(reprinted with permission, late 1990s)
This article originally appeared in Asclepius at Syracuse, a very rare title that included works that used the views of the famed allegedly 'conservative' Dr.Thomas Szasz, MD as a jumping off point into many different, yet related, disciplines. It was published in April, 1980, and this article appears on pages 369-378. At that time, Mr.Boostrom was coordinator of the Criminal Justice Program at San Diego University.
Thanks goes to the Thomas Szasz website for enabling me to get the entire of this article online!
"Those who wish to reproduce existing social relations, because it serves their interest to do so, want to control the socialization process and the institutions of socialization. It is in their interest to mask their interest in such control by appearing to offer help to children and youth which will also benefit society as a whole.
The delinquency control industry, which has become a government controlled and subsidized big business in this country, provides one of the best examples of the institutionalization of the ideology of the therapeutic state. As Thomas Szasz has pointed out, this ideology has mystified social control in the modern corporate state, presenting increased state intervention and control as help and rehabilitation. Recent developments in "delinquency prevention and control" have extended this ideology through the use of new technologies and strategies of early intervention with "pre-delinquents." (...)
Through financing and direction provide by agencies such as the office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention in the Justice Department; NIMH; [etc.] certain programs, strategies, and ideologies are developed and sustained in reaction to the problem of delinquency. ...The delinquency control industry ...provides one of the best examples we have available to us of the attempt to mystify social control as help and rehabilitation. In addition, it provides a good example of conflicts between various interest groups over who will have power to define and control the processing of offenders in our society.
"The most important business of every society is the regulation of the behavior of its members." --Thomas Szasz in Ceremonial Chemistry; Anchor Books; NY; 1975; p.20
[Dr.Szasz] has also made the point that in the modern world, as in the ancient world, Church, Medicine, and State collaborate in maintaining social order by regulating personal conduct. In [Thomas Szasz’s] therapeutic state, politics and morality are smuggled into medical/clinical social controls under the guise of science.
Nothing is more central to the maintenance of social order than the regulatory mechanisms employed to control and socialize our children. Control over the socialization process, which is institutionalized in agencies such as the family, the church, the school, recreation programs for children and youth, delinquency prevention programs, and the juvenile justice system is a key variable in the reproduction or the change of our social order and social relations.
Those who wish to reproduce existing social relations, because it serves their interest to do so, want to control the socialization process and the institutions of socialization. It is in their interest to mask their interest in such control by appearing to offer help to children and youth which will also benefit society as a whole.
The ideology of the therapeutic state and the coalition of moral, political, economic, and medical interests it supports and sustains has been an effective vehicle in this century for the mystification of social control... The therapeutic state has been expanded and legitimized through our social policy toward children and through the creation of new institutions for the socialization of children.
"Once it established legitimacy in the public mind, [the juvenile justice system] provided a fertile testing ground for the assumptions and strategies of the therapeutic state."
These institutions have evolved over the past one hundred and fifty years in the United States and they have been vehicles in this century, until recently, for the elaboration and expansion of the therapeutic state.
Those who had a stake in the elaboration and expansion...were able to use the agencies of socialization for their purposes for the following reasons:
1) children’s rights have remained relatively undeveloped in our legal system,
2) children and youth ceased to be a valued source of labor power in our society,
3) children and youth have been viewed and treated as incomplete and incompetent human beings.
This ideology and the control strategies it supported assumed that children and youth are incapable of exercising self-control in the face of temptations [including delinquency]. ...The juvenile justice system promised that it could prevent delinquency in our society and, thus, it gained legitimacy for a time as an instrument of the public welfare acting for the common good.
Once it established legitimacy in the public mind, it provided a fertile testing ground for the assumptions and strategies of the therapeutic state. For the most part, the public remained satisfied to give control over problem children and youth of all kinds to the agents of juvenile justice in order to get them out of their hair and, hopefully, out of their sight.
The Historical Development of Juvenile Justice
Prior to the Jacksonian era in American history, juvenile deviants were either subject to the criminal law and the same criminal sanctions as adults...or were subject only to informal social controls exercised by parents and the local community. This changed, to some extent, with the advent of the first juvenile reformatory in America--the New York House of Refuge, a state chartered but privately operated facility which was founded in 1825. This marked the beginning of a new policy of exclusion, deparate diagnosis, and special treatment for juvenile offenders. This development was emulated by other major urban centers on the Eastern seaboard and its assumptions and separate system of treatment...became a model for future developments...
The act of incorporation of the house of refuge contained the first statutory definition of juvenile delinquency in our history. This statute, like others to follow, defined the special status of juvenile delinquency to include youthful criminal offenders, youngsters who were seen to be in danger of leading an immoral and uncontrolled life if left to their own devices, and dependent and neglected children.
