#stanley cohen

[fitsofgloom]

A Rebel, A Wild One, A Biker To The Bone

I'll Never Grow Old, I'll Never Be Alone

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“One adjustment centre in which disruptive inmates were segregated ended up by spawning its own segregation unit to deal with those beyond its reach. The 'complicated Chinese box effect' which results 'with inmates in the innermost box ideally required to traverse each enclosing one on the way to relative freedom' is very much the way most prison systems are developing. As Messinger notes, the 'logic' of the segregation strategy is simple enough: 'identify potential troublemakers as early as possible, try to bring them to heel, if you fail, segregate them.' Whether this works or not in minimising disruption, what is clear is that 'the strategy of segregation leads to more segregation'. Given the organizational imperative of control, officials point out quite plausibly that other strategies are ineffective: force can only sometimes be used (in riots or disturbances) and anyway cannot make inmates want to do things: motivation through punishments and rewards are limited and one cannot freely select into or reject from the institution. With restrictions on the legitimate use of force, the control issue - which dominates the daily routine of prison officials at all levels - resolves itself into motivating prisoners to do things the management wants or else neutralizing the recalcitrants. ... Out of a combination of internal system demands and external pressures, then, the Chinese box effect will slowly develop. The prisoner in the innermost box- the segregation wing, the isolation block - can look forward not to release, but, if he satisfies the staff that he is "prepared to co-operate", transfer to the next box.” - Stanley Cohen, “Prisons and the future of control systems: from concentration to dispersal,” in Fitzgerald, M. et aL (eds), Prisoners in Revolt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. p. 222.

[constellations-soc]

The logic of this master pattern - dispersal, penetration, spreading out - as opposed to its particular current forms, is not at all new. Its antecedents can be traced though, not to the model which its apologists cite - the idyllic pre-industrial rural community - but to a somewhat later version of social control, a version which  in theory'  was an alternative to the prison. When, from the end of the eighteenth century, punishment started entering deeper into the social body, the alternative vision to the previous great concentrated spectacles of public torture, was of the dispersal of control through "hundreds of tiny theatres of punishment" [48]. The eighteenth century reformers dreamed of dispersal and diversity but this vision of the punitive city was never to be fully realized. Instead punishment became concentrated in the coercive institution, a single uniform penalty to be varied only in length. The earlier "projects of docility" which Foucault describes - the techniques of order, discipline and regulation developed in schools, monasteries, workshops, the army- could only serve as models. Panopticism (surveillance, discipline) began to spread: as disciplinary establishments increased, "... their mechanisms have a certain tendency to become 'de-institutionalized', to emerge from the closed fortresses in which they once functioned and to circulate in a 'free' state; the massive compact disciplines are broken down into  flexible  methods  of control,  which  may  be  transferred  and adapted" [49].

 Cohen S (1979) The punitive city: Notes on the dispersal of social control. Contemporary Crises 3(4): 359

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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.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“The 'renaissance' of the concept of dangerousness in contemporary penology depends on the decline of the rehabilitative ideal, together with the acceptance of a policy of hard-soft bifurcation. While old treatment modalities based on mentalistic concepts are discredited, new behavioural experts are given more power to perform the crucial role of separating out the dangerous from the rest and then devising suitable technologies to contain their behaviour ('predictive restraint') or change it through 'last ditch' treatment modalities (drugs, electronic control, psychosurgery).  All forms of clinical prediction, notoriously inefficient because of the 'false-positive' problem, are being abandoned in favour of actuarial prediction based on observable criteria - a clear move in the behaviourist direction. Leaving aside all possibilities for the behaviourist-inspired treatment and surveillance of these individual offenders, the trend towards 'applied behaviour analysis' or 'behavioural criminal justice' has signalled a new way to evaluate correctional policy in general. Behaviour is the problem, not words, motives, attitudes or personality: 'the focus of the approach is not on what people report they do, but on how they actually behave and the conditions under which that occurs.' The target for attack is 'behaviours' in daily living - the offence itself but also social, vocational and learning skills. The weapon is an applied technology, with procedures consistently replicable by other similarly trained personnel. For some time, now, the few criminologists who have looked into the future have argued that 'the game is up' for all policies directed to the criminal as an individual, either in terms of detection (blaming and punishing) or causation (finding motivational or causal chains). The technological paraphernalia previously directed at the individual, will now be invested in cybernetics,  management, systems analysis, surveillance, information gathering and opportunity reduction. This might turn out to be the most radical form of behaviourism imaginable - prevention of the act of crime by the direct control of whole populations, categories and spaces. This approach, however, is not at all a move to the 'social' and is quite antagonistic to traditional liberal social reform. As one leading ideologue makes clear, the point is direct control over behaviour, to be set in motion before any offence. This rules out 'indirect devices' such as 'anti-poverty programmes, ego development and education'. 'Environment' means the physical and not the social environment. 

