“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