This new institution and the laws creating it:
- focused attention on the institutional control of the poor and unorganized working class
- created the first separate system of incarceration for juvenile offenders
- mandated correction, rehabilitation, and reform of delinquent offenders as the goal of juvenile justice
- established statutory definitions of delinquency to include criminal behavior, "status offenses," and dependent and neglected children.
- established the use of the indeterminate sentence as a managerial tool
- gave state chartered managers (representing private philanthropical societies) the same power over children that parents had traditionally exercised, establishing the basis for the concept of parens patriae which was used at the end of the century to rationalize the power and control of the juvenile court over youthful offenders.
Dr. Szasz has stated that pioneering eighteenth-century asylums were the first factories for manufacturing madmen and renaming badness as madness. In like manner, the new reformatories were the factories for manufacturing delinquents and renaming the badness as delinquency. "The delinquent is an institutional product." (Foucault, Michel; Discipline and Punish; Pantheon; NY; 1977 p.301)"Once reformers were successful in establishing the special status of the juvenile delinquent in law and policy and once special institutions were in place to reinforce the special status and special treatment, juveniles lost the protection of due process of law which had been traditionally available to criminal offenders."
Michel Foucault has pointed out that the creation of these institutions in modern Western societies was part of a general movement toward domination, observation, and enforced discipline promoted by agents and agencies of normality in the new industrial society.
As these disciplinary functions become well established and legitimized in society, the process of manufacturing delinquents is no longer confined by the walls of the reformatory. Like madness, delinquency burst through the walls of the asylum by the beginning of the twentieth century.
"As medicine, psychology, education, public assistance, ‘social work’ assume an ever greater share of the powers of supervision and assessment, the penal apparatus will be able, in turn, to become medicalized, psychologized, educationalized..." (ibid. p.306)
It "was being discovered in clinics and doctors’ offices, in literature and art (i.e. Huckelberry Finn), and in the ‘psychopathology of everyday life.’" (ibid. p.306)
All of the earlier principles and practices which began in the Jacksonian era were built upon and elaborated by Progressive reformers [including the famous "Mother Jones"--ed] at the turn of the twentieth century. They took them into the community where they discovered ever-more problems of delinquency and juvenile deviance.
[These reformers] created new social control devices such as the compulsory public school with its inevitable truant officer, the juvenile court with its diagnostic clinic, probation, parole, and settlement houses; all designed to spread the logic and methods of the "carceral" institutions of the new industrial state and the ideology of the therapeutic state throughout the community of potential deviants.
Once reformers were successful in establishing the special status of the juvenile delinquent in law and policy and once special institutions were in place to reinforce the special status and special treatment, juveniles lost the protection of due process of law which had been traditionally available to criminal offenders.
Efforts to reform individual delinquents and to assuage anxiety about social change through special treatment of the juvenile deviant undercut traditional liberal concern for civil liberties and the need to protect the individual from the power of state intervention.
A new faith in therapeutic scientific management as a solution to the problem of delinquency was introduced during the Progressive era which was inimical to basic libertarian principles and philosophies espoused by our Founding Fathers and contained in the founding documents of this nation. Progressive reform programs and practices continued to dominate twentieth- century juvenile justice. However, they have recently come under attack for their lack of attention to legality and their correctional, rather than appreciative, assumptions.
NEW STRATEGIES IN DELINQUENCY PREVENTION AND CONTROL
As a result of disillusionment among a new wave of reformers with the Progressive legacy, some changes have begun to occur in recent years in juvenile justice in the United States. A new "get-tough" policy for juvenile criminals has introduced due process and determinate sentences to the juvenile court (although determinate sentencing policy has yet to be instituted at this point in most juvenile justice systems). The discovery that juvenile "status offenders" were doing more time in lock-up facilities than were juveniles who had committed offenses that would be considered crimes for adults (a direct result of the misplaced optimism about reform by the agents of the therapeutic state) has led to a movement for the decriminalization, decarceration, and diversion of status offenders out of the juvenile justice system.
New strategies of delinquency control and prevention designed to remove status offenders from the jurisdiction of the traditional juvenile justice system have served to widen the net of control for agents of the therapeutic state. These reforms are accompanied by a humanitarian-appearing concern for removing large numbers of children and youth from confinement and punishment. They have promoted early intervention, screening, testing, drug therapy, and behavior modification in the schools. They have liberated the ideologists of the therapeutic state from many of the former economic and legal constraints.
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Wow, I wonder what Boostrom's contemporaries say, today?
I also noted how closely aligned this writer is to Ken Wooden (or is it "Wooten"?).