What I term 'new behaviourism' is just as opposed to social reforms as it is to mentalistic psychologies. The talk now is about the 'spatial' and 'temporal' aspects of crime, about systems, behaviour sequences, ecology, defensible space, environmental psychology, situations, opportunity structures, feedbacks, target hardening, spatial distribution of offenders. Crime is something which can be 'designed out' by changing the planning and management of the physical environment, and massive financial and intellectual investment has been devoted to this effort. Grandiose claims are even made for the emergence of a new 'paradigm' for crime prevention in which architects and planners, or else geographers, mathematicians and economists, have become the new experts. Unbelievable as it may sound (though only marginally less believable than what happened in the heyday of the psychodynamic enterprise), governments and universities are actually paying money to researchers to fit robbery trip-frequencies into Pareto exponential curves, to find that the average distance between criminal origin and eventual destination is 1.93 miles and to measure the time and space differences between robbery and armed robbery trips. From token economies in prisons to electrodes implanted in the skull, from aversion therapy with electric shocks to simulating offender spatial patterns, from behaviour contracting between client and counsellor to redesigning parking lots - these are some of the many manifestations of the new behaviourism. Only the observable act matters; older mentalistic concepts such as mind, thought, intention, motivation, guilt and insight are edged right out of the discourse.”   - Stanley Cohen, Visions of Social Control. Crime, Punishment and Classification. Polity, 1985. p. 148-149.

[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.

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THE DYSTOPIAN ASSUMPTION

“The beginning and the end of the nineteenth century marked two of the more utopian moments In crime-control history..At the beginning were those Great Transformations with which this book started. The founders of the penitentiary system in America and Europe were confident that they could devise a solution to the crime problem, a solution that. would .result In a better society. Rothman describes well this Spirit of Optimism, the explicit utopIan thinking which informed the design of the asylums. And at the end of the century came the positivist 'revolution' in criminology. Whether it was genuinely innovatory or merely an elaborate justification of existing policy, the new science of criminology took its message from the more general faith In Scientific progress. Science and technology (and not just a belief in doing good) could solve social problems and create a new social order. . . While these agendas are set by political and .economic contingencies, the very idea that a Social problem IS solvable needs an appropriate belief system. Some beliefs are favourable and others unfavourable to planned intervention. Those nineteenth-century moments of crime control contained favourable beliefs about two constants in the human predicament: human nature and the social order. The crime problem had always presented many awkward cognitive impediments to intervention: original sin, Calvinist ideas of predisposition, social Darwinism and the fatalism even within early biological versions of criminological positivism ('crime as destiny'). But once these beliefs could be neutralized, by-passed or forgotten, the way was open. If only the right combination of benevolence and technology could be found, even the worst of people could be changed and a better social order created. We have already encountered some of the many twentieth-century assaults on these beliefs: pessimism about changing human nature, skepticism about organized benevolence, disenchantment with progress, distrust of technology, a willingness to settle for limited horizons. This was and is the new 'realism' of crime control. I want now to retrace these beliefs and counter-beliefs, and locate them in the wider context of utopian and dystopian visions. This. is not in order to indulge in cheap futurology but rather to show how social-control ideology is deeply embedded in these more general predictions, fantasies, visions and expectations. By the time that criminological positivism was establishing itself, the social sciences as a whole had taken it for granted that an analysis of the past and the present could be directed towards visualizing the future. As Kumar notes in his excellent guide to the sociology of industrial society: 'when sociology arrived in Europe early in the nineteenth century, it marked a strand of thinking about man and society that was increasingly directed towards the future.' This strand became dominant as sociologists came to dwell on the Great Transformation which was to become their subject matter - the new social order of industrialism. Not all this thinking, of course, was optimistic. We know Weber's forebodings about rationalization and bureaucracy, Marx's apocalyptic vision of what had to happen before the new social order could emerge. But an influential stream of these thinkers, represented by Comte, St Simon and the other 'prophets of progress', presented a much less complicated vision of the coming into being of the new social order. Social change was progressive; science and technology would usher in a new era; disease, misery and crime were capable of being vanquished. With the obvious (though complicated) exception of Marx, few of these nineteenth-century social thinkers expressed themselves in the classic utopian form. Unlike in Plato's Republic or the original utopia of Thomas More, they were not constructing ideal societies. Theirs were not visions of what should be, but what is likely to be. And here, while never being quite as complacent as the literary and technological utopianists of their era, they were deeply influenced by the more general cultural optimism about science and technology. 

