Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment: Applying Social Psychology in Prisons and Policing [1 ed.] 1433817292, 9781433817298

Table of contents :
Contents
Foreword
Preface: Doing Psychology
Acknowledgments
1
Embracing a Vocation
2
Initiating a Line of Inquiry
3
Heading West
4
Supporting New Careers
5
Partnering With Police Officers
6
Addressing Group Dynamics
7
Responding to Inmates in Crisis
8
Democratizing a Prison
9
Nurturing Responsible Behavior
10
Building a Sense of Advancement Into Long Terms of Confinement
11
Addressing Confrontation and Promoting De-Escalation
12
Perverting Behaviorism in Wisconsin
Conclusion Applied Social Psychology: Quo Vadis?
References
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment

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Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment APPLYING SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY IN PRISONS AND POLICING

HANS TOCH

Foreword by Craig Haney

AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION • Washington, DC

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Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, including, but not limited to, the process of scanning and digitization, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by American Psychological Association 750 First Street, NE Washington, DC 20002 www.apa.org To order APA Order Department P.O. Box 92984 Washington, DC 20090-2984 Tel: (800) 374-2721; Direct: (202) 336-5510 Fax: (202) 336-5502; TDD/TTY: (202) 336-6123 Online: www.apa.org/pubs/books E-mail: [email protected] In the U.K., Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, copies may be ordered from American Psychological Association 3 Henrietta Street Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU England Typeset in Minion by Circle Graphics, Inc., Columbia, MD Printer: Maple Press, York, PA Cover Designer: Naylor Design, Washington, DC The opinions and statements published are the responsibility of the authors, and such opinions and statements do not necessarily represent the policies of the American Psychological Association. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Toch, Hans.   Organizational change through individual empowerment : applying social psychology in prisons and policing / Hans Toch. — First edition.    pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-1-4338-1729-8 — ISBN 1-4338-1729-2  1.  Correctional psychology—United States. 2.  Corrections—United States. 3.  Prison psychology—United States. 4.  Criminal psychology—United States. 5.  Police—United States. 6.  Prisoners—United States. 7.  Organizational change—United States.  I. Title.   HV9471.T634 2014  365'.7—dc23 2013041944 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A CIP record is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States of America First Edition http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14373-000

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To the memory of Lise Turgeon Toch. None of us know what we have been afforded until it is gone.

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Contents

Foreword Craig Haney

ix

Preface: Doing Psychology

xv

Acknowledgments

xix

1.

Embracing a Vocation

3

2.

Initiating a Line of Inquiry

17

3.

Heading West

27

4.

Supporting New Careers

39

5.

Partnering With Police Officers

49

6.

Addressing Group Dynamics

63

7.

Responding to Inmates in Crisis

75

8.

Democratizing a Prison

87

9.

Nurturing Responsible Behavior

101

10. Building a Sense of Advancement Into Long Terms of Confinement

115

11. Addressing Confrontation and Promoting De-Escalation

129

12. Perverting Behaviorism in Wisconsin

141

vii

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Contents

Conclusion 155 References 169 Index 177 About the Author

185

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Foreword Craig Haney

T

he challenge of using psychological science to effect social as well as personal change is a daunting one. Attempting it in the entrenched and resistant arena of the criminal justice system is something that only the most intrepid social reformers have ever undertaken, most of them only briefly, until moving on to more “realistic” endeavors where success comes more readily and with greater fanfare. Remarkably, Hans Toch has been at this noble calling for more than a half century. And he has succeeded at it like few (if any) others. Among other things, Toch is a singular figure in the history of the now well-established field of psychology and law. He helped to found the enterprise in the 1960s, although, with characteristic modesty, he has never taken credit for it. Decades later, he continues to work on many of its most important issues, and does so with unmatched wisdom and insight. It was pure serendipity, he tells us, that accounted for him rapidly being “officially transmuted into a leading criminologist of the ‘psychological’ (as opposed to sociological) persuasion,” (p. 30), but anyone who has read his book Legal and Criminal Psychology (1961) knows better. He, and the book he then compiled, literally invented a field of study. And no one since has as fully grasped the potential of social psychological analysis to effect criminal justice reform. As you will see in the pages that follow, he has not just talked the talk but also time and again walked the walk. This volume not only provides an illuminating look at the intellectual history and zeitgeist that influenced Toch’s work but also gives us a rare ix

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glimpse into the thought processes and day-to-day decisions that led to some of the field’s most important contributions, as Toch and his colleagues devised creative strategies to implement badly needed change inside the criminal justice system, especially in its prisons. Yet his astute application of the tools and concepts of social psychology to produce reform tells only part of the story. Hans Toch’s humanity—his caring and compassion— shines through in everything he does and writes. It is a central part of the story he tells. Indeed, even though he was trained as a social psychologist, and his appreciation for the power of context and situation to shape behavior is as finely honed as anyone’s, the humanist in him serves as the basis for his “unconditional faith in the ability of people to make constructive contributions” (p. 39), to social change, including change in the circumstances of their confinement and conditions of their oppression. It is a testament to his humanism, for example, that even as a young professional he was deeply concerned that “overeager psychologists” might claim to uncover some “additional stigmatizing attribute” with which to label ex-convicts who already had, as Toch well knew, enough “incapacitating impediments” facing them (p. 32). It is even more of a testament to his humanist vision and values to note that he has never wavered in this concern, over his many decades of labor, even as the field itself was nearly overrun with those eager not only to uncover as many of these stigmatizing attributes as possible but also to develop “objective” tests by which the alleged traits supposedly could be “scientifically” measured, with little regard for how these same tests might broadly overpredict misbehavior, with life-altering consequences. Toch has stood firm against this nearly overwhelming tide. Similarly, it is the strong humanist strand that explains his dismay over the troubling irony that the discipline of psychology “could ever be invoked to justify the enactment of deprivations or the effort to withhold responses to basic human needs and aspirations” (p. 155), in prison or elsewhere. Better than any psychologist I know, Toch understands and has written persuasively about “the pointlessness of simply doing time, the absence of any opportunity for self-improvement or experiential progression” (pp. 115–116). He has devoted himself in both his writing and his direct work with prison systems throughout the world to devising environments in which prisoners are given meaningful opportunities “for demonstrating competence, for being creative x

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or becoming useful, or for having one’s constructive contributions valued and rewarded” (p. 116). So it is not surprising that he has taken such a strong stand against the application of the alleged tenets of “behavior modification” in prison, ones that are advanced with “ambiguous conceptual underpinnings” (p. 150) and used as justification for subjecting prisoners not only to profound levels of social deprivation but also “grinding monotony, boredom, and enforced inactivity” (p. 144) inside solitary confinement units with a “penchant for punitive backups” (p. 145). Toch persuasively reminds us that these kinds of regimes violate the true first principle of all humanistic and social psychology—to “treat humans as human” (p. 161). Indeed, Toch’s message that psychologists must be “applied humanists” and that “the way we relate to the people we work with—and on whose behalf we work— has to be our principal concern” (p. xvii) contains not only words to live by but also words Toch has lived by throughout his long and distinguished career on the front lines of these battles. Throughout this book Toch explicitly embraces and brilliantly models what he fears is becoming a lost art—the art of “doing” psychology. And he reminds us that this art should always be practiced with the realization that how we do it is as important as what we do and with what effect. With these things in mind, Toch shows us how he has “done” psychology—you will see how spectacularly well—over an entire professional lifetime. He does this by sharing, as he says in his own humorously understated way, personal accounts of “some of my activities during the last 6 (or 7) decades” (p. xvi). Take a deep breath and consider what they have included: 77 exploring the ways that preexisting “perceptual readiness” (p. 21) may lead persons to overperceive violence in their social and professional interactions; 77 struggling to improve the life chances of persons coming out of prison by creating “new careers” (p. 39) in which they were trained and employed to provide meaningful rehabilitative services to their peers; 77 developing a radical approach to the prevention of police violence by introducing “action review panels” (p. 71) that assembled groups of respected officers to critically review the behavioral patterns of their colleagues, analyze their motivations, and lead them through a process of increasing self-awareness and eventual restraint; xi

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77 implementing the use of “crisis teams” (p. 81) in prisons where corrections officers partnered with mental health staff to jointly and systematically analyze prisoner distress and propose more humane interventions; 77 championing what nowadays would be described as a truly “radical” experiment to democratize prison governance by giving prisoners much larger roles in day-to-day prison decision making, premised on the notion that if they were treated with respect, as responsible adults capable of good and even altruistic behavior inside prison, they would retain this selfimage and these behavior patterns after they were released; 77 devising a model of comprehensive “sentence planning” (p. 116) in which long-term prisoners worked closely with prison officials over the course of their extended prison sentence to receive continuous training and opportunities for development that maximized their chances to establish genuine, substantial, and sustaining “careers” once released; and 77 helping to intellectually—if not yet physically—deconstruct the logic of the most stultifying and severe solitary confinement units, where the most troubled and troubling prisoners are placed to have their already “rock-bottom, hardscrabble existence . . . made even more rock-bottom and hardscrabble” (p. 156) in a misguided effort to “motivate” them to change somehow for the better. To have taken any one of these principled stands or accomplished any one of these important reforms would serve as the basis for a truly successful professional life, one well-lived, a legacy for others to try to emulate. To have played such a central role in formulating and implementing all of them and more is truly extraordinary. Much of Toch’s retrospect on his extraordinary professional journey serves as a vivid reminder that there is no more astute analyst of the dayto-day nature of prison life and the psychological challenges of long-term confinement than he. Surely nobody writes with more insight than Toch does about “the requisites for surviving under stressful conditions of incarceration, and the limitations to human resilience under stress” (p. 125). As someone who has had the rare privilege of touring prisons with Toch and the even greater privilege of sitting in on interviews that he conducted with prisoners inside several supermax units, it is not difficult to understand the xii

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source of at least some of his genius for uncovering important truths in these forsaken places. He is a genuinely caring man, and prisoners—whose survival depends on their ability to separate the genuine from the poseurs— immediately recognize him as the real thing, confide in him, and share as much knowledge with him as they can. It is all the more remarkable a phenomenon to witness because, even here, Toch is always the consummate professor—he is proper, formal, polite, erudite in his speech (still spoken with more than a tinge of a Viennese accent). And yet he is utterly at ease and in his element in prison, and the comfort level and trust—from prisoners and staff alike—are completely reciprocated. Notwithstanding his many decades as a distinguished academic, it would be hard for me to guess where he feels most at home—in the classroom or in the cellblock. When Toch writes about prison administrators who recognized “the obvious need to prevent wholesale stultification, deterioration, and impairment” and wanted to invest in offering prisoners “a prison existence that transcends mere physical and emotional survival” (p. 125), he is of course talking about a very different time in the modern history of corrections, at least as it has played out in the United States. But it is not necessarily one to which we cannot return. To be sure, as Toch is quick to repeatedly acknowledge, there are “obdurate realities” that must be overcome, and the inescapable fact that even “success” in this field can be “annoyingly evanescent” (p. xvi). Yet, as long as we continue to imprison so many people for such long periods, prisons, Toch teaches us, must “shoulder the obligation to support, encourage, and reinforce the personal development” (p. 126) of their residents, in part through the proper and humane application of psychological knowledge. Indeed, at the end of a list of insightful principles of organizational change, Toch tells us that “some wheels just have to be reinvented every 30 years” (p. 73). What he modestly neglected to also say is that many of the wheels he invented are now precisely on or nearing that 30-year cycle, and many of his important and innovative ideas have never been more current. This is a truly engaging story of the kind of innovative change that courage, caring, and intellect can bring about, in part because its author is such a truly engaging writer. As I read through it I was repeatedly reminded why I have been devouring his words and learning from him for the better xiii

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part of the last 40 years. I also have had the pleasure of watching generations of students discover him; become enthralled with his insights; and benefit enormously from the unique combination of erudition, brilliance, and accessibility that characterizes his scholarly writing. So sit back, dear reader, and allow Professor Toch to take you on this journey of intellectual inquisition, humanitarian reform, and institutional change. It will be a wild, illuminating, and inspiring ride.

xiv

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Preface: Doing Psychology

I

n the days in which my generation was exposed to concerns about productivity at work, we tended to be confronted with examples that involved persons who were manufacturing widgets. No one I knew would have known what a widget was, which admittedly might have proved a handicap if we had run across an attractive widget sale or an impressive collection of widgets. But for purposes of concerns at issue in the classroom, this fact did not much matter—we could safely assume that widget making was a skilled and respectable occupation that contributed to the common good and that widget makers in their declining years would have little difficulty justifying their diligent existence—given a substantial accumulation of shiny new widgets, of course. As it happens, Webster’s Dictionary could have told us back then that a widget was “an unnamed [emphasis added] article considered for purposes of hypothetical [emphasis added] example” and that we had therefore been bamboozled. Nowadays, as it happens, widgets are no longer quite as unnamed or hypothetical. This fact, however, does not mean that widgets now qualify as tangible productive output, because widget in contemporary parlance is “a fancy word for tools or contents that you can add, arrange, and remove from the sidebar of your blog” (http://en.support. wordpress.com/widgets/). Accordingly, widget making does not sound like a career that a respectable person would entertain or would review with pride at the end of the day.

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Taking an inventory of one’s alleged accomplishments over a presumptively productive life always carries the risk of coming up with a compilation of widgets under one connotation of widget or the other. I want to make clear that in this book I have no such aspiration, though the book details some of my activities during the last 6 (or 7) decades. The account of these involvements is not intended as a testimonial to any presumably admirable accomplishments or as a set of exemplars to be emulated by others—such as unsuspecting young psychologists who may run across this book. If anything, the story may be more of a cautionary tale, redolent with incidents in which aspirations appeared to have been blunted by obdurate realities and successes proved annoyingly evanescent. By the same token, what follows is not by any means a litany of complaints. Everything considered, the author of this account defines himself as a fortunate man who knows that he has owed a great deal along the way to undeserved opportunities and the support and influence of wise and valued companions. This volume records some of his indebtedness. It is not so much a story of what its author thinks he may have done but of what he has been enabled to do by others. It is a testimonial to my teachers and associates and a record of some of what I have learned from them. My reason for chronicling these lessons is that I hope that a few of my experiences will resonate with the experienced encounters of others. “Doing psychology” as I have been doing it is a generously circumscribed endeavor. It covers a lot of ground, having to do with supporting people and with helping people to ameliorate stress, to satisfy their needs, and to grow and develop. Psychology in this sense may be as ill defined as a pile of widgets, though we psychologists hope we know what we are doing when we are doing it. For my part, I have been attempting to be of use mostly in places of confinement and police departments. I hope this book conveys a sense of what I have tried to accomplish in those venues, though accomplishment is a relative term. I would argue that in doing psychology it must be the doing as much as the psychology that counts as productivity. In widget making, the widget would be the sum of the message to be conveyed, but in doing psychology the process must matter fully as much as the product and may ultimately be more important. In other words, how we go about xvi

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assisting people may be of greater consequence in the long run than the substance of the assistance we provide, and may end up carrying more substantial repercussions. The reason we must keep the difference in mind is because psychologists are in the business of helping people—not inanimate targets of assistance. Psychologists are, therefore, by definition, applied humanists. As professionals they must be client centered; they must be attuned to human relatedness not because it bites you if you ignore it but because that is what psychology is about. The prescriptive implication of our discipline is that the way we relate to the people we work with—and on whose behalf we work—has to be our principal concern. Widget makers shoulder no comparable obligation. I think of the book I have written as a retrospective to distinguish it from a memoir. Memoirs are composed by literati and other public figures whose jobs, private lives, and inner lives are of interest to people. This is clearly not true in my case, but I might as well record that my private life has been conventional and my inner life is overwhelmingly pedestrian. My job has consisted of teaching at the university level. Some of my students claim that in doing this I have come across as intimidating, but I am in fact a pussycat. I have elected to write about doing the sort of psychology I have been doing because I am at this point too old and too dilapidated to continue doing it. I suspect that this unfortunate circumstance is one attribute I may have in common with most of the men and women who have written memoirs. But then, another common denominator that is shared among our motley group is the immodest presumption that there might be lessons to be learned from our involvements. We all hope that we might have been of some use along the way, but many of us would also like to think that some of whatever we have accomplished could be worth resuscitating.

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Acknowledgments

I

am not too proud to confess that I remain hopelessly dependent on my matchless ground crew at APA Books, chief among who are my friend and publisher, Mary Lynn Skutley, and my long-suffering editor, Tyler Aune. Mary Lynn has been a dependable source of encouragement and support over the years. Tyler has been my right arm and deserves credit for shaping what started as an inchoate manuscript—and doing this by hounding me mercilessly, and mostly successfully, to revisit and revise. And of late, Erin O’Brien, my trusty copyeditor, has been a paragon of tireless tenacity. As usual, Shadd Maruna has provided support from across the Atlantic and has once more taken time from an incredibly busy schedule to help me with his inordinately meticulous reading and a great many helpful suggestions. I trust that Shadd knows how grateful I am for this assistance. And as once before, I have to express my gratitude to my long-time employer, the University at Albany, for continuing to provide me with shelter and a place to belong well into my retirement, thus enabling me to produce this book.

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Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment

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Embracing a Vocation

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 hen I was an incipient psychologist in my late teens, I went through my obligatory Freudian period, but I was fortunate to be doing this with an authentic Viennese accent, which I had carefully preserved despite my childhood emigration to the United States via Cuba. I had further managed to arrange for a memento of my convictions in the form of a coauthored contribution to The American Imago, a journal of undisputed Freudian pedigree. I have never been ashamed of this phase of my early development. I have sometimes maintained that if you want to become a well-rounded psychologist, a smidgen of psychoanalysis is good for you. It inculcates respect for past experience, sensitivity to the continuity of the human condition, and alertness to the persisting impact of personal relationships. My precocious contribution to the psychoanalytic literature (Goldstein & Toch, 1956) was titled “An Analysis of a Sample of Eccentric Mail

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14373-001 Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment: Applying Social Psychology in Prisons and Policing, H. Toch Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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to the United Nations.” The study was profusely (and probably superfluously) illustrated and covered a wide range of recorded delusional thinking, with messianic messages predominating. One of the shortest examples of this sort of communication was a telegram that read (in its entirety) as follows: THIS IS A MESSAGE FROM GOD TO THE UNITED NATIONS STOP REQUEST YOU READ TO THE SECURITY COUNCIL AS SOON AS POSSIBLE STOP QUOTE THUS SAITH THE LORD GOD CREATOR OF HEAVEN AND EARTH TO THE UNITED NATIONS STOP PROCLAIM A DAY OF UNIVERSAL PRAYER ON THIS DAY EACH ONE IS TO GO TO THE CHURCH OF HIS DENOMINATION PRAY FOR FORGIVENESS OF HIS SINS AND I WILL ABOLISH WAR FROM THIS EARTH STOP VERY RESPECTFULLY ALIJAH GOD’S MESSENGER

This message was not only atypical in that it is concise but also in its benevolent tone and in the paradoxical formality (and humility) of its closing salutation. It resembled other communications, however, in emphasizing the subordination of the United Nations to the author of the message. Another interesting feature of much of the mail was “the obstacles to understanding that were imposed by some of the writers” (Goldstein & Toch, 1956, p. 183). This attribute raised questions about whether the writers wanted to be understood, to prevent being understood, or both—which would be a beautiful example of psychoanalytic dynamic. The most direct benefit of my participation in this enterprise was the opportunity it provided me to learn how to go about doing a thematic analysis—in this case, an analysis covering the form and contents of a variegated set of documents. In social science, one’s research problem often presents itself as a messy aggregate or confusing conglomerate, and one’s most immediate task is that of sorting or disaggregation. I believe that a great deal of what I have done over the years somehow fits under this heading. 4

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I suspect I also may have learned from this exercise that topics that have human interest or public policy implications can provide legitimate food for scientific inquiry. At the time, the United Nations had supplied me with a place to hang out—now, suddenly and surprisingly, I had done a serious study with the United Nations as subject.

