Castles of our Conscience E-Book

William G. Staples

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 310

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Castles of our Conscience presents a new and distinctive analysis of the role of the modern state in the shaping of policies of social control. Staples provides a theoretical framework for understanding the mechanisms of state policy-making and capacity. This framework supports an interpretation of the changing nature of institutions of social control in the United States from the beginning in the nineteenth century to the present day.

A distinctive feature of the author’s approach is his critique of existing theories of the state as well as recent revisionist writing in social control. Both, he argues, have tended to either reduce the state to an instrument of class power or treat it in too ‘structuralist’ a fashion. Developing a sophisticated account of the relationship between the state and civil society he provides a history of social control policies in the United States that balances analytical concerns with historical narrative.

This book will be of interest to students and professionals in sociology, politics and criminology.

Leseprobe

Castles of Our Conscience

Social Control and the American State, 1800–1985

William G. Staples

Polity Press

Copyright © 1990 William G. Staples

First published 1990 by Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell

Editorial office:

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street, Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Marketing and production:

Basil Blackwell Ltd

108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-6860-4 (Multi-user ebook)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Bembo by Wearside Tradespools, Fulwell, Sunderland

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Marston Lindsay Ross International Ltd, Oxfordshire

For Ian, joie de vivre

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1  Explaining Patterns of Institutional Social Control

From Progressivism to Revisionism

Toward a State-centered Perspective

The Structuration of the State: Form, Function, and Apparatus

Part I    The Denial of Freedom in the New Republic: Social Control and the American State, 1800–1929

2  Charting the Liberal-Capitalist State

Production Politics in the Nineteenth-century Prison

The “Problem” of Prison Labor

The Origins of the Prison as Factory

Discipline, Punishment, and Capitalism

Working to Reproduce the State

3  Public Welfare in an Age of Social and Economic Crises

Poverty, Dependency, and the Poorhouse

From “Houses of Industry” to “Disgraceful Memorials”

Classification and the Growth of Specialized Institutions

Absorbing the Local State: Centralization, Political Power, and the State Apparatus

Part II    Accumulating Minds and Bodies: Social Control and the American State, 1930–1985

4  Charting the Advanced-Capitalist State

Roads to the State Asylum

The Idle and Unproductive in the Penitentiary

The Juvenile Court and the Penetration of the Family

5  Contradictions and Consequences in Post-war Psychiatry

The State Hospital in the “New Age” of Community Mental Health

Opening the Back Doors: The Political Legitimacy of State Governments and the Early Signs of Deinstitutionalization

Community Psychiatry and the “New Frontier” of Progressive Social Reform

6  Public Policy under the Liberal Welfare State

From the “New Frontier” to the “Great Society”: The Politics and Policies of the Kennedy-Johnson Years

“Gray Gold”: The New American Nursing Home Industry

The Goal of “Reintegration”: Offenders on Probation and Parole

Crises in the Community: the Politicization of America’s “Crime Wave”

Adolescents Go from Bad to Mad

7  The Evolution of the State Apparatus

The Dialectics of the State in Civil Society

Appendix: Concepts, Data, and Sources

Notes

References

Index

Preface

During the last 20 years or so two separate yet parallel discourses have matured and flourished in both sociology and history. One has been a renewed interest in “the state” as a theoretical and empirical focus of analysis. Here we have witnessed a reopening of the classical projects on the nature and consequences of the rise of modern nation states. The debates have been both forthright and stimulating, engendering some of the best comparative-historical social science in years. Meanwhile, students of law, crime, and deviance began a critical, “revisionist” intellectual movement which shifted the analysis of these social phenomena away from questions of individual conformity to issues of control. Indeed, the concept of “social control” became the organizing theme for a broader emphasis on power, politics, and economics. Yet while revisionist authors have moved the state into the forefront of their discussions, those analyses of social control that have appeared have tended to be “society-centered” rather than “state-centered” – the former being reductionistic, deriving the state from other structures within civil society – the latter assuming a degree of state autonomy with a logic and interest of its own. As I see it, there is a need to bring the full power and scope of a state-centered approach to bear on the historical theme of changing institutional social control practice. This is the intent of this book.