After the First World War, however, even this cautious optimism was to disappear. A bleaker, even apocalyptic world view became dominant. Ominous, irrational forces were at work which made human nature and social order far less amenable to change than had been thought. This was the 'sense of ending'. Moral and material progress were not the same; scientific advances would not necessarily bring happiness. All this is now seen as characteristic of the twentieth-century world view: cynicism, disillusionment, pessimism. This is the 'cheap wasteland philosophy' about which Saul Bellow's heroes muse so often. In the social sciences, all those grand visions of progress and evolution were buried. Preoccupations became grandly abstract or minutely empirical. Within the limited fields that became known variously as social disorganization, social pathology, social problems and criminology, a degree of optimism remained. But it was only the degree needed to give credibility to the business of intervention. The evils of the big city, the disintegration of primary social control, the loss of community, the impersonality of technology - all such problems must get worse. Intervention could work, indeed it was desperately needed, but this was a rescue operation. The point was to save, treat or prevent the casualties of the machine. The social-problems industry remained the most optimistic part of the social sciences, but it was the optimism of the crusader, the muckraker, the lifesaver, and not the prophet of a new social order. In the 1950s there was some sort of recovery. Industrialism seemed more resilient, and the new theorists of 'the 'managerial revolution', 'convergence' and the 'end of ideology' began to imply that the structural problems of industrialism were working themselves out. A new note of complacency appeared which was not destined to last very long. By the 1960s the dark side of industrialism was rediscovered. It was not just the 'return' of ideology in the demands of Blacks and other ethnic minorities, gays and other groups labelled deviant, and the women's movement for a different place in the system, but a radical disenchantment with industrial progress itself. For many such groups, for the counterculture. and the new left, and then for the ecology movement, dystopIa was already on the way. Most of all, the danger came from the strong state; the quest for 'community' was an antistatist form of utopian thinking. The machine itself had to be destroyed before it destroyed us. This was the basis of the destructuring rhetoric. The old apparatus, with its bureaucracies, institutions, professionals (words which now acquired wholly negative meanings), had to be dismantled or by-passed. In the face of this apparent disintegration of the consensus, theorists started constructing a new vision and a new ideology.  'Post-industrial society' was now on its way. This was claimed to  be a transformation which would eventually produce societies as different from· the classic industrial society of Marx, Weber and Durkheim as theirs was in turn from early agrarian, pre-capitalist formations. But as Kumar points out, neither the radical harbingers of Future Shock, the Third Wave, the Greening of America nor their more sober academic successors have shown just where this qualitative leap is taking place. For, despite the pretensions of post-industrial theorists, the future which the real social world of 1984 indicates looks more like an extension of the processes begun in the early nineteenth century. Nothing very new needs to be added to that package of concepts - formalization, rationalization, centralization, bureaucratization, professionalization - through which we understood the coming of industrial society. Not a new social order, but more of the same. This, of course, was the burden of my account of the fate of those radical destructuring movements. For what is true of the social sciences and society in general, is no less true for criminology and crime, (and its control). The general literatures on futurology and post-industrlal society however, are remarkably silent about crime and its control, while students of crime rarely articulate more than a vague sense that things are getting worse. Only one criminologist, Sykes, has formulated this sense more exactly. conventional crime, he plausibly argues, is likely to continue increasing. Virtually every single causation factor - economy, ecology, family, education, values, immigration, population, community - points to increasing rates of crime and delinquency. His scenario is familiar enough: middle-class flight to the suburbs; decaying inner-city slums; unskilled and Isolated minority groups; chronic unemployment; zero economic growth; disintegration of social ties; alienation and despair; abandonment of welfare ideologies; and so, more homicide, assault, robbery, larceny, rape. At the same time, all sorts of other changes - in technology, property relationships, corporate organization, political legitimacy - are likely to increase the amount of 'unconventional crime': white-collar crime, political crime, official lawlessness and political corruption.