DISCOVERING A MENTOR Some of the books I was assigned as a psychology major in college were such a pleasure to read that I felt guilty as I was reading them. Most of the sinful readings originated in a social psychology course, and two or three books stood out because the author was the same social psychologist—a man named Hadley Cantril, who I was told worked at Princeton University. Cantril had repeatedly studied interesting manifestations of collective behavior, and had described them in a thrillingly clear and uncluttered fashion. If this was what psychology was about, I wanted a chance to explore it. One of Cantril’s books was The Psychology of Social Movements, which was published in 1941. This book happened to have real-life significance to me, in that its final chapters dealt with the origins and appeals of the Nazi movement. But putting aside my feelings and personal experiences, it was clear to me that describing this particular social movement with fidelity and dispassion at the inception of World War II was a formidable achievement. I saw that an equivalent challenge was presented by other groups Cantril covered in the book, such as lynch mobs and the Kingdom of Father Divine. Cantril (1941) wrote in his book that he wanted “to describe the content of mental life in terms that somehow throw light on cause-and-effect relationships” (p. 10). To do so, he proposed to start with an inventory of “assumptions, presuppositions, unquestioned evaluations” (p. 11) revealed in writings and testimonials. By thus faithfully reconstructing the perspectives of his subjects—irrespective of their positions on the ideological spectrum—he was able to bring them vividly to life on their own terms with their premises inviolate and uncontaminated. 5

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Though Cantril’s perspective was appealingly phenomenological, he made some apparent provision for the psychoanalytic perspective to which I had become preliminarily attached. He thus wrote, When institutions and social values are disturbed, it means that people are disturbed. And when people are disturbed they are anxious to regain mental stability. The easiest and most usual way of accomplishing this is to look for a leader, identify oneself with him, transfer one’s troubles to him, and believe that he can always cope with things, that he always has another trick up his sleeve, that he can safely protect one against external dangers. This process, so commonly followed by children, is also frequently followed by adults when they face critical situations which prove too much for their limited resources. (Cantril, 1941, p. 234)

Aside from the fact that this sort of statement appealed to my Freudian predilections, it exemplified a scintillatingly uncluttered writing style that filled me with envy and admiration. Though Hadley Cantril was at this time sitting in Princeton presumably oblivious to his impact on me, he had led me to conceive of the viability of an attractive area of inquiry and had provided me with a role model (admittedly unattainable). The damage was cemented when I read The Invasion from Mars, subtitled A Study in the Psychology of Panic (Cantril, 1940). The book was based on a minutely detailed survey of New Jersey listeners conducted almost immediately (1–3 weeks) after Orson Welles’s panic-inducing radio program had been broadcast in 1938. The conclusions Cantril drew were again appealingly plausible and meticulously documented, and the subject of historical importance. When The Invasion from Mars was reissued in 1966, Cantril wrote, “I have often been asked whether I thought such a thing could happen again. . . . Unfortunately, I have always had to reply that of course it could happen again today and even on a much more extensive scale” (p. vi). Decades later, no one would bother to ask the question. Politically motivated bombings of civilian assemblages have made the implausible plausible, and the social media have evolved to disseminate it. The 1938-model invading Martian would have its picture taken with the nearest cell phone, 6

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and its pendulous proboscis would almost instantaneously appear in living color (green?) on computer screens across the world. Today, we have an entire government department (of homeland security) to certify our collective insecurity.

SCORING PRINCETON In defiance of reasonable probabilities I applied to Princeton’s psychology department for admission in 1952—and in defiance of probabilities I was admitted and offered a sinecure that could support me in unexpected luxury. I understandably accepted this offer before Princeton could change its mind, and hurried to introduce myself to the chair of the department. The chair happened to be Hadley Cantril, and Cantril turned out to be youthful looking, personable, refreshingly unceremonious, gracious, and benevolent. He somehow wormed out of me the fact that I had momentary cash flow problems and offered me an assistantship to supplement my fellowship. As result of this ad hoc supplement I became the resident staff member (in conjunction with a prodigiously efficient secretary) of the Office of Public Opinion Research, a legendary repository of public opinion poll data cumulated since the inception of polling and the place where most of the basic methodological studies about survey research had been done. In introducing this historic research, Cantril (1944) appropriately cautioned, Statistical comparisons based on polling information afford many insights and interpretations of great theoretical and practical usefulness. But the limitations of even the most exhaustive analyses of the most intensive interviews made of representative samples of the population still leave the psychologist dissatisfied in his answer to the question of why a person’s opinion is what it is. Strictly speaking, statistics on sample populations cannot tell anything final as to why people think this or that. But statistics can disprove many false hypotheses. (p. ix)

Fortunately, Cantril’s (1944) caveat did not diminish my impression that the placement I had been assigned was the equivalent of a child being relegated to a candy store. I consequently yielded to temptation almost at 7

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once by cross-tabulating survey responses to confirm my suspicion that older respondents (such as myself as I am writing this today) hold inexcusably conservative views. The divergence in tabulations by age appeared to be particularly pronounced with topics that we now characterize as “social conservatism.” I was thus able to report that it is “in the field of personal habits and morals that the difference between the ‘fifty plus’ age group and the rest of the population is especially marked” (Toch, 1953, p. 392). I mercifully did not attempt to explain this finding without the longitudinal data that would have made sense of it. However, I recently reviewed opinions related to marijuana use over a period of 5 decades. In 1970, there was a stark and definitive consensus on this subject; in fact, “nearly one out of five [respondents to surveys at the time] suggested life imprisonment or the death penalty for the sale of marijuana” (Hindelang, 1974, p. 112). However, by 2011—via umpteen incremental ameliorations—we reached the juncture where a majority of American adults opined that marijuana ought to be legalized. This view, of course, was never uniformly shared among age groups; the permissive stance is thus endorsed by fewer (41%) of the 50-plus and even fewer (31%) of the 60-plus segment of the population than it is by (62%) 18- to 29-year-olds (Toch & Maguire, in press). But the current discrepancy is peanuts compared with the situation at the inception of the trend. Thus, in 1974, only 6% of the over-50 group thought that marijuana ought to ever be legalized, compared with 43% of the youngest respondents. In fact, three out of four of the over-50 group asserted that marijuana use is morally offensive and maintained that crimes are committed by persons who smoke marijuana. One would be tempted to argue that no matter what the public’s perception of some piece of controversial behavior, older members will tend to be more disapproving of it because as psychological beings we become less tolerant and less forbearing as we age. But this assertion makes limited provision for the fact that many older citizens have faced an overwhelming challenge adapting to the strange and disturbing permissiveness of their presumptively enlightened fellow citizens. Moreover, demographic changes associated with evolving personal norms have contributed to leaving many persons feeling beleaguered or alienated, which in turn leaves their fellow citizens thinking of them as congenital enemies of progress. 8

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PERSEVERING WITH SOCIAL MOVEMENTS If this sounds like Cantril’s social movements book has not lost its hold on me, I have to admit that this is the case. But one of my regrets while at Princeton was that the subject of this landmark book did not appear to lend itself to generating doable dissertation topics. That said, there did come a juncture when I thought I saw an opening. This occasion arose after I had moved into my luxurious accommodations at Princeton’s graduate college, a collegiate Gothic conglomerate sitting on a hill overlooking a golf course. One of the benefits of this living arrangement was that it came with regular meals, including a formal dinner served in an oakpaneled dining hall with a lofty cathedral ceiling complete with hammerhead beams, impressively fronted with an immense stained glass window. At the time, the dean of Princeton’s graduate school was Sir Hugh S. Taylor, a well-regarded English chemist who had started teaching at the university in 1913. Dean Taylor had never relinquished his British citizenship and, among other honors, had been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Possibly imbued by nostalgia at the time of his investment, and appropriately inspired by the congruent setting and congenial arrangements of our dining hall, Dean Taylor issued an edict that made it mandatory for graduate students to henceforth wear academic gowns at dinner. Although a majority of the college’s denizens decided to comply with this mandate, a minority (including myself) felt moved to file a respectful objection. Our group of insurgents was a disappointment to the administration, but we were accommodated by having our evening meal provided in an informal setting (otherwise used for serving breakfast) during the duration of our stay. In addition, there was compliance with the edict that may not have honored the spirit of the dean’s intent; his instructions admittedly did not specify what garments were to be worn under the gown, nor did he prescribe any level of desirable cleanliness. It occurred to me that the entire scenario might allow for a participant observation study, including interviews with residents to ascertain the nature of their concerns and reservations. Some members of the psychology department actually thought the idea might have merit, but the dean took a dim view of my dissertation project, which he characterized 9

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as “trouble-making masquerading as research.” The dean also indicated that he was unpleasantly surprised that anyone in the department might consider allowing this sort of thing to be proposed.

CONSIDERING THE CONSEQUENCES OF RESEARCH The experience should have prepared me for other occasions on which my contributions would not be wholeheartedly welcomed—and alerted me to the fact that I needed to consider the reasons. After I had been drafted into the navy in 1955, several such contingencies arose. On one such occasion, Edward Alf, a superlative psychologist who was one of my supervisors, wrote, You will be happy to hear that your report [relating to morale problems among recruit company commanders] has not gone entirely unrecognized. I will record, for your reading pleasure, the complete text of a letter from the Chief of Naval Personnel: 1. The subject report, which was forwarded with reference (a) is a competent report of the research study, and completely acceptable in those terms. However, the administrative situation . . . provides little or no opportunity for being selective and renders further research in the direction of selection techniques impractical. No further action should be taken in this research at this time. 2. The report will not be published as a Bureau of Naval Personnel Report because of the sensitive nature of some of the findings. It should not be distributed by your Activity. (E. Alf, personal communication, January 22, 1958)

Ed added as a comment, You have nothing to worry about. . . . We are certain the Navy will forget about the whole affair in two or three months, and in a year we might even be able to mention your name again. . . . In any event, we would all rest much easier if the reports were returned to us, and if you would refrain from referring to them in public. (E. Alf, personal communication, January 22, 1958) 10

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Though the closing comment may have been tongue-in-cheek, the substance of the message was thought-provoking, and I considered it relevant and appropriate: In research, context often matters. Disseminating knowledge in the abstract may appear to be a worthy endeavor, contributing to human enlightenment and improvement while enhancing one’s reputation. But in practice one can also create obfuscating confusion or, at least, advance no constructive goal. Short of opening Pandora’s boxes, there are many problems in the world (including the U.S. Navy in 1956) that may not be susceptible to the most obvious remedy without doing harm—or more harm than good—nor lend themselves to simplistic solutions. Another consideration is the possibility (which I failed to consider with my dissertation bid) that the dissemination of some information can be injurious to people’s feelings and that feelings—including those of deans—should be taken into account and respected. Dean Hugh Taylor retired in 1958, still able to take uncontested pride in his reenactment of Oxford in New Jersey—which survived him by several years. The wearing of gowns at dinner at Princeton, however, was discontinued in the early 1970s, with the exception of a group of students who resuscitated the practice on Thursdays as an amusing lark, because “they love the wackiness” (Edelstein, 2010, para. 3). According to Edelstein (2010), “a penchant for silliness fuels their interactions” (para. 8). The same may have held partly true of our contingent of breakfast room regulars decades earlier. In the intervening years, I was able to redeem my squelched affinity for social movements and give it occasional expression (Toch, 1955, 1957) while working on a book (Toch, 1965) that could give it more adequate coverage.

THE SOURCE OF A PERSPECTIVE Hadley Cantril was obviously a preeminent social psychologist, but he was also a solid, Harvard-trained psychologist and, in his generalist capacity, had done a great deal of ruminating over the years about what he called “why” questions relating to human behavior. In the course of these explorations of fundamental issues, Cantril had a fateful encounter that he felt 11

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had helped him to clarify his thinking. He subsequently described this serendipitous experience as follows: In the summer of 1946, John Dickey, President of Dartmouth College, told me about the demonstrations [Adelbert] Ames had created and asked if, as friend and psychologist, I would come and see them and give him my impressions . . . Mr. Dickey had heard conflicting reports. (Cantril, 1960, p. vi)

There would be no ambivalence about Cantril’s report to President Dickey. He recalled, The phenomena I experienced in the demonstrations, as then set up in the basement of the Choate House in Hanover, NH, provided me one of the most exciting days of my life, confirming as they seemed to in simple and direct fashion the fact that our perceptions, our attitudes, our prejudices are learned significances for purposive behavior, significances which we ourselves have created in order to act effectively, and which we are unlikely to alter unless and until our action is frustrated or our purposes change. . . . I spent many days thereafter, having trekked from Princeton to Hanover on weekends, alone in the basement and then in communion with Mr. Ames, trying to intellectualize for myself what I at first only vaguely sensed was valid and important. (Cantril, 1960, p. vii)

As it happened, Cantril’s response to Ames and his work was neither unique nor idiosyncratic. John Dewey—arguably, America’s leading applied philosopher—wrote a letter to Ames after viewing his demonstrations, in which he told him, While the demonstrations themselves are in the field of visual perception, they bear upon the entire scope of psychological theory and upon all practical applications of psychological knowledge, beginning with education . . . they provide thorough and systematic, step by step, experimental demonstration of principles which, to the best of my knowledge, have previously been of a theoretical nature, and hence open to controversy. (Dewey, as cited in Cantril, 1960, pp. 171–172) 12

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Dewey subsequently told Ames, “I think your work is by far the most important work done in the psychological–philosophical field during this century—I am tempted to say, the only important work” (Dewey, as cited in Cantril, 1960, pp. 230–231).

TRANSACTIONAL PSYCHOLOGY AT PRINCETON Dewey’s enthusiasm may have been partly understandable given that the premises undergirding the work of Adelbert Ames (which Cantril had found enticing) proved to be compatible with Dewey’s own theorizing. What Ames had designed as his demonstrations were mostly fiendishly ingenious contraptions that projected onto the retina of the observer images that were equivalent to those of familiar objects (chairs, windows, rooms), although they were actually different in shape and/or location—attributes that Ames (1951) referred to as their thatness and thereness. The unconscious choices that observers made, which resulted in the perception of the familiar out of umpteen available interpretations of their ambiguous retinal projections, served to illustrate the important role of our past life experiences in framing our interpretations of future situations in which we find ourselves. The “chair” or the “window” we “perceive” is thus a combined product of its retinal projection and what we bring to it. As pointed out by William Ittelson (1960), another of my Princeton mentors, the view of perception as a creative act “is in many ways foreign to our common sense view of things [because] we tend to look at the objects and people around us as entities existing in their own right and quite independent of our transactions with them” (p. 14). However, the process as Ames described it sounded familiar to Dewey, as did the term transaction that Ames had begun to use to differentiate the relationship he had in mind from a less amalgamated “interaction” (Cantril, 1960). Ittelson (1960) pointed out that in fact, The term transaction was first used in this general context by Dewey and Bentley for whom it took on far-reaching philosophical significance. What they mean by this term can best be gathered by their own 13

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words. “Observation of this general (transactional) type sees man-inaction not as something radically set over against an environing world nor yet as merely action ‘in’ a world but is action of and by the world in which the man belongs as an integral constituent.” (p. 13)

Adelbert Ames was not a social psychologist—he was a first-rate experimental psychologist as well as a self-trained ophthalmologist, and he was undoubtedly a genius, able to refresh our understanding of visual perception, but he thought of his insights and discoveries as having universal human applicability. As a case in point, he provided the following examples to John Dewey: We would not perceive distance but for the assumption that similar things are identical and that things are wholes, etc. We would not perceive motion but for our assumption of size constancy. Now apparently everybody makes these same assumptions, i.e., they are common, universal, for all people and everybody makes them irrespective to the specific “thing” to which they apply them. They remain the same, so to speak, no matter where in space or in time people are. Everybody make assumptions of the same nature in their perception of “inter-action,” “causality,” and in their social perceptions. (Ames, as cited in Cantril, 1960, p. 97)

The small group of fellow students and faculty with which I became affiliated as of 1952 had a diverse range of interests and expertise, but most of the group had been educated—or were being educated—at Princeton, as social psychologists. As a common denominator, I think we brought to the table a shared desire to bridge what we were jointly learning about perception to what we all individually hoped to be doing—or to continued to do—as applied social psychologists. In a sense, an obvious first step was that of initiating investigations of differences that Ames himself would not have studied—differences in perceptions that we would expect to result from known differences in past experiences and/or motivation. The following is a scintillating case in point that reflected this concern (I shall be delineating a more pedestrian line of research in my next chapter). 14

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AN UNSPORTSMANLIKE GAME In the study of perception, Princeton and Dartmouth had become collaboratively linked, but the schools remained bitter rivals on the football field, and on November 23, 1951, the antagonism culminated in a game in Princeton’s Palmer Stadium, which everybody—including the referees who were allocating an unprecedented number of penalties—adjudged to have been a disgraceful display. There was considerable divergence at the time, however, in the allocation of responsibility. Thus, The Daily Princetonian on November 28 suggested “both teams were guilty” but added that “the blame must be laid primarily at Dartmouth’s doorstep” (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954, pp. 129–130). In Hanover, however, The Dartmouth explained that the problem had been that Princeton’s coach “instilled the old see-what-theydid-go-get-them attitude into his players” and “got results” (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954, p. 129). As psychologists, Hastorf at Dartmouth and Cantril at Princeton responded to what they saw as “the opportunity presented by the occasion to make a ‘real life’ study of a perceptual problem” (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954, p. 130). They began by administering a comprehensive questionnaire to large samples of Princeton and Dartmouth students 1 week after the game, and conducted a second study using a rating instrument after the students had seen a blow-by-blow film of the game. Among other findings, Hastorf and Cantril (1954) reported, Princeton students . . . saw the Dartmouth team make over twice as many infractions as were seen by Dartmouth students. When Princeton students judged these infractions as “flagrant” or “mild,” the ratio was about two “flagrant” to one “mild” in the Dartmouth team, and about one “flagrant” to three “mild” on the Princeton team. (p. 130)

Viewed in transactional terms, these data illustrated—as did the Ames demonstrations—that “the same sensory impingements emanating from the football field, transmitted through the visual mechanism to the brain” can be subject to varied interpretation, and that in situations such as the football game they “give rise to different experiences in different people,” 15

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which “depend in large part on the purposes people bring to the occasion and the assumptions they have of the purposes and probable behaviors of the people involved” (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954, p. 132). Taken one step further, it meant that we have to keep in mind that “what each of us brings to the occasion is unique” (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954, p. 133). This consideration takes us beyond the contrasting perspectives of Princetonians and Dartmouthites; to me, what it suggested was that enlightened social psychologists—such as I was trying to become— ought to be consistently aiming at reconstructions of reality as it is experienced and reported by the individuals we study—even if this might lead (as it once did in my case) to the underhanded accusation that we belong to the “have-tape-recorder-will-travel” school of research.

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2

Initiating a Line of Inquiry

A

mong our cohort at Princeton, which—depending on whom you counted—consisted of four or five persons, my colleague Ed Engel stood out on at least two counts. First, he was married and lived in married housing, which meant that our poker game at his home was unusually well provisioned. Second, he was a zealous and dedicated researcher who was imaginative, single-minded, and indefatigable, and who had unearthed and staked out a scholarly gold mine. Ed Engel had rediscovered the parlor stereoscope, which in the 1850s had provided endless edification as a precursor to television but had also served as useful research tool in studies of binocular vision. What especially impressed Engel were some of the early experiments in which

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14373-002 Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment: Applying Social Psychology in Prisons and Policing, by H. Toch Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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different configurations—such as vertical or horizontal lines—had been presented to the two eyes. He had observed, In binocular rivalry something akin to a competition between two different processes obtains, and what is perceived represents the outcome of this competition. An analysis of the perceptual report allows one to determine the relative effectiveness of the processes initiated separately in the two eyes. (Engel, 1961, p. 290)

Ed Engel’s (1956) initial stereograms featured photographs of former members of Princeton’s football team, and he was able to establish, for example, that a right-side-up face of a football player would tend to be seen if it was paired with an upside-down version of the same face presented to the other eye. Engel noted, “Whereas, in previous work, differences in physical stimulus attributes accounted for the dominance effects, in this case, dominance was attributable to an internal condition, presumably a function of the residual effect of previous stimulation” (p. 297). In other words, the face that is seen is the one that is congruent with the observer’s past experience, whereas the one that is less familiar is not seen.

EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF DIFFERENCES IN EXPERIENCE It did not take long for Engel’s observations to inspire follow-up studies such as cross-cultural and cross-subcultural research that could show the effects of systematic differences in past experience. Bagby (1957), for example, worked north and south of the border, using stereograms such as a baseball scene (drawn from Saturday Evening Post) paired with a bullfight scene, and a young American boy (also from the Saturday Evening Post) paired with a Mexican boy posed in front of a horse. Bagby reported that “the national cultural differences appear critical in affecting perceptual predominance in the majority of the stereogram slide pairs” (p. 344), though the boy with the horse proved to be an exception to the rule. A Harvard University contingent (Pettigrew, Allport, & Barnett, 1958) took their stereoscope to South Africa for an elaborate comparative study of racial stereotyping. 18

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Meanwhile, back in Princeton, stereoscope viewing had gained popularity as a demonstration. Cantril (1957) mentioned to a regional American Psychological Association (APA) audience in Montreal, for example, that, One pair of slides we use in demonstrating this piece of equipment consists of two [stimulus configurations], each a photograph of a statue in the Louvre. One of the statues is that of a Madonna with Child, the other a lovely young female nude. . . . Let me describe what happened in a typical viewing of these stereograms. The viewers happened to be two distinguished psychologists who were visiting me one morning, one from Harvard, the other from Yale. The first looked into the stereoscope and reported that he saw a Madonna with a Child. A few seconds later he exclaimed, “But my God, she is undressing.” What had happened so far was that somehow she had lost the baby she was holding and her robe had slipped down from her shoulders and stopped just above the breast line. Then in a few more seconds she lost her robe completely and became the young nude. For this particular professor, the nude never did get dressed again. Then my second friend took his turn. For a second he could see nothing but the nude and then he exclaimed, “But now a robe is wrapping itself around her.” And very soon he ended up with the Madonna and Child and as far as I know still remains with that vision. (pp. 121–122)

Cantril (1957) happened to mention to the same APA audience that the Princeton psychology department’s laboratory had modified and constructed a life-size Engel stereoscope that enabled pairs of actual people to be alternated or amalgamated. Cantril confessed that he had inaugurated this demonstration by perceptually fusing his wife and his daughter.

STUDYING VIOLENCE PERCEPTION USING THE STEREOSCOPE The research possibilities afforded by the stereoscope became attractive to me as a result of a job move I describe in Chapter 3, through which I was credited with a field of specialization—that of criminology/criminal 19

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justice—to which I had then made no contributions. In considering activities I could belatedly undertake in this field for which my upbringing might have prepared me, my attention drifted to Engel’s stereoscope, to the opportunity the stereoscope might afford for exploring the effects of atypical past experiences, which—as a promising example—might include personal experience with criminal violence. During this period our department had acquired a graduate student with unusual expertise in graphics, and he introduced me to a book of pictograms used in designing highway signs. From this collection of line drawings I was able to garner nine pairs of figures—one related to a violent act or a crime and one neutral—each covering an equivalent portion of the visual field. My “violent” configurations depicted three murders, two suicides, an act of theft, an imprisoned convict, and a policeman writing a citation. In our inaugural study with these violent and nonviolent stereograms (Toch & Schulte, 1961), we presented them to advanced (third-year) students in an educational enterprise designed to “develop professional competence in the fields of law enforcement administration, police science, the prevention and control of delinquency and crime, correctional administration, industrial security administration, and highway traffic safety administration” (Toch & Schulte, 1961, p. 389). We used two comparison groups, including one of psychology students. Our 19 presentations (the pictures were shown once to each eye) resulted in an average of 9.37 “violent” percepts among the advanced police students. For each control group, the mode and the median were 4. We wrote, Assuming that extremely violent scenes are comparatively unfamiliar, we would thus expect violence to be relatively infrequently perceived in true binocular rivalry. We would predict the type of result we obtained from our Control groups. We could assume that law enforcement training supplements this experiential deficit in the area of violence and crime. Unusual experiences, after all, become “familiar” in the course of any specialization. The funeral director or the medical intern, for instance, may learn to accept corpses as part and parcel of everyday experience. 20

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The dedicated nudist may acquire a special conception of familiar attire. The pilot may come to find nothing unusual about glancing out of a window at a bank of clouds. . . . The acceptance of crime as a familiar experience in turn increases the ability or readiness to perceive violence where clues to it are potentially available. (Toch & Schulte, 1961, p. 392)

We concluded, An “increased readiness to perceive” is highly functional. It permits the person to cope with otherwise improbable situations. The law enforcer thus learns to differentiate within violent scenes—to “detect” or “investigate” crimes; the mechanic becomes able to react with dispatch to unusual engine noises; the sonar operator can efficiently respond to infrequent underwater sounds. (Toch & Schulte, 1961, pp. 392–393)

AGE AND GENDER DIFFERENCES IN VIOLENCE PERCEPTION A superlative stereoscope study was completed while I was on sabbatical and could take no credit for any personal involvement. This study by Moore (1966) was an elaborate piece of research, designed to concurrently investigate two sets of questions: “the effects of differential socialization of the sexes on the perception of violence, and the relation of age to the perception of violence” (p. 685). Moore was somehow able to obtain access to classrooms in three schools so as to work with children at five grade levels, in addition to the usual introductory psychology students. He also improved on the design of our studies by adding two “lie slides,” each comprising identical pictures of “blatant violence.” Moore (1966) found a substantial difference between the sexes at each grade level, with boys perceiving more violence. In the case of both sexes, he found that the amount of violence perceived increases in linear fashion with age. He noted that the sex difference was expected, in that “males are taught, directly and indirectly, to be more overtly aggressive and assertive than females” (p. 687). As for the trend related to age, Moore suggested, 21

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“As children mature they are educated into a reality that is a slow-motion facsimile of the police training situation [see the earlier discussion]—a reality where they become increasingly familiar with the abundance of aggression loose in the world” (p. 688). Moore felt that the findings he was reporting were by and large encouraging, and concluded, “Finally, then, sex and development differences found in this study represent learned variant sensitivities of males and females to aggressive situations and feelings which they must know about to operate effectively within a social and cultural context” (p. 688). The formulation raises the question of what could be extrapolated once the “social and cultural context” becomes suffused with violence (as it increasingly has) and produces an indecent proliferation of violent impingements. What then are we likely to say about the effects of socialization? Is a penchant for violence perception in a violent world a reassuring testimonial to our sanity and evidence of our healthy adjustment?

VIOLENCE PERCEPTION AND VIOLENCE PROCLIVITY On the assumption that there could also be a downside to a person’s penchant for seeing violence where other people might not see it, I recruited a psychologist with expertise in such matters to help me investigate the question. My new partner was Ernest Shelley, the director of treatment for the Michigan Department of Corrections. Under his authoritative auspices we were able to stereoscopically process the entire population (N = 81) of a Michigan Corrections–Conservation youth camp, where we informed the inmates that we were interested in testing “the visual recognizability of objects under specific conditions” (Shelley & Toch, 1962, p. 465). This was arguably a fact, though it was admittedly a somewhat incomplete characterization. The study was pretty much a fishing expedition, though we confessed in discussing our findings, It was speculated that if we obtain an indication of a person’s readiness to perceive violence, we might at times learn about the related 22

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presence in him of anti-social motives or predispositions. In other words, we argued that if a person tends to perceive violence more readily than most people, he might also tend to engage in antisocial conduct more readily than most people. (Shelley & Toch, 1962, p. 468)

It was not clear how we would be able to substantiate such a relationship, but we began by identifying a group of 11 prisoners who had scored one standard deviation or more above the camp mean on violence perception. We paired each of these inmates with a low-scoring member of a control group. In comparing these groups, we found no obvious differences in projective test scores or other measures. However, we were able to report the following relatively dramatic outcome: Several weeks after the experiments, two inmates “walked away” from the institution. (This is a very rare occurrence for the camp.) The escapees fell second and fourth in [violence perception] scores among the test group. As further observation time elapsed, five other members of the test group were transferred to the reformatory or prison. . . . Only one of the control group failed to make adequate institutional adjustment. It must be emphasized that the personnel responsible for disciplinary transfers [the staff members who decide that inmates who misbehave cannot be managed in a camp setting] had no access to violence perception scores. (Shelley & Toch, 1962, p. 467)

Strictly speaking, we had not anticipated these eventualities. However, if we had, ours would have been an encouraging finding because “in instruments which pretend to gauge predispositions toward criminal behavior, it is important to demonstrate ‘predictive validity’ rather than relying on ‘concurrent validity,’ which is more easily obtained” (Shelley & Toch, 1962, p. 468). However, the greatest psychological payoff would eventuate from longer term predictions, because Long term would presuppose that readiness to perceive violence is related to a consistent tendency to behave violently. It presupposes, in other words, a stable anti-social component of personality which 23

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manifests itself, among other ways in sensitivity toward violence in the world, or in a relatively routine acceptance of it. (Shelley & Toch, 1962, p. 469)

NO RUSH TO PREDICTIVE JUDGMENT Although several investigations appeared to corroborate our ruminations about a possible relationship between violence perception and past or future behavior (e.g., Berg & Toch, 1964; Nachshon & Rotenberg, 1977; Putoff, 1962), one important study (Wenk, Sarbin, & Sherwood, 1968) failed to record supportive results. In a way, this outcome came as a relief when I discovered that the study had been envisaged as subsumable under a “continuing effort to ultimately locate a set of predictive instruments that will permit an early identification of assault-prone persons” (Wenk et al., 1968, p. 136). That sort of prejudicial exercise would not have been the kind of application with which I would have liked to be associated. That said, there remained the question of why the stereoscope did not differentiate between the groups being tested, and on that count, the authors offered a plausible explanation. Their study took place at a reception guidance center in the California Youth Authority. At that location, “during a period of four weeks, each ward is tested, interviewed and evaluated on his particular psychological, social, academic, vocational and custodial assets and shortcomings” (Wenk et al., 1968, p. 139). A propensity for violent involvements would count among the shortcomings, and “the fact known to all inmates . . . that offenders convicted of a violent crime [the subjects being studied] are more extensively evaluated and very often examined by a psychiatrist” (Wenk et al., 1968, p. 144). In that context—given a study population of moderately intelligent young men—a stereogram in which a drawing of a male figure with a gun is paired with a drawing of a comparable figure without a gun can easily result in a somewhat curtailed description of what one has seen. The authors thus reluctantly concluded the following: The present findings are rather discouraging in our search for techniques to identify violence-prone offenders. . . . The lack of 24

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convergence between expectations and findings directed us to an analysis of the experimental situation. This analysis suggested that subjects may respond to “cue properties” of the binocular resolution and give a verbal report different from what they saw, a report congruent with their unwarranted beliefs about the ultimate use of the test results. (Wenk et al., 1968, p. 146)

Whether the beliefs of the original subjects were in fact “unwarranted” depends on what one means by “the ultimate use of the test results.” There was certainly no danger in this case that the inmates might be in jeopardy if they described in detail what they were seeing, but there was a real risk that others could be. If these prisoners had discoursed volubly about guns, knives, and ropes, they could have made a fateful contribution to the otherwise-aborted development of a stigmatizing tool.

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3

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I

first came across my long-time colleague Doug Grant on a field trip out of San Diego in 1955. At the time, I had the dubious distinction of being the only sailor in the navy with a PhD in psychology. However, there were other highly educated draftees in the vicinity, and our superiors decided to stake us intellectuals to two stimulating excursions. One of these consisted of a day on a minesweeper, where I discovered that minesweepers make one seasick. The second expedition was a trip to the naval retraining command, Camp Elliott. The purpose of this experience was for us to see what had become known as the Camp Elliott Experiment. This project was being run by J. Douglas Grant, a psychologist who had been described several weeks earlier by TIME magazine (“Psychology at Work,” 1955) as “a burly, six-foot Stanford graduate, with an infectious grin and a saddletanned bald head” (p. 32). This was a vintage TIME portrayal, though they

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14373-003 Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment: Applying Social Psychology in Prisons and Policing, by H. Toch Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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forgot to mention that Grant was a former football player and ex-boxer and that he made a perfect martini. TIME was able to interview Doug Grant, but we visitors could not. As I later recalled, Our group did not get to see Doug Grant. After the usual welcome by a braided officer, we were hosted by a Marine sergeant. The sergeant was on Doug Grant’s staff. He worked with court-martialled offenders, some of who were also on Doug Grant’s staff. The sergeants spent 6 to 9 weeks eating, sleeping, working, recreating and frequently meeting with offenders in closed Living Groups of 20. Each group had a consulting psychologist, who worked with the men individually and in group sessions. (Toch, 1993, p. 73)

Unbeknownst to me at the time, another feature of the Camp Elliott Experiment was fated to exercise a substantial influence on many of my activities in years to come. I observed and recorded during our visit that “the [Camp Elliott] Experiment was committed to the concept of self-study and to systematic inquiry, including research. Inmates studied their personalities and those of other inmates. Custody studied custody” (Toch, 1993, p. 73). I quoted Doug Grant himself, who had reported, Three times a week, three professional members of the staff meet separately with three maximum security groups (which include all maximum security prisoners), for an hour and a half discussion. The custodial staff are included in these discussion groups. Once a week the maximum security custodial staff meet with the three ­professional staff members and a research representative for self-inquiry discussions concerning their maximum-security work. (Grant, 1957, p. 304)

There was a great deal else for us tourists to learn at Camp Elliott, where (again unbeknownst to me) we were witnessing the earliest demonstrations of what was to become recognized as a landmark approach to rehabilitation. As I described the situation at Camp Elliott, 28

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Inmates were classified by the sort of interventions they could tolerate and benefit from, treatment staff (including nonprofessional treatment staff) by the sort of approach they felt comfortable using and were good at using. This made it possible to pair intervention agents and targets in ways that were effective and congruent with the inmate’s stage of development. The inmate who needed structure and benevolent control got structure and benevolent control. The high-anxiety, conflict-ridden inmate got all the empathy and insightful exploration he could use. Grant referred to the drill sergeants who had that sort of capability as “junior psychiatrists.” The behavior modifiers he called “coaches.” (Toch, 1993, p. 73)

The results—as Doug Grant and his associates had expected—were that “the interaction between the predicted supervisory effectiveness and maturity of the subject (Analysis of variance, p = less than .05) affected restoration success” (Grant & Grant, 1959, p. 492). In more pungent language, The [offender] maturity classification system appears valueless without an effectiveness of supervision classification, and an effectiveness of supervision classification appears valueless without a maturity classification. . . . It is when the interaction of the situational and [offender] classification variables are considered that one finds ­productive relationships with offender behavior. (Grant & Grant, 1959, p. 495)

This simple but incredibly propaedeutic statement summarizes the factual underpinning of the differential treatment model—which decades later became the most widely deployed and influential approach to youthful-offender rehabilitation. Of course, considerable water had flowed under the bridge in the interim. As Doug Grant’s partner, M ­ arguerite Warren, wrote in retrospect years later, “The [Camp Elliott] study produced one of the first bits of evidence about the importance of matching staff and clients. . . . The division of the offenders into only two categories (high and low maturity) and workers into only two categories now seems to us very naive. However, it was the beginning” (Warren, 1969, p. 9). 29

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THE SERENDIPITOUS INCEPTION OF A LONG-TERM ASSOCIATION In 1957, we draftees were released by the navy on short notice, but I was able to secure a last-minute (nontenure) academic appointment in Michigan. I owed my stroke of good fortune to the fact that a member of the Michigan State University psychology faculty had been accorded a sabbatical, leaving his undergraduate lecture sections in need of coverage. The course title, Legal and Criminal Psychology, sounded ominous and intimidating, but not as intimidating as starvation, and in any event, the need to shamelessly improvise would be evanescent. Or so I thought. But while I was going through the strenuous motions of pretending to teach a subject I knew nothing about, the incumbent instructor (and criminal psychology expert) decided to relocate. By default, I was thus officially transmuted into a leading criminologist of a “psychological” (as opposed to sociological) persuasion. My immediate order of business was to begin to familiarize myself with the subject matter to be covered in an introductory course. Fortunately, I discovered that I could exploit the charitable impulse of some extremely knowledgeable mentors if I looked pitiful enough. And as a group, we went on to compile an eminently deployable text—first called Legal and Criminal Psychology (Toch, 1961a) and, later, Psychology of Crime and Criminal Justice (Toch, 1979/1986). It was further incumbent on me to ratify my entitlement to my new field of specialization by embarking on some pertinent research. I decided to try to satisfy the requirement by extending the exploration of correlates of violence perception using the stereoscope (see Chapter 2). I could not have anticipated that this line of inquiry might lead to a reunion with J. Douglas Grant, but it did. While I was acquiring my new area of specialization, Doug Grant had joined the California Department of Corrections as its chief of research. I got in touch with Doug in 1961 because our research using the stereoscope with institutionalized youthful offenders had yielded encouraging findings (Berg & Toch, 1964; Shelley & Toch, 1962). In fact, the data looked so incredibly neat that I felt the research begged for replication. However, I also thought that I might have been straining the hospitality of the Michigan 30

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prison system and that another venue might be in order. On that impulse, therefore, I mailed carbon copies of our manuscripts to Doug Grant, asking whether he might have an interest in the area. In response, I received a special delivery air mail letter dated September 1, 1961. This letter read, All is O.K. for your spending the five days of September 11 through September 15 with us to consider developing your perceptual discrimination approach to correctional diagnoses. Please let me know when you will arrive in Sacramento. Sincerely, J. Douglas Grant, Chief, Research Division PS: Please sign and return all four copies of Standard Agreement No. 26.20 attached

EMBARKING ON AN UNEXPECTEDLY AUGMENTED ASSIGNMENT By way of an exonerating preamble, I can certify that preliminary steps were taken thereafter to extend and replicate our prison stereoscope studies in California. A skilled inmate carpenter in a local prison had constructed two portable stereoscopes exceeding my specifications, and I went on to contribute an essay entitled “The Stereoscope: A New Frontier in Psychological Research” to Volume 3 (Toch, 1961b) of the Department of Corrections Research Newsletter. I recall that several productive discussions also took place about the logistics of doing a prediction study based on violence perception scores related to interpersonal maturity level classifications. At some juncture we became sidetracked, and I am not certain that I feel an overwhelming sense of guilt about opportunities we may have missed. Admittedly, it might have been interesting to confirm that youthful offenders operating at an I2Aa (Unsocialized, aggressive) level would report perceiving the largest number of violent stereograms and that I4Na’s (Neurotic, acting out) might see more violence than I4Nx’s (Neurotic, anxious) or vice versa. But the prospect of then going on to ascertain (as we did in Michigan) that a high incidence of violence perception might turn out to be correlated with future misbehavior impressed me in retrospect as uninviting. For one, any measure that one can invoke to 31

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predict misbehavior inevitably gets used to badly overpredict misbehavior. More serious, average offenders have any number of incapacitating impediments facing them as they embark on life in the community, and the last thing they need under those circumstances is for some overeager psychologists to have uncovered an additional stigmatizing attribute. Last, I would hate to be the psychologist who would have to explain a blindly empirical inference to the offender. In any event, such quibbles became academic in this case, because priorities had abruptly changed—having shifted fortuitously during the week of my visit. The challenge of real-life violence had suddenly become more tangible and immediate, and the need for violence-related research now came to be defined as information about the actual behavior of perpetrators and victims. My contribution was concurrently redefined as that of violence researcher—the drawback being that I knew next to nothing about violent behavior and those who engage in it. The incentives for my unmerited transmutation originated in incidents of violence that were being cumulatively recorded within the prison system and in peremptory requests that were being received from the governor’s office. The prison system had been experiencing an increase in assaults on staff members and inmates; there had also been unexpected changes in the types of incidents reported. The governor’s office in turn had become seriously concerned (as had various police agencies around the state) about publicized predations of recidivistic offenders on parole. The developments that followed were recorded by Lawrence Bennett, who came to spearhead research activities in the department in the 1970s: The next effort was a major one. The 1965 Task Force to Study Violence was carried out by the Research Division under the direction of top-level administrative staff. The effort was augmented by such knowledgeable individuals as Hans Tock [sic] and James Park. Methodology for this particular study involved the examination of data concerning violent incidents in six major institutions with analyses directed toward shifts in patterns between 1963 and 1964, and a comparison of both the aggressors and victims with their respective populations. . . . A large number of findings resulted. (Bennett, 1975, p. 7) 32

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My principal interest in connection with the wide-ranging activity Bennett (1975) described was to investigate the possibility of inferring the perpetrator’s motivation from incident descriptions. Bennett recalled that “an attempt was made to unravel the motivational aspects of the incidents” (p. 8). As an example, he mentioned that “it was found that 35 percent of the inmate to inmate assaults seemed to stem from accidental, real or imagined insults combined with hyper sensitivity” (p. 8).

