TOWARDS THE CLASSIFIED SOCIETY
“Let me return to those original early nineteenth-century transformations. But now, instead of seeing state centralization, segregation, mind control or professionalism as the crucial changes, imagine the enterprise of classification to be the centre of power.
The great projects of discipline, normalization, control, segregation and surveillance described by the historians of this transition were all projects of classification. Foucault's version of this history conveys this element most clearly. His theory is curiously close to functionalism, labelling theory and to Illich's notion of iatrogenic growth: the system is non-rational and non-utilitarian in that it creates and classifies deviance rather than seeks to eliminate it. Foucault, indeed, greatly exaggerates this irony: the prison system has nothing to do with turning offenders into honest citizens; it simply manufactures new criminals, drives offenders deeper into criminality and recruits them to the criminal class. The regrouping of delinquents into a 'clearly demarcated card-indexed milieu' is seen by Foucault as a typical episode in the mechanics of power: the prison falls, so now there takes place 'a strategic utilization of what had been experienced as a drawback'.
There is no need, however, to accept all the implications of this rather crude type of left-functionalism to see how the emerging control system neither prevented nor eliminated crime but translated it into different terms. The unorderly and inefficient world of eighteenth-century crime control gave way to a regulated, ordered universe. The bifurcatory form became theorized and formalized: the criminal to be separated from the poor, the poor to be divided up into deserving and undeserving, the criminal then to be divided into bad and mad. The asylum, the closed institution, performed the initial sorting out. This was the roughest filter. Then, within the asylum, all sorts of elaborate and intricate systems of classification began to evolve. Students of nineteenth-century prisons describe institutions in which up to 29 separate categories of inmate were worked out. The logical end of the process was solitary confinement - each individual in his own category. In the idealized panopticon, each one of these cells could be observed totally by a few unseen people. The exposure to cognitive passion was absolute - the smallest gestures, the merest words could be observed, described, classified and compared. Eventually these elaborate systems inside broke down because of their sheer complexity. But the passion for classification remained, to be redefined and made scientific by the twentieth-century enterprise of scientific testing. The elaborate systems inside the prison are duplicated by the equally elaborate systems outside - the new 'continuum of community corrections' with all its fine gradations and notations.
The obsession with classification is truly baroque, something like the life work of a mid-European lepidopterist. And the whole enterprise is largely spurious, not just because of the difficulty of matching people to methods, but because changes in control policy keep demanding new schemes of classification. Each part of the system starts with its own selection criteria to accommodate the 'right' client around whom the regime or service was designed and for whom a particular professional specialism exists. But if there are not enough 'right' clients, that is who fit the selection criteria for the diversion agency, community correctional centre, half-way house or prison - then the norm changes. Other clients are admitted, the regime is altered accordingly and a new technology of selection has to be devised.
Like methods of punishment or treatment themselves, these classification systems mayor may not 'work'. The category might be too broad or too narrow, the wrong candidate might be selected. Sometimes these mistakes can prove fatal, particularly at the output end where an offender might be classified as 'safe’ so to be released, but turns out to be dangerous. But these "forms of failure are perfectly suited for the crime-control system. Unlike the failure of a correctional measure itself, the 'failure' of a classification system rarely evokes troublesome ideological questions and never threatens professional interests. It simply calls for more and better classification - an agenda which can be followed with total agreement from everyone. Liberals and conservatives, reformers and managers, psychologists and guards, all are committed to seeking further refinements to whichever bifurcation they are concerned with - soft or hard, treatable or untreatable, safe or dangerous. The non-contingent nature of these refinements matters not at all.
Nor do fads and fashions in penal philosophy matter very much. At first sight, the just-deserts movement and the attack on rehabilitation seem to threaten the whole edifice of individual classification. But the various judicial modes within classicism and the disciplinary or treatment modes within positivism are more complementary than they appear. At one point, Foucault gives a pleasing explanation of the 'furious desire' of judges to assess, diagnose, receive reports and listen to experts (even the 'chatter of criminology'): it was as if they were ashamed to pass sentence. But as he shows, the need to classify runs deeper than this; I will try to simplify his tortuous and confusing 'history'.
The form of punishment in the great codification reforms of the eighteenth century simply refers the offence to a corpus of law which contains a single binary classification: the legal opposition between permitted and forbidden, with prescribed categories of reaction.
Though it has to appear general and universal, a precisely adapted code, in fact, is aimed at individualization. Punishment has to be finely calibrated 'with neither excesses nor loopholes, with neither a useless expenditure of power nor with timidity.’ There was little psychological knowledge in the eighteenth century (tests, examinations, etc.) to supply this 'code-individualization link', so this Linnaeus-type taxonomy has to be found elsewhere. Criteria such as the repetition of the crime could be used to make the tactics of power more efficient.