Certainly one great pleasure of completing this book is acknowledging those friends and colleagues that gave of their time and energy. Like most first books, this monograph began life as a dissertation and I want to thank the people at the University of Southern California who made that step possible. They include Jon Miller, Michael Dear, Daniel Glaser, Sol Kobrin, and, unfortunately posthumously, Robert Hodge. The process of converting some reasonable ideas into a book took place during my two-year appointment as a Post Doctoral Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. Here I was fortunate to share ideas and friendship with a number of people but especially Robert Emerson, Christine Grella, Oscar Grusky, Kathleen Montgomery, Michael Mann, Melvin Pollner, William Roy, Judith Stepan-Norris, and Maurice Zeitlin. I own a great debt, both in intellectual and in practical terms, to Michael Dear and Anthony Giddens. Not only has their work profoundly influenced my own thinking, but their advice, support, and confidence in the project was unfailing.

I am grateful as well to those institutions and organizations which help support my work. They include the Department of Sociology and the Social Science Research Institute of the University of Southern California, UCLA, the National Institute of Mental Health, and, finally, the Rockefeller Foundation for my time spent at the Bellagio Study Center in Lake Como, Italy in the spring of 1985.

Few people have shared more in my personal and intellectual life than my brother and fellow sociologist, Cliff Staples. I thank him dearly for his encouragement, and most of all his friendship, which deepens as the years go by. Contributing her keen sociological imagination and her ability to tirelessly read draft upon draft of my coarse prose, Carol Warren has given much of herself to this book. I thank her for all her help. This book is dedicated to my son Ian Warren Staples, for our Tuesdays together, for teaching me not to take myself too seriously, and for showing me what is really important in this world. You are, indeed, the joy of my life.

W. G. Staples Lawrence, Kansas

Introduction

It is for the other world that the madman sets sail in his fool’s boat; it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks. The madman’s voyage is at once a rigorous division and an absolute Passage . . . He is put in the interior of the exterior, and inversely. A highly symbolic position, which will doubtless remain his until our own day, if we are willing to admit that what was formerly a visible fortress of order has now become the castle of our conscience.

Michel Foucault*Madness and Civilization

* Reproduced by kind permission of Vintage Books, a division of Random House Publishers.

PART I

The Denial of Freedomin the New Republic

Social Control and the AmericanState, 1800–1929

1

Explaining Patterns of Institutional Social Control

From Progressivism to Revisionism

The history of public policy in the United States concerning the care and control of the ill, the dependent, the misbehaved and dangerous, has been a cyclical one of “reforms,” “innovations,” and “solutions.” Until recently, a reformist historiography had assessed these policy movements as the result of shifts in ideological currents, often stressing the actions of benevolent, forward thinking progressives in shaping a more humane social world.1 This was a history of progress, a history of unquestionable allegiance to scientific humanism and social intervention. Even if failure occurs, according to this vision, it is eventually overcome through the application of more resources, better training, planning and the like. Today, a body of revisionist history and sociology challenges this perspective with a “determination to locate the reform enterprise in the social, economic and political contexts of the period.”2

Despite this common goal, however, revisionist accounts of the history of social control policies remain fractured along several fronts. These divisions involve basic debates concerning idealism vs. materialism, action vs. structure, and the historical place of human agency. Those who emphasize materialist interpretations of history focus on class, politics, and economics as determinants of social reforms and attempt to link these movements and the origins of institutions to structural changes such as urbanization, industrialization, and the rise of capitalism. Materialist views have, more often than not, placed agency in the hands of dominant classes and have characterized reformist policies as ultimately reflecting the “social control” interests of such classes.3 Other materialist interpretations range from a focus on the fiscal constraints of the welfare state, to a concern with the historical ascendancy of discipline, surveillance, and classification in what Michel Foucault has characterized as an economy of “power.”4 Still others, such as David Rothman, writing from a more pluralist view, see the “discovery of the asylum” as a response to general disorder and disequilibrium in society rather than a threat to any particular social class.