A STUDY OF VIOLENT MEN BY VIOLENT MEN My ultimate objective was to move from a classification of motives for participation in individual incidents to a categorization of the motivation of persons who were recurrently involved in incidents. The study group of which I was a member thus concluded in its report to the task force that “it would be desirable to see a five year, fully staffed research project on institutional violence. Its purpose would be to study the personality and behavior of inmates and staff who contribute to violence” (Mueller, Toch, & Molof, 1965, p. 10). Our report also mentioned that the project the group envisioned might profitably include inmate research assistants. On both counts, progress had in fact been made by the time we filed our recommendation. Doug Grant and I had submitted an application to the National Institute for Mental Health for support under the auspices of the Institute for the Study of Crime and Delinquency (a spinoff of the Department of Corrections) to do a multiyear psychological study of recurrently violent offenders. This application had been favorably reviewed, and funded. On the second count, our research staff was to prominently include prisoners and former prisoners on parole. By 1966, Grant and I were sufficiently far along with our project for me to describe it in an invited address to Division 8 of the American Psychological Association (APA) at its annual convention in New York City. I titled my talk “The Social Psychology of Violence,” and I began by announcing, Before I turn to the “social psychology” of violence I must tell you about the social psychology of our project, and I have to start with the claim that our staff is probably collectively superior to the personnel 33

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of other projects. Our top researcher, for example, is an interdisciplinary social scientist for whom I cannot find enough praise. His name is Manuel Rodriguez, and his academic background consists of an eighth grade education, a term in the U.S. Army Supply School and a short course in automobile repair. But Rodriguez has other academic qualifications. Before the age of eighteen, he was arrested for malicious mischief and assault. Later, he was sentenced for such offenses as armed robbery, burglary, firearms possession, narcotic addiction and drunk driving . . . ­Rodriguez has spent fifteen of his thirty six years behind bars, mostly in the California State Prison at San Quentin. And it was at San ­Quentin that ­Rodriguez became interested in the subject of our research. (Toch, 1966a)

I noted that we had recruited Rodriguez in prison, where he participated in the New Careers Development Project, which I describe in my next chapter. This project was an intensive training experience designed to develop marketable human-service-related skills, including research skills, among California prison inmates. As it happened, prison violence research provided an appropriate (and accessible) pool of case material. Manuel Rodriguez had thus become a violence researcher, and when he was accorded parole, we were happy to continue to employ him. As I told my APA audience, Outside, Rodriguez has acted as our principal interviewer. He has interviewed parolees with violent records and citizens who have assaulted police officers. He not only was a sympathetic and incisive interviewer, but became unusually successful in stimulating interest among potential subjects. I might add that Manuel is 5’ 10” tall and weighs 175 pounds. He generally wears shirts that allow an unimpeded view of two arm-fulls of tattoos. In addition, when we began the police assaulter interviews, Manuel grew a bushy mustache to make himself look—as he puts it—more subculture. This prop undergirds an invitation to participate that starts with the words “we are not a snitch outfit,” but then proceeds to a thoughtful, honest exposition of our objectives. (Toch, 1966a) 34

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I also told my APA audience that Grant and I were in the business of attempting “to blur the line between observer and observed” (Toch, 1966a). We had tried to accomplish this by inviting our interviewees to speculate about psychological denominators among incidents they had reviewed. Though the response to this invitation was not invariably productive, it did give each respondent “the same opportunity we [enjoyed] to play scientist, and become a minor partner in our enterprise” (Toch, 1966a). At later stages of our project, the incipient effort at encouraging selfstudy acquired a great deal more importance. The possibility had occurred to us along the way that violent offenders who were enabled to understand their own maladaptive behavior might be further assisted to give consideration to less destructive or self-destructive responses to provocations. The move to attempt implementation of this paradigm in a specialized prison unit (Toch & Adams, 2002) did not enjoy the success it undoubtedly deserved. However, a group of police officers did adopt a variant of the idea and used it in designing a peer review (or action review) panel for fellow problem officers (Toch & Grant, 2005; Toch, Grant, & Galvin, 1975). I revisit this undertaking in a later chapter.

POST DICTUM: THE CALIFORNIA GANG VIOLENCE PROBLEM Among developments in the California prison system, none has attracted more attention (and arguably, inspired more disproportionate responses) than some of the changes that have occurred in the ethnicity of participants in violent transactions. Shortly after the period during which our review of violent incidents had taken place, there was a perceived spillover into the prison system of race riots in the community, including some of their political (Black power) overtones. Thereafter, the overwhelming concern of the prison administration was with conflicts arising from rivalry among Mexican American prison gangs. As was accurately pointed out by James W. L. Park (Bennett’s superior, and former warden of San Quentin), the concern had been consistently obsessive. At a conference of violence experts in 1976, Park observed, 35

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The reader of the [prison gang] literature . . . will be immersed in a fantasy world that is composed of excerpts from the Infantry Manual and Alice in Wonderland. This feeling of unreality is heightened by reading the official accounts of these groups written by staff investigators who spend an inordinate amount of time trying to ascertain what rank particular inmates hold in the organization . . . . The suspicion arises that inmates and employees are each feeding the others fantasy lives in an effort to erase the essential bleakness of life generally and prison life particularly. There is no doubt that conspiracies, election of leaders, execution of defectors and laying of battle plans are far more emotionally involving for inmates than washing dishes or attending school, nor is there any doubt that chasing Nuestra Generales is more stimulating than manning a guard post. (pp. 93–94)

Park (1976) raised the possibility that the incestuous game he described might result in a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby “the inmate organization becomes exactly what the staff fears it was in the beginning” (pp. 93–94). Forty years after Park’s observation, his sagacity has become painfully evidenced by a standoff in California corrections and a price the state has to pay for its continued preoccupation with gang mythology, which has resulted in a series of highly publicized hunger strikes, a raft of litigation, and a running public relations disaster. California’s concern with countering the perceived threats posed by prison gangs culminated in a draconian policy of indefinitely segregating prisoners whose only transgression is their alleged membership in an alleged gang. In fact, an alleged friendship with an alleged gang member can earn the California prisoner sequestration for life as an alleged gang “associate.” I have had occasion to point out that what has evolved has many similarities to the prosecution of witches in the Middle Ages (Toch, 2007). In those early days, the stigmatizing was done by inquisitors steeped in witchcraft lore, but in prisons today, “evidence is usually gathered by some variant of the ‘institutional gang investigator,’ ‘threat group investigator,’ or ‘security threat group intelligence coordinator’ . . . who is presumed to be conversant with the seamier side of gang activities” (p. 276). I pointed out that “in 36

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practice the incumbent of a threat group office is a person who becomes the repository of rumors, innuendo, and scuttlebutt” (Toch, 2007, p. 276). In California’s supermax prison, Pelican Bay, the key decision-maker is its institutional gang investigator, who serves as resident prosecutor, judge, and jury and whose decisions have almost invariably been irrevocable. The result of his efforts is that at present Being associated with a prison gang—even if you haven’t done anything illegal—carries a much heavier penalty than say, stabbing someone. [Gang] association could land you in solitary for decades. An inmate who murders a guard—the severest crime in prison—can get no more than five years in the SHU [segregation unit]. (Bauer, 2012, p. 2)

In other words, more pain is being inflicted on a group of persons selected for their sociability to prevent them from engaging in misbehavior they might in theory manifest than on substantial offenders who have demonstrably and violently transgressed.

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4

Supporting New Careers

J

. Douglas Grant was a dedicated advocate of bottom-up reform. His perspective appealed to me intuitively because it seemed to imply an unconditional faith in the ability of people to make constructive contributions. I subsequently discovered that Grant’s views also dovetailed with prevailing assumptions in social psychology about the importance of participation as a vehicle in effective planned change and innovation (see Chapter 6). Grant’s activities during this early period centered on preparing prisoners to make contributions in a variety of paraprofessional capacities to human services agencies (and especially to criminal justice–related organizations) that might be willing to hire them. The training program Grant directed in the prison system was called “New Careers Development Project,” and it was federally funded.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14373-004 Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment: Applying Social Psychology in Prisons and Policing, by H. Toch Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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Many other analogous activities were being supported by the government across the country at the time, under the rubric of the war on poverty. These variegated involvements were discussed by Pearl and Riessman (1965) in a seminal book, which opened with the following paragraph: This book deals with a current and unforgiveable shame of the Unites States of America, the name of which is poverty. For too many years widespread and pervasive poverty has existed in this country and the public has been either unaware or unconcerned about the problem. Today there is awareness and concern, frenzied activity and legislation, demonstration programs, and volunteers in the field—all functioning with but one stated ambition—to help the poor. The concern is laudable although the activity might not be. (p. 1)

One of Pearl and Riessman’s (1965) assumptions—the one underlying the New Careers movement—was that job opportunities in the human services industry were bound to proliferate (which, given the expanding war-on-poverty empire, was quite plausible) but that the advertised qualifications for human services jobs served to exclude the average unemployed job applicant: “In over-simplified terms,” they wrote, “there exist simultaneously large numbers of people without jobs and a great many jobs without people” (p. 5). The solution advocated by Pearl and Riessman was the development of “New Careers.” They explained the idea as follows: The new career concept has as a point of departure the creation of jobs normally allotted to highly-trained professionals or technicians, but which could be performed by the unskilled, inexperienced, and relatively untrained worker; or, the development of activities not currently performed by anyone, but for which there is a readily acknowledged need and which can also be satisfactorily accomplished by the unskilled worker. (p. 13)

Doug Grant’s version of the New Careers concept added a new twist by highlighting the benefits of training and hiring ex-offenders and other targets of reintegration efforts. Grant (1967) pointed out that not the least 40

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of the immediate advantages of such a program was that it would support the mission of the system by assisting the rehabilitation of its clients: There is considerable evidence that shifting the offender’s role from that of recipient of rehabilitative services to one of active participation in the rehabilitation of others helps in the process of breaking away from a given set of delinquent identifications. There is also evidence that getting the offender to commit himself to a cause or a movement can directly affect his attitudes and behavior. (p. 26)

The offender as New Careerist would be in a position “to stand outside of and to look at his [own] behavior,” but unlike peers who remained as conventional treatment clients, he or she would be doing this “from a position of responsibility and strength” (Grant, 1967, p. 27). More important, the offender’s past experience could now serve as a tool of his or her new trade rather than merely functioning as a heavy burden to be rejected and overcome. The offender’s past would be invoked; it could be “used in a positive way to meet ends that transcend his own needs (helping others, building knowledge)” (Grant, 1967, p. 27). I illustrated in my previous chapter some benefits that accrued to those of us who worked with ex-offender New Careerists in the field. I pointed out that in doing research, Manuel Rodriguez and those like him not only contribute by facilitating the tasks we professional researchers were supposed to perform but could also make the performance of these tasks possible. As academically trained members of the middle class aspiring to function in the real-world community, we needed credible confederates to link us with persons whom we might otherwise not be able to assist because we might not be able to reach them, to understand what their concerns might be, or to earn or merit their trust. But the culminating contribution of paraprofessionals in the research enterprise transcended the provision of credible outreach, such as through their involvement in data gathering. We were able to illustrate with our study (Toch, 1969, 1992c) that paraprofessionals can participate in data analysis as sources of insight and providers of perspective. The resulting process is one of mutual enrichment and cross-fertilization in a group effort designed to address and solve problems. 41

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NEW CAREERS AS A SOCIAL MOVEMENT In July 1963, I was invited to attend a 3-day symposium held at the California Rehabilitation Center, Norco. The session was to be concerned with “the use of products of a social problem in coping with the problem,” which nicely summarized the goal of Doug Grant’s project. However, the definition also described the aspiration of other groups and organizations, many of which were represented at the conference. Grant had become aware of the fact that I had a burning interest in the psychology of social movements and had been struggling to write a book on the subject (Toch, 1965). He consequently concluded that I might welcome an opportunity to free associate about some parallels between the New Careers and self-help movements. I did so at the conference, and I enjoyed it. The following is an excerpt of what I said: Professional human relations at its best owes its potency to interpersonal processes which are as old as civilized humanity. . . . People change, console, encourage, educate, and indoctrinate each other at every turn without the benefit of licenses, certificates and diplomas. No one can claim a monopoly to basic human offerings such as kindness, the ability to listen, the art of entering into community with others, or the sincere and interested sharing of personal problems. The attitudes, values, and motives of a variety of people are molded and revamped endlessly in the context of their interactions with other people. Contacts among nonprofessionals have converted saints into sinners (and vice versa), have made mystics out of extraverts and have produced mad executioners for concentration camps from the ranks of congenial heads of households. Similarly, therapeutic effects seem to be obtained through the sharing of problems among persons who have them, on a scale which makes professional therapy an extremely puny enterprise by comparison. One step removed from these spontaneous human interactions through which people may be changed are deliberate conjoint efforts to achieve the same end. Alcoholics Anonymous, for instance, with its 700 chapters and 300,000 members, is only one of 265 self-help organizations currently active in this country. These organizations capi42

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talize on the transactions of persons whose only qualifications are their personal problems. This point is expressed in a local publication of Alcoholics Anonymous: “You were selected because you have been the outcasts of the world, and your experience as drunkards has made, or should make you humbly alert to the cries of distress that come from alcoholics everywhere.” In the more formal language of a national publication, “Meeting and talking and helping other alcoholics together we are somehow able to lose the compulsion to drink, once a dominant force in our lives.” The stress in such groups is on reciprocity, rather than on the rendering of services. Each member feels that he is helped by helping others. He also feels that his beneficiaries are simultaneously his source of support. One self-help reducing group thus ends its membership pledge with the words, The more we get together The slimmer we’ll be. For your loss is my loss And my loss is your loss Another self-help group, made up of mental patients endeavoring to stay out of hospitals, tackles the same theme in a ditty entitled “I’m Like You and You’re Like Me,” intended to be sung to the music of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” One of the refrains of this number proclaims: I’m glad we met I won’t forget That you helped me to get well. And if it’s true I helped you, too Then for both of us it’s swell. The intensification and focusing of interpersonal processes, unfortunately, tend to lead to their formalization. Most self-help groups, for instance, come to feel that certain “steps,” techniques or rituals are required for effective change. A special language and a private set of concepts, tend to develop. Finally, self-help groups come to reinforce their arbitrarily selected techniques, by referring to them as products of “experience,” by incorporating a continuous stream of 43

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testimonials and commercials into their proceedings, and by otherwise indicating that theirs is the Only Road to Salvation. The institutionalization of social change . . . undermines social change. . . . The art of human relations becomes lost among techniques of manipulation and manuals of exploitation. [One of the challenges we face,] it would seem, is to keep the process of social change alive. Merely removing it from the hands of professionals is not enough, since this can represent little more than a transition from one type of guild system to another, although admittedly a less expensive one. The cooperation of the professional and laymen, however, may keep the systems open, because each of these roles may act to inhibit the institutionalization of the other. . . . In summary, it would seem to me that the job is not merely to change the client or the patient, or the group member. If cultural change is to accelerate to meet the urgent needs of our day, the changers have to change faster than the people being changed. All avenues of inducing change in people must be broadened, and new expressways to this end must be constructed. This type of enterprise will tolerate no artificial boundaries, classifications, empires, dogmas or other restraints. Each one of us must learn to work with persons or forces which promote the destruction of our roles, values, habits and preconceptions. (Toch, 1963, pp. 119–122)

GETTING DOWN TO BRASS TACKS The next New Careers conclave to which I was invited was held in September 1966 at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California, which described itself as offering “rustic charm and simple elegance” and providing “an unforgettable escape from the demands of everyday life.” The latter phrase would not have applied to our conference, which was subtitled “Implementation Issues.” The mundane nature of these concerns differentiated this second conference from the earlier one, as did the active participation of New Careers program graduates. The client perspective made for animated and spirited dialogues, because what program administrators listed as desirable requisites or 44

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attributes, the newly minted New Careerists often viewed as chickenhearted timidity. Gilbert Geis, who summarized the first plenary discussion, reflected the tenor of the debate. He noted that the group’s view of one of the pioneering efforts that had been described was that it “was taking such short, truncated steps that it foreordained its own success, but in doing so vitiated to a great extent the reason why it was undertaken” (Geis, 1966, p. 20). The New Careerists were particularly offended by the notion that the program at issue had goals other than resocializing the participants. According to Geis (1966), Ex-offenders insisted that rehabilitation should be the basic goal of employment programs, and their personal testimony was to the point that had they themselves not been given New Careers assistance immediately after their release from prison they would inevitably have made the dismal statistical predictions regarding their chances of parole come true. (p. 20)

Geis (1966) noted that he was sensing “ethical concerns” of a “perplexing nature” and observed that “the rehabilitation stress, deeply rooted in a biblical ethos about the majesty of saving even one stray lamb, seems to be particularly unsuited as a major guideline for New Careers work eligibility” (p. 21). Geis said that he understood that the concern of administrators about ensuring the survival of their programs might strike some social movement members as pedestrian, that “despite the cogent reason behind it, a blueprint geared to survival is not apt to arouse much enthusiasm among persons concerned with innovative and imaginative techniques, such as most individuals advocating the New Careers approach” (p. 22). I was assigned to summarize the next session, which was related to training issues. I decided to use the occasion to wade into the debate about the relative importance of rehabilitation in the program: There is the obvious fact that prison inmates cannot be viewed as models of successful human relations unless they are habilitated, and this process (to put the matter conservatively) cannot be tested in prison. In other words, our trainees are “suspect” in the sphere of 45

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human adjustment, and there is no reason to assume that technical training would be more effective than fresh air in converting antisocial dispositions to social ones. To put the matter more directly, we cannot abrogate corrections or therapy or social education or rehabilitation, and assume that our sole function is to produce competence. Competence has a way of becoming wasted with reconfinement. Social change agents must— as a first step—experience change themselves and become capable of it themselves. (Toch, 1966b, p. 46)

While I had the floor I decided to conclude by repeating some of my 1963 sermon relating to the asset and liability of New Careers becoming a social movement: One risk to be considered here is the possibility of inducing overinvolvement. Thus, (1) the trainee may become unrealistic in his expectations or self-assessment because he places excessive faith in his training; or (2) he may come to view every detail of his belated upbringing as sacred, and thus reduce his efficacy. An illustration of this danger is an incident involving a New Careerist on the panel who tried to make a case for flexible training by listing as absolutely necessary every training device used in his own program. (Toch, 1966b, p. 48)

IT IS A COLD AND LONELY WORLD OUTSIDE THE NEST While New Careerists are in training, they belong to a peer group that offers dependable reciprocal reinforcement, and they enjoy patronage and sponsorship from unfailingly parental staff members. When program graduates are employed by the project itself upon graduation, or if they secure an assignment in the vicinity, they can usually retain a portion of this support system. (They may thus rely on program staff members for emergency “loans” when they predictably encounter cash flow programs—and they know that there is always a shoulder to cry on if the need arises.) 46

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Away from home base, New Careerists may miss the emotional and physical nurturance the program had been providing. Allan Williams, who summarized the discussion of this issue at the conference, listed several ways in which New Careerists said they would love to perpetuate the buttressing provided them by the training project: Among the new careerists themselves, it was thought that more emphasis should be placed on developing groups specifically designed to help each other with personal problems. . . . Another suggestion was that one member of a group of new careerists might be assigned the role of being available to help others when personal difficulties become a threat to adjustment. . . . The question was raised about why more use is not made of typical community resources. . . . The new careerists in the group were not optimistic about the value of the above types of resources. Some felt professional help is generally not necessary. They also strongly felt that more can be gained by talking to each other. (Williams, 1966, pp. 66–67)

A person who by virtue of his or her demonstrated competence earns promotions and transfer away from home, and who is accorded added responsibilities for which he or she may not have been adequately prepared, is set up for failure. Training-induced inflated self-confidence, combined with peer-reinforced reluctance to seek assistance, make for a potent self-defeating formula. This is especially so when past failure has led to substance abuse and when the new careerist happens to be working in a program for substance-abusing offenders. This scenario could be purely hypothetical if I had not received the following letter, dated April 13, 1971, from a member of our group: Dear Hans: As you may know Manuel Rodriguez is in the Alameda County Jail awaiting trial on armed robbery. He has been there since November 1970 and I am told he will go to court this April 13th. . . . Con mucho respeto, Ricardo Ontiveras 47

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POSTMORTEM As a social movement, New Careers lost steam as it lost financial resources, with the rest of the war on poverty. The election of conservative administrations, such as that of Governor Reagan in California, expedited the demise. Moreover, there were continuing problems along the way that had never been successfully addressed. As the most prominent such problem, the guild system under which workers in the human services had been traditionally organized, by its nature proved to be adamantly resistant to the notion that persons who have not been conventionally trained and bureaucratically certified could earn the right to exercise professional responsibilities—“para” or otherwise. This built-in resistance was exacerbated when the persons at issue were former clients of the system, with the liabilities that had accorded them that role. The other side of the coin was that the identity of the human services worker happens to be tied to his or her expertise in dealing with defective human beings—people who are in need of guidance, remediation, surveillance, control, and so forth. Such human beings did not inspire confidence on their own—and certainly did not appear to qualify as prospective colleagues. And given the presumed chronicity of the average human deficit, the passage of time would not provide anything like sufficient reassurance in that regard. To be sure, individual New Careerists (including several members of our group of ex-offenders) became impressive success stories and appeared to demonstrate the viability of the model. However, New Careers as an experiment in public policy did not stay around long enough to have staying power—it did not last long enough to grow roots, to be convincingly assimilated, integrated, and institutionalized, and thereby to survive.