When the new disciplinary society emerges, so does a psychology of classification. The mind, not the body, the actor, not the act become the judicial object. The offender is examined, assessed and normalized - his 'soul' is brought before the court. This is not only to explain his action or to establish extenuating circumstances, nor to humanize the face of justice, but to re·-organize yet again the economy of punishment. The new methods of punishment and treatment (aimed at changing the offender) have to be legalized. The individualized classifications, that is, have to be reproduced in the system as legal forms.
The 'knowable man' now becomes the object of the human sciences. Inside and outside the court (but always sanctioned by the law) they begin testing, measuring, allocating each person to the correct space on which he can be differentiated.
At every stage, classification is deeply lodged in the framework of punishment. It is no less important our current deterrence theory (punish Just enough to prevent repetition) or current just-deserts theory (punish just enough to redress the social balance). And even if they are not very good at matching, even if they are not too sure what works, and even if the court has a somewhat less
than 'furious desire' to listen to them, the professional classifiers are still at work. In every judicial system we know, the number of social enquiry reports or recommendations submitted to the court grows incrementally. The soft/hard bifurcation makes the professional classifier even more important.
As we move away from sentencing into the punitive apparatus itself, the urge to classify remains. In prisons, the magic wand of classification has long been held out as the key to a successful system. If only those who mess up the regime could be weeded out (sent to special prisons, units or isolation centres), the system could go ahead with its business. All that has changed over the last century is the basis of the binary classification. It used to be 'moral character', sometimes it was 'treatability' or 'security risk', now it tends to be 'dangerousness'.
For example, at the end of the seventies, the Federal Bureau of Prisons set up a Task Force to investigate how to establish inmate 'custody level' in terms of dangerousness. They grouped the inmates according to 47 potentially significant factors from an initial list of 92 possibly relevant items, gahered from 329 staff. Institutions are grouped into a Security Designation Form according to 7 features, ending up with 6 security levels. Pertinent information is then teletyped to a central Designation Desk. Step-wise Multiple Regression is used to test validity. Each inmate has a Unit/Classification Team working with a Custody Classification Form.
At the softer, community end, the classification business, as we have seen, lacks the rationality of models such as 'dangerousness', 'security risk' or ‘incapacitation' (which can all be empirically validated). There are just endless pitouettes between psychological characteristics (self-esteem, conduct impairment, hostility to authority); composite categories (risk, amenability, proneness); treatment modalities (reality theory, camping, behaviour contracting); and places (7.8 on the normalization scale?). Even cruder legal categories become shifting and uncertain. One official study commissioned to solve the problem of who were the 'status offenders' to be deinstitutionalized, found that 46 classifications were being used, and that, for the most part, these had no effect on the selection of target groups. This last project is an example of the convergence of academic with managerial and professional interests. There are workers who devise classification systems, others who operate them and meta-workers who classify these operations. Some professionals specialize entirely in the area. In one American enterprise, some 10 federal agencies, 31 task forces and 93 experts got together to study the impact of classification systems for children.
To study the impact of classification systems though, is quite a different matter from joining the quest for the Golden Goose of systems that 'work'. For despite their apparently self-sealing logic, classification systems do indeed have an impact on the external world. Professional expansion is directed towards creating new categories of deviance and social problems, that is defining more people as belonging to special populations and then slotting them into one or other category. This is what labelling theory - correctly - means by the socially constructed nature of deviance. Professionals play a crucial role in making claims about the boundaries of the category and then ruling on who belongs to it.
The logic of professionalism requires either that these boundaries be expanded to bring in new populations or that they be changed to relocate old populations. Types of deviance such as homosexuality, hyperactivity or drug abuse, the very nature of mental illness itself, categories such as dangerous, treatable or high-risk, have all been subject to this type of boundary adjustment. This is what happens in what sociologists variously call the 'politics of deviance', 'stigma contests', 'reality negotiations' and the 'power to criminalize'. But the real significance of classification lies in the form, not the content, the enterprise itself and not its end-results. The power to classify is the purest of all deposits of professionalism.
This is what Orwell meant when he said that the object of power is power. And this is what Foucault meant when reminding us that power is not just a force which excludes and says 'No', but a form of creation: 'we should not be content to say that power has a need for such and such a discovery, such and such a form of knowledge, but we should add that the exercise of power itself creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information.’“
- Stanley Cohen, Visions of Social Control. Crime, Punishment and Classification. Polity, 1985. p. 191-196.