So much for crime. As for its control, beyond the assumption that current policy has arrived at a turning point and that some sort of crisis is ahead, Sykes presents a choice between pessimistic and modestly optimistic alternatives:

It is possible to envision a society marked by increasing violence and attacks on private property, by intolerance of any deviation from an obsessive morality and by far reaching police surveillance coupled with a loss of civil liberties in a totalitarian social order. It is also possible (though admittedly more difficult in this disenchanted era) to envision a society with widespread acceptance of and conformity to the criminal law. a modest view of the proper reach of the State, and methods of law enforcement that are just, humane and effective. 

A linear projection from current control trends suggests changes much more incremental and ambiguous. The assumptions which Wilkins noted more than a decade ago still apply. First, most criminal-justice planning will continue to seek solutions by means of more of the same. Second, the public will continue with the mistaken, and confused belief that because we do not like crime, what we do about it will decrease it. The results of these assumptions will be a total breakdown of the criminal-justice system (somewhere before the year 2000 Wilkins predicts), together with increasing pressure for more and more control. The resultant forms of control will be less noteworthy, for their effects on crime than their intrusive side-effects on ordinary citizens: a retreat into fortress living; streets abandoned to outlaws; inconvenience and erosion of civil liberty as a result of continual security checks and surveillance systems. We have already seen this prediction from several theoretical directions: for traditional law-and-order policies based on doing something to individual offenders, 'the game is almost up'. The next technology is the use of cybernetic planning at the level of systems and environments in order to make the initial act more difficult. The by-products might be unpleasant, but the old punitive technology will soon be extinct.

Apart from these more imaginative excesses - crises, system breakdown, desolation, totalitarianism - most crime-control predictions art! only modestly pessimistic. An optimistic, utopian element in crime-control thinking has always to be maintained: the counter-vision of order, regulation and security which will replace the imminent threat of breakdown and chaos. This vision appeared in the early penitentiary movement, in the idealistic excesses of scientific positivism, in the Continental social-defence school and today, in the bland technicist criminology peddled by international agencies to the Third World. The visions of chaos dominate; all that can be hoped for is a holding operation. Genuine utopianism only remains on the extreme right with its visions of environmental manipulation, psycho-technology or genetic planning and the extreme left, with its prospect of a 'crime-free' society with the dissolution of capitalism. The dominant tone is the realist right: 'I argue for a sober view of man and his institutions that would permit reasonable things to be accomplished, foolish things abandoned and utopian things forgotten.” - Stanley Cohen, Visions of Social Control. Crime, Punishment and Classification. Polity, 1985. p. 197-202.

[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.