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Partnering With Police Officers

M

y involvements with the police had their inception during a coffee break at an advisory group meeting of a now-defunct graduate school at the University of California in 1966. J. Douglas Grant was a panel member, representing the corrections department. Chief Edward Toothman of the Oakland police belonged to the group, as a spokesperson for law enforcement. Neither Grant nor Chief Toothman had a reputation for engaging in small talk during coffee breaks, so their exchange somehow turned to the details of our ongoing interviews with recurrently violent parolees. “If you are interested in men who have been repeatedly involved in violence,” Chief Toothman is reported to have said, “you should be interviewing some of my officers in Oakland.” According to Doug Grant, he replied by announcing, “My colleague Hans Toch will be in your office Monday morning.”

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14373-005 Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment: Applying Social Psychology in Prisons and Policing, by H. Toch Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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The outcome of my Monday meeting with Chief Toothman was a set of interviews with police officers in the Oakland department who were deemed by his administration to be creating problems on the street. To round out the picture, our team located and interviewed some of the citizens with whom the officers had been experiencing these problems— including several we had to interview in prison. The activities that followed were inspired not only by issues highlighted in the interviews but also by our concern about the officers we had interviewed, and their future. We saw some of the officers as attractive and talented individuals who could make invaluable contributions. We also thought that their unfortunate experiences with degenerating encounters on the street could be redeployed to beneficent effect. We consequently began to entertain the idea of what would most likely sound like a counterintuitive intervention—an intervention, however, that was reminiscent of New Careers (see Chapters 3 and 4), in that it involved violence-experienced officers working on the study and amelioration of police–citizen violence. One argument for such experimentation would be that the officers had relevant firsthand knowledge that could ­provide them with a head start in exploring the problem of police– citizen ­confrontations. Plus, they had an obvious stake in addressing the problem. We presented our proposal to Chief Toothman’s successor, Chief Charles Gain. Charles Gain was slated to acquire a legendary reputation as a reformer and innovator during an immensely turbulent period in American policing, but he took the time to listen to us and to respond. We talked, and over the next several years, Chief Gain remained a dependable source of inspiration and support to our involvements. During this same period, we retained the financial backing of our sponsors in the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), who were not offended nor turned off by the sudden transmutation of our prison violence research into a police study. The NIMH classified our project as “training,” but it could have been categorized as “organizational change.” With the chief’s blessing, we set up an entity called the Violence Prevention Unit (VPU). During the first 50

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phase of our venture, the VPU was staffed by seven officers, three of who had been involved in our interview study. These seven officers met during 2 consecutive days a week for 22 weeks. They were tasked with originating studies and designing interventions to reduce conflicts in police– citizen encounters. The following year (during Phase 2), the project was expanded, with the seven officers becoming leaders of three groups comprising 17 violence-involved officers who were assigned a comparable mission. In Phase 3, products of Phases 1 and 2 were implemented by the police department, and the process was coordinated by a spinoff of our project called the Conflict Management Section.

ADMISSIONS CRITERIA One of the most impressive officers we interviewed in our study of “problem officers” was Carl Hewitt. By virtue of his effervescence, imagination, and eloquence, Hewitt became the most influential member of our Phase 1 group and the most effective leader in Phase 2. He eventually retired as a sergeant, with a diagnosed heart condition. During his initial interview, Carl reviewed for us in detail an ill-fated encounter with a bright but volatile adolescent, which ended in a messy physical tussle. The official arrest report Carl had filed captures the frivolous inception of the incident: R/O [Carl, the reporting officer] saw what appeared to be the figure of a man sitting on a bench inside the fence of the school yard in the shadows. [Carl’s] attention was brought to the figure because of his light colored jacket . . . [Carl] asked the susp [kid] “What are you doing in there?” [The kid] replied, “ask the question again.” [Carl] “What are you doing in there?” [Kid] “I’m sitting on a bench. What the hell does it look like!?” [Carl] “Come outside the fence. I want to talk to you.” [Kid] “Talk to me through the fence! What do you want, anyway?!” [Carl] “I want to know who you are and what you’re doing here.” [Kid] “What you want to know for. I didn’t do anything!” [Carl] What’s your name?” [Kid] “None of your damn business!” [Carl] “I don’t want to have to chase you, now come out!” [The kid] laughed 51

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and was on his feet at this time and backed away saying, “Come in and get me.”

The report described the following culminating encounter: [The kid] began struggling violently and [Carl] finally managed to get behind [the kid] and get a choke hold. [The kid] was yelling loudly and began kicking [Carl] in the ankle and legs with backward kicks. [The kid] at this time struck [Carl] about 4 or 5 times solidly with his left elbow into [Carl’s] left rib area. One of the blows winded [Carl] but the choke hold was maintained. . . . [Carl’s] Watch band was broken during struggle.

A RETROSPECT In 2012—after many years of close collaboration and friendship—I sent Carl an affectionate e-mail alluding to his 1966 experience: “On the 15th of April you can commemorate the 45th Anniversary of your historic encounter with Jonathan Young [not his actual name], who is now 61 years old if he’s still with us.” At the time, young Jonathan observed: The main thing about this whole thing was it was just a matter of attitudes. I guess my attitude was wrong to begin with and his was too, and it was a lack of communication between the two of us. And I guess it was two personalities that weren’t going to give in, and if one had gave in, probably nothing would have happened. Probably this would have blew over. Totally unnecessary.

“Blew over?” I added in my message to Carl, “That would have been a terrible shame.” I was reflecting about the fact that the communication lapses at issue had provided the occasion for the two of us to work together over the ensuing years. Sadly, my ruminations crossed in the blogosphere with a message from Carl’s wife, Kathy, notifying me that Carl had succumbed to his heart condition. 52

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A MEMORABLE LESSON As the particulars of Carl’s arrest report illustrate, he had an affinity for nuances of expression and a collector’s memory for personal details. Carl was also an instinctive and inspired performer and might have done well on the stage. As a member of our project, he settled for being an advocate of role-play and its use in police training. When he chose to stage occasional demonstrations to illustrate some point or other, he sometimes came close to achieving the depth and intensity of psychodrama. Given these skills and predilections, it did not surprise me that Carl announced one day that he was taking a field trip to Synanon to “observe” the notorious confrontation encounter groups there. Synanon at the time was a well-regarded substance-abuse treatment program operated by former addicts. It had accumulated an impressive success rate but was nonetheless controversial in some quarters because it relied on a form of take-no-prisoner group therapy that had been designed to undermine the psychological defenses of long-term addicts. Carl provided the following justification for his expedition: Of course, my main concern in going there was comparing the Synanon game with the role playing in the Recruit Training Academy which I was supposed to be evaluating with some sort of improvements in mind if they were needed. And they needed improvements.

Needless to say, training police recruits is hardly the equivalent of a therapeutic approach designed to break down obdurate defenses. The deployment of role-play during recruit training that Carl had been charged with reviewing generally consists of a series of relatively tame reenactments of typical police–citizen encounters. However, Carl predictably thought the process could be usefully enlivened. And what he meant by “observing” the Synanon games transcended what one usually means by “observing.” His level of participatory involvement is illustrated by the following excerpt from his report: Finally someone looked my way, and I almost had a heart attack. What about the guy in the yellow jacket? I looked around the room and 53

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found that I was the only one wearing a yellow jacket, so he must have been referring to me. And my mouth was so goddam dry that I had a hard time speaking. And I thought, “Well, I’m going to use the Hewitt technique. I’m going to come out with a little humorous line and everybody’s going to giggle and laugh and I’m going to be in, man, because they’re going to really loosen up and I’m going to be a nice guy.” So my opening statement was “I’m kind of nervous being here, you know, maybe even a little paranoid, to be in a room with people where the [mention] of cops has come up. And I’ve been a cop here in Oakland for 6 years.” I noticed across the room when I said this, the only black man in the room, who was wearing an army field jacket, the army fatigues and combat boots with a black turtleneck tee shirt underneath, the natural haircut with the mustache, slid forward in his seat. And right away I fought this feeling I had to be extremely defensive of my particular subculture, that of a law enforcement officer. I looked at the man and said “Well, I think I’m a little uptight about this thing because the guy across the room, the black man over there, might scream something about me being an Oakland pig, and I was real worried about it.” I no sooner finished that sentence, than I knew I had been had. All hell broke out with this black fellow. He looked at me and he said, “What are you singling me out for, man. I mean, you showed me by your attitude, by mentioning and by pointing at me that you ain’t nothing but a motherfucking pig”. . . . I looked at him and I said, “We got the semantics out of the way now. I’m a motherfucking pig. That’s what I was worried about, and you said it. So now we can talk”. . . . Then the conversation went into a calm conversation, when the black man, Mike, again interrupts, and said, “Look, man you never did answer me. Why did you single me out?” And I didn’t know what to say, as far as a defense goes. I did single him out. My answer to him was, “Hey, wait a minute now.” And at this point . . . I didn’t feel nervous anymore. I felt myself part of this Synanon game, in that I knew I had to get him off my back, which is apparently the first thing you have to learn. I looked at him and said, “Look, man I didn’t single you out. You singled yourself out. What are you doing wearing those goddam army fatigues. You come in here in 54

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combat boots. What, did you just get off a bivouac somewhere? Why can’t you just dress like other people? What are you singling yourself out for wearing all this bullshit?” Upon which immediately there was some applause and everybody leaped on him.

Putting aside Carl’s initial gambit, which he himself knew had left him vulnerable (and open to accusations of profiling), he ended by demonstrating proficiency in the use of an extreme confrontation approach that called for merciless verbal assaults and counterassaults. Carl could not only take pride in demonstrating his one-trial mastery of the process but also in the opportunity that the occasion appeared to provide for the safe and protected discharge of unacceptable feelings and opinions. He reported, After the game was dismissed, the tribe leader just stood up and said, “Let’s go for coffee.” The black man walked over to me and said, “My name’s Mike,” and shook hands. I said, “Hi, Mike, how are you.” We went out, all of us sat down at a table and had coffee and talked.

By way of conclusion, Carl added, In summary, I just want to say that I find myself so damn enthused about this Synanon game, that I really feel like going back there tonight. . . . Because it seems to be very, very, very rare when one can find someone who will be completely honest, totally and completely honest, in saying exactly what they think, from your breath stinks to you’re a big asshole, a big phony. And right away I feel about the adaptability of something like the Synanon game in the role of law enforcement, in that one could sit down in a room, perhaps, and converse with other officers, with their superior officers involved, to talk about different personality conflicts and problems, and to try to bring out these gut level feelings, to let it all hang out before they get out on the street so at least it’s not going to be taken out on citizens who perhaps try and bait the cop or try and play a game of “go ahead, pig, knock me on my ass,” which the policeman readily responds to, because he’s just been hassled by a captain or a sergeant over nonproductive work, for instance, which happens to be one of my hang-ups. 55

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HUMANIZING TRAINING Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the officers worked their regular assignments 3 days a week. However, as a contribution to our cause, they set out to tape-record interesting encounters on the street, to allow for leisurely analysis by the group. Over time, the result was a respectable tape library. Each of the tapes came with a juxtaposed commentary (courtesy of an officer who was an expert electronics technician), and the combination seemed particularly useful as case material for recruit training purposes. As it happens, one of the most effective users of the material during the 4-hour sessions we had been allocated in the training academy was Carl Hewitt. Carl complained that he initially felt constrained by the rigid authoritarian format of the academy, but he easily managed to circumvent the problem: They wouldn’t say a word without raising their hand for the first two hours, and they’d say, “Sergeant, sir.” I’d have to say, “Jesus Christ, man, I love the title, but knock it off. And just talk.” And about the last hour and a half they got out of that raising their hand a bit.

The first of our tapes Carl played was one featuring a domestic disturbance, which was resolved through skillful mediation and counseling. A member of the audience objected: One guy [brought] up the fact that the whole call took up about 25 minutes, and he says on a busy day when you’re working that street, you just haven’t got time to spend 25 minutes on a 415f [domestic disturbance call.] I said “Well, that’s wonderful. What alternative do you have?” “Lock the guy up,” he says. And I said, “Great, that’s an alternative. We can arrest him. Now, what do you have to have?” And by the time he got through the face sheet, statements, crime report, and waiting for the wagon, he estimated about an hour and ten minutes. And we got off that crap.

The next tape Carl played involved an alcohol-related incident: We go to another tape [involving an intoxicated woman creating a disturbance] and this one guy was saying, “Man, you’ve got a drunk 56

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girl here. She’s breaking the law—she ought to go to jail.” I said, “That’s true.” That’s all I said, and a voice across the room says, “Now, wait a minute. Don’t you think the law can be flexible?” And he says, “Not that flexible” and then I just sat back and relaxed for about 10 minutes while they chewed each other’s ass out about “how can you be so rigid?” And it really went over—the point [that discretion can be intelligently exercised] got there to most guys.

The theme Carl was illustrating in his lecture happened to be of considerable interest to Chief Gain, who believed—as did other police reformers of the period—that arrest had been erroneously regarded as the preferred solution for any minor problem a police officer might encounter on the street. One implication of this concern of the reformers was the desirability of de-escalating the apparent emphasis in recruit training on gung-ho, no-holds-barred enforcement. Chief Gain expended considerable effort in this regard by substantially broadening the range of training coverage in Oakland. For example, the time spent in the academy on “community–police relations” was tripled to 157 instructional hours, and this included (according to the syllabus) “attention . . . to day-to-day techniques which the officer may employ to accomplish his tasks in a manner which will afford a minimum of resistance and antagonism from persons with whom he deals” (Oakland Police Department, n.d., p. 11). Our group’s involvement was particularly welcomed in connection with this segment of the academy curriculum. Of most interest to Carl, the statement relating to the reorientation of the training academy included the following paragraph: Role playing became a vital part of every facet of the training program. Sometimes under the heading of “critical incident simulations” and other times under regular subject matter titles, officers were exposed to and participated in training exercises containing a degree of realism not heretofore possible. To this was added the technique of videotape replay, and recruit officers were given the opportunity to review and critique their performances almost immediately and in detail. (Oakland Police Department, n.d., p. 13) 57

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A GROUNDBREAKING INTERVENTION During the second phase of our study, we added 18 violenceexperienced officers, who were divided into three groups. Carl Hewitt presided over one of these groups, and his group of seven managed to achieve a substantial breakthrough in its first meeting. Carl deserved some of the credit for this, but the bulk of the contribution was made by an extraordinary officer named James Hahn. Hahn had been interviewed by our first cohort, who reported, “He has a BA degree, is very articulate and should be considered a stalwart of the ‘18.’” Hahn was not only articulate but also extremely thoughtful in his articulations. He had listened attentively as two members of his group— with a little help from Carl—reviewed some of their less-than-felicitous encounters with increasingly disgruntled citizens. During the discussion of these incidents, Hahn began to think of ways of addressing the problem. In the summary of the session, he described the result of these ruminations: And I started making little notes about maybe coming up with trying to work up some sort of system where we can have line patrolmen or the peer group meet in some sort of . . . review unit where you can analyze the problems that the specific officer might be having on the street when it becomes apparent: Recommendations from superior officers, numerous trips to Internal Affairs, just numerous violent incidents on the street. This would not be a disciplinary unit or anything like this and it wouldn’t really come up with any particular finding pro or con about the officer’s action. (Toch & Grant, 2005, pp. 165–166)

In a subsequent meeting of the group, Jim Hahn spelled out precisely what he had in mind: And what you’re going to try to do then is review the behavioral patterns of the person and analyze what he is doing and somehow make him, in this process, come up with some self-critique, like we do here. You know, after he reads the reports [some of his own arrest reports]

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somebody asks the questions. . . . And [he] would have to stop and think, “Do I do that very often?” (Toch & Grant, 2005, pp. 170)

From these modest beginnings, Hahn fleshed out a detailed proposal for consideration by the chief, and the celebrated Oakland Peer Review Panel or Action Review Panel was born. Before the process was firmed up several months later, trial panels were conducted, with subjects nominated by supervisors or drawn from a pool of volunteers. As an example of the latter, an early participant expressed a particularly strongly motivated interest. According to his panel, [He] voluntarily approached the supervisor of the Violence Prevention Unit and requested that a panel be formed to review his reports. It was obvious that the officer was concerned about his involvement in a large number of violent confrontations. In fact, he felt that his request for transfer to another division might be affected because of these involvements. Additionally, he had recently been involved in a rather harrowing incident where his service revolver had been taken from him. He was injured to the extent that he required medical treatment.

TWO REHEARSALS After the officer had volunteered, he was far from reticent about sharing his ideas with the panel members. In fact, he expressed himself with peculiarly disarming candor. The panel recorded, The interviewee stated that he was “sick and tired of taking things from the ‘animals and social misfits’” he found on the street. He further stated that he now just does not have any tolerance when dealing with “these people.” He further stated that he actually looks forward to when a person makes that error that is serious enough for him to make an arrest. With further discussion along these lines the officer stated that he was just tired of people not doing as he said or not appreciating him. “After all, the policeman is supposed to be the ‘good guy’”. . . . There

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were several reports that appeared to have no crime committed until the citizen decided to disregard a simple direction of the interviewee.

The latter propensity (arresting without apparent justification) had previously impressed the panel in reviewing the officer’s reports. They had concluded (among other things): 1. It appeared the officer would take immediate action (often physical in nature) when a subject would fail to comply immediately with his verbal directions. 2. The panel felt that this was of extreme concern because the officer probably felt that his authority as an officer was being challenged by citizens when they failed to “immediately” comply with his verbal instructions.

Most members of this officer’s panel thought that in the course of their deliberations “the interviewee became aware of some of the negative patterns that he had developed—specifically, in his over-reaction to citizens when they failed to immediately comply with his instructions or wishes.” Given the obduracy of his behavior patterns and the intensity of his expressed feelings, such an outcome would obviously have to be viewed with some caution, but it would be the best result one could expect from an initial session, and return engagements would have to be scheduled. A second of the trial interviews scheduled by the group generated particular interest because the subject of this panel was considered both a challenge and a worthy investment. The group noted, “If the officer will redirect his priorities he has the potential of being an extremely effective member of the Department.” Unfortunately, the priorities at issue were characterized by the panel as a deplorable one-man “crusade.” The panel thus concluded from its interview: 1. The officer has intentionally specialized in narcotics arrests. 2. He is proficient in the technical aspects of narcotics arrest but has no interest in the reasons an individual might become an addict. 3. He is of the opinion that an addict or drug user is the most dangerous suspect an officer will confront. 60

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4. This exaggerated fear of the “user” causes the officer to make the initial move which is often of a physical nature. 5. He believes that most violent incidents between citizens involve narcotic or drug use in some form. Consequently, he has initiated a personal program against “users.” 6. He has had personal experiences with friends and a member of his family regarding abuse of narcotics and drugs, to which he traces his interest in this field. 7. The officer feels strongly enough in this area that he expresses some resentment to fellow officers and the Department for what he feels is a low level of priority in this type of offense. 8. The officer considers himself an expert in this field, yet states he has no interest in being assigned to the Vice Division. 9. He feels the Vice Division’s object is the dealer and he feels that the user must also be apprehended.

