standardized scales for assigning programmes along the 'institutionalization-normalization continuum' or awarding them PASS (Program Analysis of Service Systems) or MEAP (Multiphasic Environmental Assessment Procedure) scores. But these are not just untidy loose ends which scientific research will one day tie up. Community control is a project explicitly devoted to changing traditional ideas about punishment. The ideology of the new movement quite deliberately demands that boundaries should not be made too clear: the metaphor of 'crumbling walls' implies an undifferentiated open space. The main British prison reform group, the Howard League, once called for steps to 'restore the prison to the community and the community to the prison'. Less rhetorically, here was an early enthusiast for a model 'community correction centre': 'the line between being "locked up" and "free" is purposely indistinct because it must be drawn differently for each individual. Once the client is out of Phase I, where all clients enter and where they are all under essentially custodial control, he may be "free" for some activities but still "locked up" for others.' There is no irony intended in using inverted commas for such words as 'free' and 'locked up' or in using such euphemisms as 'essentially custodial control'. This sort of blurring - deliberate or unintentional - may be found throughout the complicated networks of 'diversion' and 'alternatives' which are now being set up. The half-way house might serve as a good example. These agencies - called variously, 'residential treatment centres', 'restitution shelters', 'rehabilitation residences', 'guidance centres', 'reintegration centres', 'community training residence programmes' or (with the less flowery language preferred in Britain) simply 'hostels' - invariably become special institutional domains themselves. They might be located in a whole range of odd settings - private houses, converted motels, the grounds of hospitals, YMCAs, beach clubs, the dormitories of university campuses or even within the walls of prisons themselves. Their programmes turn out to reproduce regimes and sets of rules very close to the institutions themselves: about security, curfew, passes, drugs, alcohol, permitted visitors, required behaviour and surveillance. Indeed it becomes difficult to distinguish a very 'open' prison, with liberal provisions for work release, home release and outside educational programmes, from a very 'closed' half-way house.” 

- Stanley Cohen, Visions of Social Control. Crime, Punishment and Classification. Polity, 1985. pp. 57-59.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“The prison, we are told, looks like a suburb or college campus, paths lead to separate 'neighbourhoods' and prisoners have the key to their own rooms. Many hostels 'in the community' are more restrictive and artificial than this sounds. To confuse matters further: half-way houses may be half-way in for those too serious to be left at home, but not serious enough for the institution - and hence are a form of"diversion' - or half way out for those who can be released from the institution but are not yet 'ready' for the open community - and hence are a form of 'after care'. To make life more difficult the same centre is sometimes used for both these purposes, with different rules for the half-way in inmates and the half-way out inmates. Even this degree of blurring and confusion is not enough: one advocate draws attention to the advantages of quarter-way houses and three-quarter-way houses.  These 'concepts', we are told, are already being used in the mental-health field, but are not labelled as such in corrections. The quarter-way house deals with people who need supervision on a near permanent basis, while the three-quarter-way house is designed to care for persons in an 'acute temporary crisis needing short-term residential care and little supervision'. Then, taking the opposite tack from devising finer and finer classification schemes, other innovators argue for a 'multi-purpose' centre. Some half-way houses already serve as a parolee residence, a drop-in centre, a drug-treatment programme and a non-residential walk-in centre for after care. And in the absence of a handy multi-purpose centre in the neighbourhood, a package deal is worked out around the offender himself, shuttling him from probation, a day training centre, a hostel, a service for alcoholics and ajob creation programme.  Behind all this administrative surrealism, this manic activity, some more significant forms of blurring are happening. For many of these 'multi-purpose' centres, bureaux, services and agencies are directed not just at convicted offenders, but are preventive, diagnostic or screening enterprises aimed at potential, pre-delinquent or 'at risk' populat:ons. The ideology of community treatment and the preventive thrust of the diversion strategy allows for an altogether facile evasion of the delinquent/non-delinquent distinction.  A good example of this evasion is the British system of Intermediate Treatment (IT). This is not just an intermediate possibility between sending a child away from home and leaving him in his normal home environment, but also a new way 'to make use of facilities available to chillhen who have not been before the courts and so to secure the treatment of "children in trouble" in the company of other children through the sharing of activities and experiences within the community. Note the wording of these accounts of IT projects: 'a provision for young people at risk of institutionalization, unemployment, homelessness, family breakup and lack of work skills'; 'community based provision for adolescents and children who are deprived or who are more at risk of getting into trouble than their contemporaries'; 'a continuum of care ... with intensity increasing according to the degree of deviancy or perceived needs'. 

There is a deliberate attempt here to evade the question of whether a rule has actually been broken. 'Illegal behaviour' (degree of deviancy?), we are assured, 'merges almost imperceptibly with behaviour which does not contravene the law' (perceived needs?). The 'deprived' are not very different from the 'depraved'. The point is to devise a service flexible enough to deal with both - a service which is simultaneously a response to delinquency and to other 'crises' (family breakdown, deviant leisure styles, school problems, unemployment) in the 'normal life cycle'. This type of definitional 'flexibility' is ensured by the tendency of the new agencies to operate in a closed circuit free from legal scrutiny. While the traditional screening mechanisms of the criminal justice system have always been influenced to a greater or lesser degree by non-offence related criteria (race, class, demeanour) the offence was at least considered. Except in the case of wrongful conviction, some law must have been broken. This is no longer clear: a delinquent may find himself in custody ('short-term intensive treatment') either because of welfare/treatment criteria (at risk, deprived) or by programme failure (violating the norms of some other agency in the continuum, for example by non-attendance at a therapy group or 'acting out'). By 1981, through a classic form of net widening, at least 45 per cent of participants on all IT programmes were not subject to any court order at all. The definitional blurring which occurs in regard to individual judgements (referral, diagnosis, screening, eligibility) is reproduced at the organizational and personnel level. Agency names like 'Youth Service Bureau' or 'Intermediate Treatment Centre' and staff titles such as 'counsellor' or 'supervisor' are interchangeable and they might just as easily be managed by the educational, welfare or health sectors as by criminal justice authorities. All this again is intentional: 'as institutional walls disintegrate, figuratively speaking, the boundaries between the various human service areas will disappear as well - and correctional problems will come to be the problem of a range of professionals serving communities.' Crime and delinquency nets thus not only become blurred in themselves but get tangled up with other welfare, treatment and control nets. In Britain, social workers are the most powerful human service professionals operating in these waters, while in the USA the mental-health net is more important.”

- Stanley Cohen, Visions of Social Control. Crime, Punishment and Classification. Polity, 1985. p.  59-61