Unsurprisingly, most of the officer’s degenerating incidents were found by the panel to derive from self-initiated encounters “and involved narcotics arrests.”

A SUCCESSFUL (BUT EVANESCENT) REVOLUTION As these panel excerpts illustrate, the behavior patterns that contribute to violent confrontations can be variously motivated but also relate divergently to organizational constraints and norms of the locker room. One salient virtue of the peer review panel is that its members are embedded in the same force field as the subject. This does not mean that the panel members will share the subject’s idiosyncratic perspective, but it does mean they can anticipate how his or her behavior and attitudes are likely to be perceived and reacted to. The officer can thus count on a shared understanding of contextual variables that would not be expected from others, a fact summed up in the dictum “It takes one to know one.” The panel can expect honest disclosure because it is made up of respected colleagues and does not threaten adverse repercussions and because members of the panel communicate helpful and benevolent intent. The panel’s credibility gets cumulatively enhanced by the usefulness 61

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of its feedback, by the plausibility of inferences that are drawn during its deliberations, and by the fact that it leaves as much of the thinking as possible to the subjects themselves. As the Oakland Action Review Panel was institutionalized under the able leadership of Sergeant Hahn, we were able to demonstrate through statistics that over the course of several years, the panel not only achieved the expected improvement in the post-panel performance of its subjects but also contributed to the overall reduction of police–citizen confrontations in Oakland. In fact, the Oakland police chief who eventually discontinued the program—in an across-the-board economy move— expressed considerable admiration for the panels and gratitude for their contribution. He should have had some second thoughts. At the present time, the Oakland Police Department is operating in receivership, under supervision of the courts. The beginning of the end of the department occurred in 2003, when a group of officers known as “the Riders” were convicted of systematically brutalizing citizens. The judge who decided the case mandated reforms designed to prevent future misconduct but has been deluged with reports of continuous foot-dragging and has received complaints about the lack of “officers’ cooperation in reporting misconduct by other officers” (Onishi, 2013). The defunct panels had been designed to deal with this problem and to do so by making the experience nonpunitive and the process collaborative.

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6

Addressing Group Dynamics

T

hroughout my working life, my day job has consisted of university teaching. In September of 1969 I therefore had to return to my students in upstate New York, with Carl Hewitt’s farewell message (“We’ll miss you sons of bitches”) ringing in my ear. Fortunately, Doug Grant remained in the Bay area, where he lived and worked, in what we customarily referred to as “Grant’s tomb.” Grant was travelling much of the time, attending high-level meetings relating to the New Careers movement. Because Grant had never drawn much of a distinction between the rationale underlying New Careers and the Oakland police project, he had no difficulty killing two birds with one stone by offering the officers individually a chance to accompany him on trips across the country to talk about their work. He explained this

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14373-006 Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment: Applying Social Psychology in Prisons and Policing, by H. Toch Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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undertaking as a way of dealing with flagging motivation and diminished enthusiasm: We had finished an intensive summer program. The question then became how one keeps development and interest of the initial seven officers going for the remainder of the year in order to have them able and willing to work with the program next summer. Along with several other program areas was the strategy of having the 7 officers as they were willing to volunteer, take part in presentations of the program to appropriate workshops and seminars within the administration of justice field. It was argued that taking part in such presentations would increase the commitment and understanding of the officers because they would literally be learning through efforts to teach others about this program, and that they would become committed to the program through participating in the selling it to others. It was further argued that these presentations would assist them in their ability to communicate and work in groups with others. (Grant, 1969, p. 1)

Typically, the men reported in tape-recorded communications to me that they initially tended to find the experience of addressing a new group to be somewhat anxiety-provoking but that they invariably gained confidence as they discovered that they were able to make their work the focus of interest and attention. Larry Murphy, a mature officer who had performed as a folk singer and who had been a chief petty officer in the navy, thus reported to me after a trip: I think my voice was a little tight. You know, I am scratching my chin like Hans . . . I was a little on edge when I started to make this presentation. I’ve done a good deal of speaking before groups, but when I was doing this in the Navy, for instance, I was always talking to my subordinates, my military subordinates. Everything I had to say was the damn Gospel, see. Either like it or I’ll ram it down your throat. But when you start to look down the list of names of people who were at this conference, I was not talking to my subordinates back there. I was talking to some people who hold pretty important positions. (L. Murphy, personal communication, n.d.) 64

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In reviewing a 3-day experience in Washington, DC—including both business and associated social encounters—Larry Murphy (n.d.) observed, I’m sure I’ll be considerably more relaxed next time, unless they start throwing me in with people at the White House level or something. I think I realized after the way people cornered me at these cocktail parties and these dinners and the information they wanted, that we’ve got a hell of a thing going here. I think I’m more convinced right now of what we’ve got going than I’ve ever been. The fact that there’s a lot of interest in what we’re doing here has certainly given me a new insight into why we are up here. I think probably in my mind I feel we have a better chance of success than I ever felt before. (p. 7)

Providing the officers with evidence that their work was deemed important by others served to enhance their self-esteem and commitment to the project. But Doug Grant also felt that the officers were entitled to take additional satisfaction from the fact that their contributions were held in particularly high regard because they were made by rank-and-file police officers—which was the New Careers lesson to be derived from their presentations. Doug also felt that the officers had been assimilating lessons of their own—that they were learning as much from their audiences as the other way around. He told me in another recorded message, Carl and Murphy have both met situations which departed from merely putting on a good show to an appreciative audience. They have actually found themselves working at the business of social change, and have held up very well. The possibility of these kinds of experiences and their implications for growth and development on the part of our officers are most encouraging—that we may be gaining here not only interest in superficial skill development in semi-formal presentations, but the development of much more basic comprehension of program development, social change strategies and the accompanying skills to go with the effective utilization of these strategies.

The attainment Doug was alluding to would come in particularly handy at this precise juncture in the project, when the officers were scheduled to assume the unfamiliar role of group leader and coordinator. 65

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A PROFESSOR’S LONG-DISTANCE LECTURE During most of the winter months I had been sidelined, limited to receiving and sending messages by telephone and air mail. Being (as I am) a dedicated teacher by profession, I decided in the course of this exchange to compose a conventional lecture, which is what teachers do. I addressed this communication as a letter to the group of seven officers, but I must confess that I have no idea whether any of them read it. For the record, however, here is part of what I told them: Dear Friends: We have talked a good deal about changing people, and you may have gained the impression that social scientists know something you don’t know. What is worse, you may have inferred that social science starts with Grant and Galvin and myself. To set the record straight (on both counts) I thought I should acquaint you with a few facts and conclusions that we have inherited from wiser colleagues. As you know, we are peddling the idea that participation is the best way to get people to change their actions, and to increase the efficiency of organizations. This idea is big in social science—or at least it was during the war [“the war” being World War II]. It also happens to be the slogan of the “progressive management” school [now more or less defunct] in industry. One of the earliest efforts to show that participation can do the job occurred during the war, when food was in short supply. The government wanted to change the daily menus of your mothers and aunts, and wasn’t getting any converts [emphasis added]. You can imagine why this happened if I tell you that the name of the game was to get decent American [cooks] to serve beef hearts, sweetbreads and kidneys. We may have a gourmet in our crowd, but I suppose most of you would share the feeling that this stuff is not only inedible but deeply repulsive. The method that didn’t change anyone’s cooking consisted of attractive, appealing, and persuasive lectures. These included picturesque charts to show the vitamin content of kidneys; sterling appeals to patriotism; demonstrations of considerable savings, and recipes. 66

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In other words, the wives were shown how to attractively disguise sweetbreads so that they look like something else, and taste good. The lectures also included success stories (marriages mended by beef hearts, I suppose). Not surprisingly, the [ladies] continued to serve hamburgers, although they may have felt more guilty about it. But other[s] were involved in “participation” groups! First, there was a discussion of nutrition and the war effort and health (I suppose similar to our early talks about the violence problem). The question was then posed whether housewives in general [emphasis added] could be induced to join the sweetbread and kidney movement. Next, there was a discussion of obstacles and problems that would come up in trying to do this job. Only at this point [emphasis added] was the group given recipes and ways of sneaking up on their husbands. And at this point the group was heavily involved. They wanted to know whether the obstacles they saw could be removed; they shared the thinking about strategies for circumventing the obstacles. The sweetbread people assumed that the best way to get housewives to stop playing the traditional hamburger game was to make it clear that every woman in the group wanted to go along with the Julia Child approach. In other words, the discussion made it obvious that the group wanted to move, and this made it attractive for each woman to swim along with the tide. Furthermore, each woman had made all kinds of public resolutions which she was then committed to carry through. The same method was used with other problems involving eating, ranging from the use of milk and orange juice to the drinking of (ugh) cod liver oil. [I was here, and earlier, referring to the seminal research of Kurt Lewin, the father of social psychology.] A lot of work has been done in industry trying to get workers to accept new ways of doing things—such as working with fancier machinery—or to just plain raise their production. In every case small groups who were given a say in their own work performed magnificently. This type of thing usually includes the workers suggesting the best strategies, and then running the show. Even more importantly, it offers them the opportunity to keep track of their 67

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own progress (by stages) and to discuss each new development as it occurs. The group is never told what to do, but is permitted to make their decisions, as they are ready for them. [The allusion in this paragraph was to the famous Hawthorne Studies, which revolutionized industrial psychology.] Of course, it has also been discovered that this [meaning everything described earlier] is not a magic process. Some industrial studies have shown that before participation works people have to have security within their organization; they must know where they stand and what they can depend on. If people feel lost or insecure, they simply rant and rave and blindly protest and show no desire for playing a constructive role. This relates to another finding—the happy discovery that democratic leadership has an edge over authoritarian leadership and anarchy. In anarchy you have no security and little gets done. In authoritarian leadership, things get done when the leader is around and fall to pieces when he leaves (for instance, when he returns to Albany). The second point is worth stressing. You might change officers by “laying it on the line” but don’t expect this to stick, or to make a difference when you are not around . . .  Another point that has been made about change is one that Doug Grant tried to get us to think about. Any situation in which you want to bring about movement has two types of forces playing in it. . . . There are reasons why people want to go along, and reasons that make them reluctant to cooperate [again, Lewin]. One must know what these reasons are, because they are going to show their ugly faces sooner or later. Now, we know that one good way of not changing people is to build up the pressures for them to change. This makes them tense and upset. They may change at first, but they’ll regroup and backslide as soon as they can. The way to change people is to work through their resistances. It is here that participation becomes important, because participation is a way of making people face their hang-ups, so that they can give them up after they have worked them through. You must realize that if this is done well, it produces some hairy scenes and uncomfortable moments. But we know that crises or explosions are necessary to 68

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clear the air for change. But they work this way only if after you break through resistances, you make sure that the person follows through. You can do this by getting him committed to tasks, by having peers reward him and prod him, and by providing tools to get change underway. As someone has put it well over twenty years ago [Lewin, of course], you must “unfreeze” old habits and “freeze” new ones. . . . Lastly, it’s worth mentioning that people have other concerns in life than your project. It pays to build in rewards involving status, career opportunities, etc. On the other hand the motivation for change cannot come from Brownie points. People who are with you because there is something to gain are weak links; the sooner you can get them aboard because of what you stand for the better you can sleep. Remember, when people work hard on something, they get a stake in it. I could bore you further, but I hope these few points might be enough to help you in thinking about your experience to date and about your role as staff members next summer.

MORALE AND PRODUCTIVITY In another communication to the seven officers, I set out to ruminate about the pursuit of high morale and high productivity. I started out by defining the two concepts (morale and productivity) in an inexcusably succinct manner. I wrote, “‘Morale’ describes how good someone feels about his job, and ‘productivity’ refers to his output.” But I then went on to make a point that turned out to be a feat of prognostication, though it was probably closer to a manifestation of foreboding. I told our seven prospective group leaders, Now, there was a time when everyone thought that morale was just about the same as productivity (workers are happy drudges or grouchy bums). Since that time, we have discovered that you can have carefree, lazy people, and grouchy drones. Still, everyone agrees it would be nice to have a tight ship and a dedicated crew. I am telling you this because change agents differ in the extent to which they aim at morale or productivity. 69

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As it happens, a case could later be made for the contention that our officers varied considerably in the extent to which they ended up achieving one or another of these goals. As change agents, the seven had been assigned three second-generation groups, each comprising officers with a history of problems on the street. The resulting interventions proved to differ considerably from each other. The first of the three groups indisputably became a high morale and high productivity group. In our review of the summer, we attributed this fact to three factors: (a) “Time was taken up with consuming practical tasks which were related to an objective the group identified with”; (b) “not only were the sessions conducted with sensitivity to group and individual dynamics, but group leaders had acquired substantive background which was deployed at critical junctures”; (c) “the group contained key members who were stimulating and self-stimulating and who were able to originate ideas for the group and conceptualize them in detail” (Toch, Grant, & Galvin, 1975, p. 165). Group 2 oscillated between dispirited and discouraging sessions of feverish activity: There were sporadic sessions in which the group actively invoked data sources which it found enjoyable and profitable. At other times, selfgenerated statistical exercises provided hours of taxing effort with little obvious pay-off. Premature drafting tasks similarly involved painful, unfamiliar detail work with no obvious results. Moreover, the division of clerical tasks necessarily excluded some members, with no incentive for their reintegration into the group. (Toch et al., 1975, p. 195)

Nonetheless, Group 2 ended up producing a superlative proposal, based on solid empirical data, ready for implementation. Group 3 was the prototypical happy but unproductive group. It was characterized by omnivorous interest and a reluctance to abandon free exploration of multifarious projects. . . . From the first, the men enjoyed the . . . chance to speculate on subjects that mattered in a context that mattered. . . . Each session gave the men the feeling of a trend into the future. They viewed these trends as spectators, but felt privileged 70

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and fulfilled. . . . The men had embarked on a free-floating exploration of their professional lives. They abstracted, out of the gestalt of their job, meaningful—bothersome—problem areas. They asked questions about these areas, and saw the possibility of solutions. This process paid off to the extent that it brought a feeling of autonomy, a sense of direction, and a faith in progress. (Toch et al., 1975, p. 220)

What the three groups had in common was that they provided the officers with an opportunity to constructively participate in an exercise that most people find fulfilling: to talk about their jobs and to freely express themselves in doing so. However, the rules of the game in the groups were that statements made were examined for validity, valid remarks were evaluated for importance, important conclusions were related to causes, and causes were isolated to determine whether solutions were in order. The result of pooling the intellectual powers of numbers of experienced patrolmen was phenomenal, though the relative contribution of individual officers may have varied. The project culminated with an organizational change in the police department that was designed to perpetuate its operation. Several of the officers with whom we had worked were assigned to a new entity called the Conflict Management Section, which was embedded in the department’s table of organization. This new administrative unit was made responsible by the chief for three prioritized functions: (a) training research, (b) experimental projects (with jurisdiction over experiments such as family crisis intervention, landlord/tenant intervention, and resource officers in schools), and (c) an action review function responsible for continuing to run the peer review panels. One of two handpicked officers working with newly promoted Sergeant Hahn became the coordinator of the review panels. According to Hahn’s meticulous account, it took the coordinator 23½ to 24½ hours to prepare each panel, and he was convoking at least two panels a week.

THE EVANESCENCE OF CHERISHED REFORMS If explanations were to be taken at face value, the review panel was eventually discontinued by the Oakland Police Department because it had become too expensive to operate. If this explanation were to be examined 71

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in light of subsequent developments, the department would have to admit that it had cut off its nose to spite its face. Oakland ended up reverting to a situation reminiscent of the one we had encountered when we initiated our study, and the result was extremely expensive. A settlement the city had to agree to in 2003 to deal with a raft of police brutality complaints obligated Oakland to pay out $10 million, spread over a 5-year period. The settlement also committed the city to institute reforms that were uncomfortably reminiscent of those we had in place 33 years earlier. For example, the settlement required the Oakland department to institute a system for tracking police misconduct (­Oakland Police Department, 2013). We had precisely such a system, and we underwrote it out of grant funds by hiring and training graduate students to work in the conflict management section, coding and keypunching daily crime reports and recording all the charges filed by officers for such offenses as resisting arrest. The discontinuance of the review panel initiated by our officers and the closing down of the rest of our program was admittedly a painful disappointment, and our feelings in that regard have occasionally been shared by others. Thus, Darrell W. Stephens, a multiple-award-winning police executive, told a distinguished Harvard audience, In the early 1970s, the Oakland and Kansas City Police Departments implemented a peer review process based on work that the social psychologist Dr. Hans Toch did in a correctional setting with corrections officers. The process involved experienced senior officers reviewing the behavior of officers who received a complaint or reached a predetermined threshold volume in areas such as use of force, resist arrests and vehicle collisions. Identifying officers, through analysis of variables of this type, represented one of the first forms of early intervention. . . . There is [no] indication that the [review panel] idea has been tried by other agencies—a disappointing outcome given the overall power of peer influence on officer conduct and the focus of the program on behavior change rather than punishment. It seems that peer review is worthy of further exploration as a formal—perhaps informal—initiative aimed at encouraging and reinforcing positive attitudes and behavior. (Stephens, 2011, p. 17) 72

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SOUR GRAPES Crime inexorably preempts police responses. Crime especially preempts such responses when money gets tight and resources are scarce. At such junctures it almost seems axiomatic that in-house support functions have to be curtailed so that all available manpower can be mobilized on the streets. “Who can justify training research,” the plausible argument goes, “at a time when citizens are being raped and robbed and assaulted?” This explanation sounds satisfactory and reasonable, but some supplementary considerations suggest themselves: 77

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For an intervention in an organization to take hold, it must have the unqualified endorsement of top management. For the intervention to survive once the environment gets turbulent, it must continue to enjoy the wholehearted commitment of top management or its successor. An intervention that creates a subculture within an organizational culture is always potentially vulnerable, unless the surrounding culture shares its salient perspective and concurs with its norms. (And Chief Gain had been accorded a vote of “no confidence” by a militant police union.) When targeted reforms take place within an organization they can lead to the creation of an innovation ghetto or circumscribed elite enclave. Such an entity can be easily sacrificed or unceremoniously bumped off, if such is desired, without implicating the rest of the organization. On occasion, a set of reforms may subdue or suppress a set of historically dominant concerns (such as a predilection for particularly aggressive policing), causing these beloved propensities to temporarily go underground, awaiting an opportunity to reemerge. Some wheels just have to be reinvented every 30 years.

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7

Responding to Inmates in Crisis

I

n 1973, my trusty associates and I put the finishing touches on a study of distressed prisoners whose back-to-the-wall misery had culminated in suicide attempts, self-injuries, self-mutilations, and—in some unfortunate instances—in completed suicides. There happen to be a great many such prisoners-in-crisis, but they are not easy to locate or to accurately portray. As we had occasion to explain in discussing our study, Routine inmate self-injuries . . . are buried in infirmary records and disciplinary logs, and are dismissed as inconsequential oddities of prison life. Staff make light of inmate “attention-getting”; they note that . . . for the most part damage is limited to surface scars. (Toch, 1975, p. 5)

We pointed out that male prisoners in particular seem to minimize the importance of their own despondency by refusing to acknowledge its http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14373-007 Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment: Applying Social Psychology in Prisons and Policing, by H. Toch Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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intensity and seriousness. They do so because they are faced with social norms that prize “‘manliness,’ rationality, invulnerability and a pragmatic orientation,” and that call for a (generally unconvincing) pretense of “coolness, toughness, and a capacity to negotiate obstacles” (Toch, 1975, p. 6). In response to these prevailing norms, an inmate may pretend to indulge in an exercise of casual volition when he has lost control, as in the following interview excerpt: Interviewer: When you want to do this for proof, is that something that’s rather difficult to do, or is it easy? [Inmate]: Well, a person has to work himself up to an emotional state where he can actually carry through with the act of destruction on his body. Interviewer: Can you give me some idea of what that is like? Or what you do? Inmate: You sit there, and you have to put yourself in a mental position where you have to think of all the supposed wrongs that have been done to you and the wrongs that you have done to other people, to yourself and to your family and to your loved ones. And you’ve got to keep running this through your mind until you get in a paranoid state of mind that “I’m no good to myself or to anybody.” Somewhere along that line your mind blanks out. . . . You have no control over your emotions whatsoever. You just function like a machine. (Toch, 1975, pp. 8–9)

WHOSE PROBLEM? The prisoners whose difficulties culminate in self-injurious behavior end up to varying degrees under the jurisdiction of custody and/or mental health staff. For the most part—thanks to the collusion between prisoners understandably concerned with preserving their reputations, and staff intent on running a smooth ship—the definition of self-destructive acts as annoying prison misbehavior predominates. In one sense, this is not 76

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much of a leap, because these acts in fact do tend to be disruptive and can interfere with the smooth running of an institution. But the portrait badly undersells the depression and suffering of the inmates. It also implies that the behavior is intended to annoy, to manipulate staff, or to gain material advantages. On occasions, disciplinary staff members exercise the option of reclassifying self-destructive behavior and defining it as possibly manifesting mental health problems. They are apt to do this cautiously when the behavior looks eccentric or bizarre. The prisoners at issue then become presumptive “dings” and get referred to mental health staff to the extent that such staff is available. The mental health staff members then have to make a determination as to whether the prisoner falls under their beneficent purview (i.e., whether he or she has problems that might benefit from mental health ministrations). No matter how they decide, however, the prisoner continues under the concurrent jurisdiction of custody staff. Jurisdictional issues relating to these prisoners therefore appear to be amicably resolved, though the harmony may be an illusion. Prisoners often end up in strip cells under “observation,” which does not improve their dispositions. The guards frequently feel used or disrespected, and mental health staff members may believe that they have to pay undue deference to their hosts—the presumption being that custody always preempts. The picture changes markedly in the case of completed suicides. Suicides are always defined as manifestations of mental illness—even if the prisoner had been reputed to be a notorious manipulator only hours earlier. Suicides are also invariably seen as acts that could have been predicted or prevented, which suggests the possibility of negligence, incompetence, or malfeasance. Such messy contingencies invite invidious comparisons among staff members. A recent case in point involved an increase in suicides at a large detention facility (and an across-the-board increase elsewhere) that resulted in reports about “mental health experts concerned about what they say is a lack of supervision,” with other staff quoted as noting that “the deaths have raised questions about the mental health provider at the jail” (Banco, 2013, p. A11). 77

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THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX It occurred to the members of my research team—after we had interviewed hundreds of inmates in prisons and detention facilities in New York State—that these men and women might have been more humanely served by a delivery system less tied than the existing one to a bifurcated (custody/mental health) view of the problem, which invites silly boundary disputes and definitional questions that strain credulity. The time appeared propitious for the raising of questions relating to service delivery: The New York City detention system had been struggling with a wave of suicides averaging one a month and had prioritized suicide prevention. The state correctional system had been digesting the painful trauma of the 1971 Attica riot and its bloody resolution and had emerged with a widely advertised determination to engage in serious reform. Both agencies appeared willing to do some serious soul searching. Accordingly, with trepidation, we organized a workshop on “Intervention, Management and Treatment of Inmate Breakdowns” in Albany, on February 17 and 18, 1973. The workshop proved to be an exciting and stimulating experience. New York State was represented by a group headed by Edward Elwin, the deputy commissioner for program services. Also included was Dr. Paul Agnew, a psychiatrist and a long-time superintendent of a hybrid correctional facility. The city delegation was headed by Captain Jacqueline McMickens, a correctional officer then assigned to the training academy and subsequently promoted to corrections commissioner. Another member was Robert Wicks, a psychologist charged with suicide prevention training. Our sponsor, the National Institute of Mental Health, sent a representative to keep us honest.

THE RECALCITRANT STANCE OF THE REPUDIATED GUARD The most affecting contributions to our 2-day proceedings were those of Jacqueline McMickens, who impressively portrayed the feelings of correctional officers faced with what they regard as their daily exclusion by 78

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the system from serious involvement with prisoners. At one juncture, she threw out the following challenge: Now, you [meaning us] are going to develop some new strategies, new people will come in—strange people. Say, the shrinks, for instance. The shrinks have inundated the institutions and they have not helped my problem. As a matter of fact, what they have done is to complicate my life. First of all, I don’t trust them, because I would never go to one, and I know for a fact that they are very expensive. Now you have put this very expensive person there to do something for people who I don’t believe you’re going to be able to do anything for anyway. . . . You have not only attacked my structure, my base of power, you don’t even talk to me. And the reason you keep looking at me like that is because I have a strange body odor, which is the only thing I can conclude from the way you have treated me. But now you have seen the inmate, and you tell one of us that the inmate must be restrained, or treated differently. I’ll suggest that you restrain him, and you treat him differently yourself—you’re trained for it. This is exactly what’s happening in our system, and we are tearing ourselves apart with it. And now we are sitting in this room and somebody said the disciplines have to work together. I don’t even know if we can start to go there. They ought to be able to just relate to each other. Maybe there ought to be seminars for correction officers and psychiatrists so they can let each other know that they are human beings.1

When another workshop participant made some remark relating to the “professionalization” of correctional officers, McMickens responded, There is so much noncooperation in this system it is not a simple task to institute a professional custodial scheme. Today even sanitation people are being professionalized. But the sanitation man’s job is very specifically defined. He is to get that trash out of the gutter. And if it’s still there when he leaves, then we know he is not a professional. But with us it’s something very different. Somebody is making value Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations in this chapter are drawn from the workshop on “Intervention, Management and Treatment of Inmate Breakdowns” held in Albany, on February 17 and 18, 1973.

1

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judgments about us all the time. There’s a social worker making one. There’s medical staff making one—and we are not allowed the luxury of making any.

And she concluded by inquiring, “What about the other professions and disciplines in the area? What do they say positive about us?” She went on to say, So we owe them nothing. We owe psychology, psychiatry, sociology and academia nothing. Because at no point have you said that I could possibly be of use to you except to produce the product for your services. I will just continue to say, “Hey, there’s a lost guy in the ball game that is not going to let anything you say or do get off the ground too easily until you recognize the fact that he is not recognized as a professional”. . . . And if you are indeed professional, why haven’t you addressed yourself to that?

CREATING A HUMANE AND RESPONSIVE SYSTEM The post-Attica resolve to consider fundamental prison reforms percolated through several of the contributions to our workshop. Commissioner Elwin thus noted that, to date, presumably enlightened perspectives at the top of the system appeared not to have trickled down to create an environment that might be able to empathetically respond to prisoners faced with serious problems: I think what we have talked about for years has been garbage. We’d get around conferences and talk about rehabilitation. And when that wasn’t good we talked about reintegration. And we are now talking about resocialization. But the name of the game as far as the facilities is concerned, is warehousing. And so long as that’s the name of the game we are not going to identify an individual as he reaches a crisis point. Because we don’t really have that much interest and control over the individual, to identify it.

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I recently met an officer from Green Haven—he’s a student at John Jay [College]. I can certainly identify with his feeling of complete lack of control of any situation . . . He could, if given a chance, offer a hand to an inmate at his institution. He took the job because he thought he could help. Presently there is nothing built into the system that allows him to be that kind of human being.

The psychiatrist (and warden), Dr. Agnew, similarly talked about the frontline unresponsiveness of the system. He commented as follows about what he characterized as the prevailing “confusion”: I would relate this to the fact that our system is in a state of evolutionary change. That the system in which we are working was not designed to be a humanitarian system, to look at the individual as an individual human being who had needs and needed to be understood, and to make an attempt to change him. The system wasn’t designed for this purpose. The system was originally designed to punish, to dehumanize, to deprive. . . . It’s absolutely essential to have a humanitarian environment as a foundation.

There was some skepticism voiced subsequently about how much humanitarianism the public might be willing to accommodate in a correctional agency, which led me to observe, [There are] crosscurrents of society that permit us to be humane, particularly if we don’t make it visible that we’re humane. . . . When you talk about feeding, clothing, housing, order and so on, let’s just add innocuously and without overemphasizing it, the capacity for the system to permit its clients to psychologically survive. I don’t think the public would object if this is done unostentatiously, as a side product.

PRISONERS AS MEMBERS OF CRISIS-INTERVENTION TEAMS The New York City detention system during this period had undertaken an interesting experiment deploying prisoners as “suicide prevention aides.” The prisoners had been delegated to be on the lookout for inmates 81

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in crisis and had been trained to spend time with these inmates in their cells, listening to them and lending them support. Commissioner Elwin was clearly impressed with this experiment and argued that it might offer surprising promise as a vehicle for initiating organizational change: If we take the morning’s premise that self-mutilation may very well be an almost normal reaction to a particularly abnormal atmosphere, then I think a great deal of work needs to be done around the changing of this abnormal atmosphere which is the stimulus factor here. I think a great agent of change can very well be this inmate.

He went on to suggest that the most tangible benefit accruing from the model might be its impact on the prisoners who were exercising the helping role: As one begins to look at the inmate population, the whole picture is one of lack of success. They have never perceived success in school or at home or in the job situation. They didn’t even perceive success in crime, which is why we have them. We say let’s talk about program, and you draw nice pieces of program and you say you’re going to build on something. And you don’t have anything to build on. But what you need as a basis is a man to perceive himself as a kind of man. That he has something to offer. Perhaps in a very real sense this kind of intervention, inmate to inmate, gives us this. And here I am not talking about the person mutilating himself primarily because he has me to lean on. Forgetting about X who may or may or may not mutilate himself, you may have, in that instance, done for the prop here what the total system has never been able to do for him.

Commissioner Elwin’s point about reinforcing the helping role to promote self-esteem and a sense of self-worth struck Dr. Agnew as fundamental and as applicable not only to prisoners but also to correctional officers as human services workers. He started by asking, How do you bring about this sense of pride, a sense of self-respect, a sense of value, a sense of worthwhileness, with this new image of the officer as the helper, treater type of individual? They’ve got to come 82

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out of themselves. And they’ve got to get something out of it. . . . The basic reinforcement has got to be this: That they’ll come out of it every day with a sense of self-respect, a sense of pride, a sense of worthwhileness in being a helper, treater type of individual rather than a clubber, repressor, power sort of individual. And nothing is going to change until we do that.

Robert Wicks, the psychologist, eloquently echoed the sentiment and observed: Ideally, we would want the old guards to cease feeling like inhuman pawns. We would want them to be so involved in a program that they’d be saying things like, “You know, I’ve been on the job 18 years and now I just wish this was when I first started because I feel like I am doing something. I don’t feel as tired at the end of the day, or if I do, I feel proud of the fact that I am.”

WORKSHOP RECOMMENDATIONS Jerry Burke, a member of the state delegation, ultimately brought our deliberations down to earth to enable us to consider proportionate recommendations. He pointed out that an inviting stance for a sophisticated group might tend to be to consider holistic and radical options, reminiscent of upheavals in Algiers and Belfast: You know, we’re all rational people. We grant ourselves this. And yet, as a result of rational decisions, it’s, “Kevin, did you bring the grenade?” That’s rational, right? They reasoned it that way. That’s frightening to me. Here we’ve got a little tiny problem, Carlos Rodriguez is down there in the tombs, up on 11-something, and he may hack at himself tomorrow, and certainly next week and the month after. Within the structure of this ghastly thing we are all involved in, what are we doing for that? And that comes as a much more simplified problem than revamping the Department of Correctional Services. That’s much more accomplishable for us. And probably the system is very likely to be going on long after we have shuffled off. It’ll be dissimilar 83

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to what we have today, but maybe not as much as we would really like. And we’re still going to have all these guys cutting up.

With this injunction in mind, we set out to advance specific recommendations, though we prefaced these by observing: There is a need to explore new intervention options. Options currently in use (such as segregation) frequently aggravate inmate difficulties. New options entail different staff orientations. Current norms governing staff–inmate contacts, for example, make it difficult for inmates to reveal developing difficulties or problems.

We then went on to list proposals that had been advanced and endorsed by our group. These included assisting correctional officers to function as key figures in crisis intervention teams, including inmates “with support and guidance,” and encouraging mental health personnel “to function on prison frontlines, on the tiers, on a day-to-day basis,” with involvements that “permit free inter communication and foster mutual respect.” We proposed team development centered on the systematic study of the problem, including data collection, group review of incidents, and exploration of intervention options. We discussed the need for support of the process by management and professional organizations. We submitted copies of the conference proceedings—including these recommendations—to the Department of Correctional Services, and I received the following reply: Dear Professor Toch: My letter of April 2 acknowledged receipt of the workshop report entitled “Inmates in Crisis,” I indicated to you that this material would be referred to staff. I am pleased to report to you that the staff has incorporated the rationale for a team approach to intervention in the proposed program manual for the operation of the Attica Correctional Facility. Very truly yours, [signed] Walter Dunbar, Executive Deputy Commissioner (W. Dunbar, personal communication, May 2, 1973) 84

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AN AUSPICIOUS CEREMONIAL IN THE BIG APPLE In December 1984, Jaqueline McMickens, as the head of New York City’s Department of Corrections, awarded her agency’s Certificate of Merit to the director of her department’s suicide prevention program, which had been “lauded as a national model” and described as “the best in the nation” (“Award Day Honors,” para. 20). Two New York City correctional officers who had been serving as program coordinators received commendations from Commissioner McMickens, who observed in the course of presenting these awards, “We have not eliminated suicide from our midst . . . but with this program we have saved lives, given suicide prevention aides among our inmate population a greater sense of self-worth, and fostered positive relations among inmates and staff ” (“Award Day Honors,” para. 21).

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8

Democratizing a Prison

O

n June 24, 1993 I gave a talk titled “Democratizing Prisons” at the Prison College in Polmont, Scotland, to a group of Scottish prison administrators who had apparently decided that being bored was a small price to pay for a chance to socialize at a munificent postlecture reception. If being bored were the expectation, my audience would not be asking for their money back, though they might have considered it. Although I tactfully refrained from revisiting the Oakland police and the late-lamented Violence Prevention Unit (see Chapters 5 and 6), I indulged in a blow-by-blow description of inmate cooperative clubs at the Alderson Women’s Reformatory, which happened to have transcribed their minutes back in 1928. I went on to make things worse by following up these exotic historical anecdotes with a sanctimonious

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14373-008 Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment: Applying Social Psychology in Prisons and Policing, by H. Toch Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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sermon detailing the presuppositions of the human resources school of management: The premise is that people work more effectively when they are involved in making decisions that govern their work, and that organizations are more effective when they deploy the intelligence, wisdom, and judgment of all their members, particularly those on the frontlines—those in the bowels of the organization. A second premise is that involvement brings sense of ownership and buys loyalty, dedication and commitment. Another way of stating the human resource argument is that the classic hierarchical, top-down management model may have outlived its day. (Toch, 1994a, p. 65)

That last line of this summary would hardly be designed to make friends and influence the managers being alluded to. Moreover, prison administrators were bound to be additionally offended once I expanded the argument, contending that the implication was that prisoners and correctional officers ought to be forthwith involved in prison governance. Fortunately, my Scottish audience could easily point out that I had never run a prison (or anything else) and that my prescription was conveniently and transparently vague. It would not help matters in this regard that I tried to burnish my reputation by adding a few top-of-the-head prescriptive minutiae, such as the following: Prisoners and officers can meet separately and report to each other or to plenary sessions. . . . Special skills and interests can be exploited in selecting participants in governance bodies. An advisory group to the prison kitchen, for example, could contain persons who have worked in restaurants, grown vegetables, or become famous because of the amount of food they consume. (Toch, 1994a, p. 70)

I did think that I sensed a possible opening at the time in that some official documents in Scotland had been referring to prisoners as “consumers” of correctional services. So I waded in at this stage with Service consumption can become a passive or an active enterprise, and the latter is preferable to the former. A passive consumer can be 88

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forced into a regressive, dependent stance, which some students have described as a “gimme” posture. . . . Such a person’s role becomes that of a mendicant, who is given to whining and tends to grouse and complain. An active consumer exercises options among available alternatives or invents options, given existing resources. Gradations of consumer activism (or active consumerism) can be envisaged in prisons. Inmates can be afforded choices of services or combinations of services. . . . The common denominator of such arrangements is that the prisoner has mindful control over the sequence of events, in negotiation with staff members. . . . Active consumerism involves adult-to-adult transactions between prisoners and staff. It requires prisoners to do something to get something. And it lets prisoners engage in assessment, deliberation and planning in determining their future. . . . The experience is also one that prepares prisoners for more responsible participation in the opportunity structures of society at large. (Toch, 1994a, pp. 70–71)

I cannot recall my Polmont lecture being met with a standing (or any other) ovation, but my talk did appear to contribute to several subsequent hospitable overtures. The most satisfying of these invitations provided me an opportunity to witness the introduction of a self-governance process at Penninghame by Hamish Ross (the superintendent of the prison) and John Pearce (regional director of the Scottish Prison Service), who functioned skillfully as change agents.

ANTICIPATING RESISTANCE TO REFORM The Penninghame intervention was conducted over an intensive 2-day period. The prison provided an almost ideal venue for an organization development project. Aside from the fact that as an open prison Penninghame offered a relatively relaxed regime, it looked as if a lot of spadework had already been done. According to a survey freshly conducted by Ed Wozniak of the Scottish Prison Service research division, relationships among officers and inmates at the prison were outstandingly harmonious, the atmosphere was rated favorably by almost every respondent, and 89

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confidence in the prison’s leadership was high. Most to the point, nine out of ten members of Penninghame’s staff told Wozniak that management in the prison placed a high value in staff participation. As I subsequently recalled the inception of the project (Toch, 1995b), the protagonists who were involved in its inauguration were prepared to deal with some resistances they expected to encounter. They were hoping to promote the combined involvement of prisoners and staff in the governance of a prison. This is a far more ambitious goal than that of preaching the desirability of collaboration more or less in the abstract (which is par for the course in a progressive system) or even of sponsoring an assortment of congenial group activities advertised as enhancing inmate–staff rapport. Such activities (including friendly games of pool) were already prevalent at Penninghame and elsewhere in the Scottish system and were not regarded as particularly controversial. To be sure, some prisoners and staff members were not as inclined as others to fraternize with each other. There had been many instances of halfhearted or token participation—even in the operation of the progressive “personal-officer scheme,” which (in theory, at least) pairs every prisoner in the United Kingdom with a correctional officer, who (in theory) provides personal counseling and reliable record keeping. Despite inroads that might have been made by these sorts of arrangements into the inmate–staff divide that is customarily described in sociology texts, contrasting role playing and corollary social distance inevitably survive. Real across-the-board efforts to alter the fundamental juxtaposition of keepers and kept, as contemplated at Penninghame, would be bound to violate residual preconceptions about the preordained order of things—and would particularly challenge “the ‘them vs. us’ culture of prisons. . . . shared—or rather, reciprocated—by prisoners and staff,” the culture that gives rise to “the fact that even in the most benevolent prisons . . . transactions between staff and prisoners are essentially parental: Prisoners request, demand, or protest. Staff members concede or refuse, circumscribe, delimit, monitor, and order prisoners about” (Toch, 1995b, p. 35). Where that is the arrangement of the world that prisoners and staff members have been taking for granted, “the transition from [custodial parent versus sulking child] transactions to adult–adult 90

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transactions [would probably be] unbelievably difficult and strangely painful for both prisoners and staff ” (Toch, 1995b, p. 35). We knew that we would be posing some threat to residents and staff members at Penninghame because we would be introducing the prospect of unknown challenges and making vague and unspecified demands for commitment, presenting the possibility of what must have sounded very much like work. One could even argue that to start with a progressive prison such as Penninghame could prove a liability rather than an advantage, because in stirring up a quiescent pond we would be violating what had been a privileged enclave—monkeying with a sanctuary that residents had looked forward to as a well-earned prerelease respite offering a predictably smooth and trouble-free transition to parole and the streets. At minimum, we could expect some ritualistic grousing (which was par for the course at Penninghame), but if we evoked real anxiety this could spell real trouble, because “anxiety, unfortunately, can be expressed in a variety of ways, and none of these is delicate, civilized or attractive” (Toch, 1995b, p. 35).

ENGENDERING CHANGES IN PERSPECTIVE Persons who run organization development programs frequently start by collecting information about relevant feelings and attitudes of participants. They then share these data with the participants (in what are known as data feedback sessions) as a way of initiating self-directed inquiry. At Penninghame, the sequence began in accord with the prescription, thanks to the presence of Ed Wozniak, who came armed with meticulous tabulations of local and comparative survey results. Wozniak led a discussion that highlighted some problem areas identified by the survey respondents that might be easily addressed or remedied. He also described the climate of the prison as one that would facilitate problem solving. The proceedings were formally opened on behalf of the administration by John Pearce, who stressed the Prison Service’s philosophical commitment to the empowerment of officers and prisoners. He went on to emphasize the uniqueness of the opportunity offered to Penninghame to become the site of a pioneering experiment in self-governance. In the wake of these inspirational remarks, the session got down to business. 91

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The first order of business was an attempt to surface and confront the parental nature of staff–inmate transactions at the prison. The group was divided into four task forces—one of officers and three of prisoners. The officers were asked to deal with the question “What do we do that they can and should do for themselves?” And the inmates were tasked with answering, “What do they do that we can/should do for ourselves?” During an ensuing lively plenary session, representatives of the task forces decorated the front wall of the dining hall with their reports—the more-or-lesslegible products of their group deliberation. Given that there had been no prior preparation or rehearsal, it was not totally unexpected that some work might remain to be done. The report emanating from the officers, for example, was less than outstandingly coherent: The staff manifesto ranged from justificatory statements (such as, “Why the boundary rules? [Answer:] protection of residents”) through cautious bids (such as, “Don’t you trust us?” [Answer:] “Yes—given trust”) and concessions varying in generosity from making residents responsible for cleanliness and tidiness to letting them allocate the recreational budget and coordinate visiting arrangements. (Toch, 1995b, p. 35)

Two of the prisoner groups did even worse than the staff group—one by coming up with a roster of benefit requests and the other by presenting a laundry list of enhanced privileges. The third prisoner group, however, productively and creatively rose to the difficult challenge: The group suggested that “educational trips be organized by prisoner committees.” It proposed “a meeting between a town committee and a prisoners committee every month to improve relationships between prisoners and town folks with a view to enhancing (work and volunteer activity) placement schemes.” It recommended a system of “work allocation (for work on the prison grounds) by a prisoner committee made up of skilled and experienced prisoners.” The group also asked that “people with work or recreational skills (be) given the opportunity to pass on experience to others who are interested” and that “prisoners be consulted about job creation within the prison.” 92

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They requested that prisoners be permitted to “organize (their) own lunches for (outside) placements by given budget for the week,” to organized and supervise their own visits—again, by committee—and that they be allowed to run the inmate canteen “with accounts available for inspection at all times.” (Toch, 1995b, pp. 35–36)

In a second difficult task—which was posed the next morning—it was the officers who responded productively and creatively. Each of the groups had been asked to consider “the other side’s” perspective, which meant that the officers had been asked to empathize with the prisoners. They did this with considerable sensitivity by speculating about the psychological impact of penny-ante rules and redundant security rituals and the difficulties posed by “frustrating prison routines.” They then went beyond their mandate by considering the feasibility of “greater flexibility and open communication” (Toch, 1995b, p. 36). The open-mindedness and generosity of the officers was gratifying. By contrast, no such empathy was forthcoming from the prisoner groups (Toch, 1995b). It might be understandable—given the long-standing tradition of the great divide—that prisoners might come up somewhat short when they tried to visualize the perspectives of their keepers, but there was no evidence that such an attempt had been made. The prisoner groups instead used the occasion to stage a mini-revolt. Their discussions and reports were tangential (to put it mildly) and the rest of the reporting period was taken up with demands that the social worker be fired and the director’s rejection of this demand. This dialogue sounded like a parent–child exchange in which limits are tested and parents have to react to set boundaries. (Toch, 1995b, p. 36)

This eruption was neither surprising nor coincidental. Emotionally charged episodes during organization development exercises are to be expected and are often considered an attainment. Such junctures tend to be the result of the consequential nature of thematic materials that are tapped. And in our case, the jumble of concerns that were ventilated by the inmates reflected the double-edged dilemma of their dependence— the desire for nurturance that inevitably cohabits and collides with a 93

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frustrated desire for autonomy. The expression of these irreconcilable feelings (partly at the expense of the not totally inoffensive social worker) appeared, though, to have a salutary impact on the proceedings by clearing the air. It also left members of the groups feeling sheepish and therefore resolved to turn over a new leaf and become conspicuously compliant and task-oriented. The transition from introspection to task-related activity thus appearing feasible, the next move was to make the prospect as attractive as possible. To that end, the group members were instructed to ask themselves, “What’s in it for us?” on the assumption that a program could be set up. Again, the staff group transcended the parameters of the task. The officers not only listed an impressive number and variety of personal benefits they anticipated but also went on to consider some risks they felt they might run. In thus considering the downside of the psychological equation, the officers anticipated the sort of systematic inventory (of resources and obstacles) that social scientists sometimes undertake in planning the implementation of change.

PRESERVING PARTICIPATION IN PARTICIPATORY GOVERNANCE It was gratifying that by this time the officers and prisoners had independently come up with congruent conceptions of desirable reform. The officers appeared to be looking forward to the prospect of enriched jobs, of being able to undertake “more worthwhile productive tasks,” play a “more demanding role,” and engage in “more interaction” with inmates. The prisoners in turn envisaged an enriched prison existence studded with interesting staff-assisted opportunities for enhanced learning, growth, and personal development. We asked the prisoners to translate some of the activities they had listed into a roster of groups and committees that could be charged with taking responsibility for their enactment. The officers and prisoners decided that the groups and committees (and ultimately, some subcommittees) would be composed of elected prisoner representatives and officers and that they 94

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ought to regularly report to a similarly composed council or “council committee.” This council, and a committee of the whole, would in turn meet with the warden for monthly updates, exchanges of news and pleasantries, and coordination, as needed. One of the encounters resulting from this arrangement (as per the minutes of the meeting, as summarized by Hamish Ross, the warden) nicely illustrated the benefits of democratic governance in prisons: The meeting was then split into four groups. Two were to discuss the No Smoking Policy. . . . The groups’ thoughts were as follows: GROUP 1—NO SMOKING POLICY Group One. . . . came up with the following thoughts: The number of no smoking dorms should be extended to perhaps 4, as this would give more choice as to who you shared a dorm with. Visits should be non-smoking, and anyone wishing to smoke should go outside. They stated that anyone wishing to smoke should do so in the dining room or corridor, but this could create problems as non-smokers were having to walk through smoky corridors. The group then thought that the corridors should be smoking areas, due to the time waits for phone calls, etc. Next to be discussed were the vehicles. The group thought that on a long run, for example Glasgow, smoking should be allowed and on short runs into Newton Stewart, etc. there should be no smoking. [A staff member] pointed out that at present there were smoke stops on long journeys, therefore no need to smoke in the vans at all. Also discussed was the gate area, which Group One agreed should be a non-smoking area, as this is the first point of contact with external visitors. The general office is at present [already] non-smoking, as should be the education unit. GROUP 2—NO SMOKING POLICY Group 2. . . . came up with the following views; The gate, dining room, dorms offices, muster room and conference rooms should all be non-smoking areas. They agreed that s­ mokers have to go somewhere, but we needed to reach a tolerance level as it is up to each individual whether they wish to smoke or not. They 95

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thought that smokers should have consideration for non-smokers, and non-smokers should have consideration for smokers. For anyone visiting, they thought half an area should be for smoking, and half for non-smoking. Group 2 thought that the recreation room should be smoking, but asked if the ventilation system could be looked at and perhaps [equipped with] an extractor fan. This group also looked at smoking on journeys and as there is at least one stop there was no need to smoke in the vehicles (H. Ross, personal communication, April 29, 1996)

The minutes of these deliberations reflect the prisoners’ focus on practical details, and they nicely illustrate their effort to accommodate varying predilections and interests in formulating their responses to problems. There is also evidence of the benefit afforded the inmates through their intimate familiarity with the prison environment. On other occasions during the same period, meetings involving the prisoners and warden appeared to exhibit what he characterized as a “we want we want attitude.” The difficulty the stance presented had little to do with the merits or substance of the prisoners’ requests—which were often quite reasonable. The problem was that an organizational structure designed to facilitate participatory management appeared to have been shanghaied to serve as a vehicle for the perpetuation of parent–child transactions. Meetings were frequently used to organize lists of requests for systematic and orderly presentation. As an example, 24 questions were formulated by the group as agenda items for discussion with prison management on May 30, 1996. The questions included the following: Would it be possible for more use to be made of the mountain bikes during weekday evenings? Would it be possible for each room to have its own kettle? Would it be possible to change the type of mattress which is issued? Could there be more of a variation of weekday meals? Could a microwave dish be provided for heating foodstuffs in the microwave? 96

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Since the office can only provide stamps on a Thursday, would it not be an idea to look into the possibility of installing a stamp machine at the gate? Would it be possible for visits to Newton Stewart’s cinema when it reopens? Could we have more litter bins placed around the prison and grounds?

Admittedly, the format of such discourse could be regarded as structurally ordained, given an arrangement which makes the prison administration the dispenser of commodities required or desired by inmates. But there are many services that can be rendered with the assistance of their consumers or prospective consumers. The second of the 24 questions in the prisoners’ roster, for example, read, “Could the area around the back of the house be upgraded in order to allow the playing of 5-a-side football?” (H. Ross, personal communication, May 29, 1996). In reporting the outcome of the meeting in which the request was presented, the warden recorded, “Prisoners are starting to take ownership of things—for instance, clearing stones out of a potential football pitch” (H. Ross, personal communication, May 29, 1996). It became critically important that as many requested activities as possible involve the assignment of responsibility for their implementation to interested volunteers. Deliberations are ideally structured to facilitate mindful decisions or suggest the need for reasonable compromise. As a case in point, a published committee report included the following: The house committee met with Mr. Rodgers to debate cooked breakfasts when it was explained that to provide this would “eat into” the budget for the other meals and affect the quality and quantity of lunch and dinner. As it was a minority who requested the cooked breakfast the decision to the council was to leave things as they stand. (“Council Business,” 1994, p. 3)

The possibility of reasonable compromise requires consideration of new or additional options. Hamish Ross, the warden, thus responded as follows to an apparently irreconcilable conflict about the scheduling of a practice 97

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session for a prisoner musical combo: “During talks between groups for any deals/changes/improvements the business of the day can usually be summarized by 4 answers: 1. Yes, 2. No, 3. Wait, 4. Yes, but not in the way or time first proposed [emphasis added]” (“Letter to the Editor,” 1994, p. 2). The closure of Penninghame put an end to some of the prison’s distinctive contributions, including its ongoing experiment in participatory governance. Along the way, to be sure, it sometimes appeared difficult to sustain the level of motivation and momentum required for effective participation. On one of these occasions, the belletristic (and insubordinate) editor of the Post complained, Being a member of the Community Council these days is more than a bit frustrating, as I was saying to my man Hamish the other day. I wasn’t totally surprised to find that he agreed with me, suffering as he is from a wee bit of offpissedness at the apparent inability of the Council to actually meet, let alone decide anything. (“CC,” 1995, p. 4)

Even in a prison for relatively long-term inmates, there is turnover. This meant that at Penninghame cohorts of incoming residents had to deal with a milieu that invited unfamiliar departures from the comfortable passivity of the traditional convict stance. In theory, the prisoner peer group enables such adjustment—older term, enthusiastically participating residents serve as reassuring role models, demonstrating the virtues and highlighting the benefits of participatory involvement. But to the extent to which older term residents succumb to creeping lethargy, such intergenerational cross-fertilization occurs less effectively, and staff has to carry more of the load. This erosion of the participatory process can be further accelerated with a turnover in supportive leadership, such as the untimely departure of Penninghame’s outstandingly charismatic warden.

THE LAST HURRAH One would expect an experiment in prison democracy to be adjudged wildly irrelevant once rumors begin to circulate about closure of the site in which the experiment is conducted. But at Penninghame, participatory 98

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democracy experienced a dramatic revival under these circumstances. The threat to survival of the prison served as a spur to conjoint action. Staff members and inmates organized impressive and heroic efforts to try to save the prison, which garnered considerable coverage in the media. The activity proved ultimately futile but was nonetheless instructive, in that it demonstrated for the last time that prisoners and their keepers can work together if and when joint interests are at stake.

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9

Nurturing Responsible Behavior

I

have a number of prized mementos of experiences in the south of Scotland. One is a handcrafted cane, suitable for herding sheep, with a copper plaque that reads, “MacToch of Galloway.” But an undoubtedly more professionally relevant keepsake is a clipping from a prison newspaper, the Penninghame Post, dated June 12, 1996, which announced, Tomorrow the establishment will be visited by Prof. Hans Toch. For those of you who don’t remember him, Professor Toch is the wee guy with the foreign accent (Dutch, if I recall correctly) who has been advising the S.P.S. on turning prisons into communities. Anyway, my information is that he visits tomorrow, and again on Friday, when he’ll be accompanied by the Area Director, Mr. Pearce. Professor Toch is to be honoured on Friday by having the new Community Room (the old rec. room) named after him. The room is to

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14373-009 Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment: Applying Social Psychology in Prisons and Policing, by H. Toch Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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be known as the Hans Toch room, though he doesn’t know this yet! Apparently he is coming to officially open it on Friday. (“News From the Governor,” 1996, p. 3)

As predicted by the inmate-journalist, I found myself attending the surprise room-dedication ceremonial alluded to, and this scintillating occasion was promptly put in perspective for me by a prisoner who loudly announced, “In a couple of years, some guy is going to be standing in front of that door, and he will be asking, ‘Who the fuck is Hans Toch?’” What the otherwise sagacious inmate might not have anticipated was that his question would not end up being posed by a smart aleck future resident but by a real estate speculator in the market for a recently shuttered prison. Her Majesty’s Prison Penninghame was closed in 1999 as an economy move by the government, and the physical plant sold (at bargain basement prices) to a wealthy London realtor the following year. The fire sale happened to augur the demise of a revolutionary rehabilitative paradigm, an arrangement to which the word community—cited in the article quoted previously—was aptly and uniquely applicable. Penninghame was one of three Scottish prisons without walls or fences, designed to provide transition experiences for long-term prisoners nearing the end of their sentences. One of the interrelated premises underlying this approach was explicated in 1990 in a document that summarized the thinking of Scottish prison administrators; it reported, It was held that if the prisoner was not treated as a responsible person whilst in custody, and if he was not given the opportunity, whilst in prison, to exercise some choice over his daily life, then it was difficult to see how he was being assisted to exercise responsible choice on discharge. (Scottish Prison Service, 1990, p. 17)

The inference that was drawn from this premise was that “we should try to relate to the prisoner in ways which would encourage him or her to accept responsibility for their actions by providing him or her with opportunities for responsible choice, personal development and self-improvement” (Scottish Prison Service, 1990, p. 30). 102

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This resolve was obviously one that had special urgency for a prison designed to serve as a port of reentry into society at large and in which the prison’s inmate–staff society would have to provide training and testing opportunities for exercises of responsible citizenship. To fully accomplish the goal envisaged in the model—the transfer of learning from the inside community to the outside community—rehearsals of responsible citizenship that straddled the perimeter of the institution were required—hence, the concept of the prison without walls. An example of a real-life experience that was afforded to the inmates at Penninghame was an annual 5-day holiday leave. The preparatory steps for this excursion were part and parcel of the experience, nicely illustrating how the prison-as-community (including both inmates and staff) could function to reinforce and support its transitioning members. Hamish Ross, the charismatic governor (superintendent) of the prison, described the 1995 sessions in a letter written in early January: We set them a task dividing the staff and prisoners into 3 groups— they were given about an hour to consider, a) the problems that could arise during home leave, and b) solutions to these problems. When the groups fed back (a mixture of staff and prisoners) they really were most revealing, and they had been brutally frank with each other. . . . For a number of lads who had not been at a community meeting before it was a real revelation on just how things can be tackled in an open way. As you can imagine there was a lot of laughter and hilarity about the whole thing (I will not mention too much about the prisoner who said he was going to take 20 condoms home with him) but it was something I think would have cheered your heart. . . . At the end of it all our new social worker . . . gave a brief talk on another thing relevant to Christmas—selfishness, that was received in stony silence which developed into positive agreement (I think he hit home.) Another interesting part of his delivery was he strayed into theological grounds. . . . At this point I intervened fearing another Reformation, summarized, and drew the meeting to a conclusion. . . . You will be pleased to note that all of our 103

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desperadoes arrived back from Christmas leave despite the bus breaking down. . . . All this was carried with good order and good humour. . . . a good example of a community pulling together and actually producing the goods. (Ross, 1996)

This preparatory session for the 1995 leave is of special interest because of the deceptively casual atmosphere within which its serious, self-revealing business was conducted. Loudly and for the record, advertised expectations needed to be accorded lip service so as to garner their quota of peer admiration. These publicly touted, subculturally reinforced simulated objectives tended to define the leave experiences in purely hedonistic terms, culminating in allusions to suitcases filled with contraceptives. Within this good-natured pretend game, staff were assigned to play the role of being dependable spoilsports. Penninghame’s prison newspaper thus announced the meeting as follows: Anyway, lads, we’ll all be home in four days’ time. The governor is holding a community meeting on Wednesday afternoon. I think it’s so we can all be told about the silly things we’ve not to be doing while we’re out. We’ve not to get drunk, stoned or arrested or we’ll be in deep trouble. I suppose we’d be as well staying in here then! (“Welcome,” 1995, p. 1)

But both the prisoners and prison staff members were keenly aware of the fact that the impending leave experiences would involve much more by way of interpersonal problems than the challenge of contending with free-world temptations. I had discovered this decades earlier when I participated in a study of Norwegian prisoners returning from furlough. I reported at the time, “The benefit most universally experienced by inmates temporarily returned to the community is the feeling that their relationship with significant people is renewed, cemented, revived, or otherwise strengthened” (Toch, 1967, p. 253). As for the payoff, I noted, The strongest plea in support of furlough (argued by nine out of ten interviewees) is that it provides opportunities for constructive, restorative, reassuring human contact in renewed face-to-face communication. Bonds loosened with time and distance are restored, 104

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doubts resolved, new pledges made, and understandings achieved. (Toch, 1967, p. 257)

The prisoners at the Penninghame meeting had not been invited to discuss their individual family situations. However, the importance of the problems they were liable to encounter was underlined, and they were asked to think in terms of constructive resolutions. Moreover, the social worker (before his lapse into biblical exegesis) focused the attention of the group on issues of interpersonal relations, and elicited a respectfully attentive response. Finally, there was the role of the prison staff as dependable members of a supportive community, which at minimum would discourage unhelpful filibuster.

MAKING UNSELFISH CONTRIBUTIONS On the 26th of November 1997, Penninghame open prison came up for mention in the British House of Commons. Alasdair Morgan, the distinguished member representing the area in which the prison is situated (which includes Galloway, of MacToch fame), testified during debate that “the prison has been well integrated into the local community” (1997, para. 4), and he reported as an illustration Much of the prisoners’ work goes to help voluntary organisations that might not otherwise be able to carry out their role within their own slender funds, so the arrangements with the prison enable them to achieve more than they could otherwise do. Recently, a constituent of mine who is involved in running a day centre told me that the centre would certainly have shut down some time ago had he not had the daily assistance of four or five prisoners from Penninghame open prison. (Morgan, 1997, para. 6)

I had the occasion recently to allude to other, comparable involvements by prison inmates, which had been similarly implemented, as I put it, “not for profit or gain but to assist some underprivileged people who stand in manifest need of assistance” (Toch, 2000, p. 270). I tried to make some sort of case for my fondly held assumption that in addition to 105

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“the [obvious] benefits of altruistic activity for its targets or recipients . . .  [it was] no less tangible [to envisage] the benefit [that] accrued to those who engage in the activity” (Toch, 2000, p. 270). I thought that it might not be too far-fetched to propose that “several psychological gains from altruistic activity . . . have rehabilitative potential” (Toch, 2000, p. 270). Thus, taking into account the day-to-day experience of a team such as the Penninghame inmates rescuing the endangered day care center, I speculated that among the rehabilitative yield of such an experience, What one expects is that the [prisoner] crew members have potentially learned and hopefully internalized premises such as (a) it is not at all unmanly to engage in caring or nurturing activities, (b) there is satisfaction in experiencing gratitude from persons whom one assists, (c) to respond to needs of others is at least as rewarding as satisfying one’s own, (d) one’s personal problems diminish in salience when one considers the problems faced by those who are more disadvantaged, (e) one contributes to improving the world through individual acts of kindness, and (f) one can feel effective, competent, and powerful when one assists people who are relatively dispossessed of resources. (Toch, 2000, pp. 274–275)

Among opportunities for unselfish dedication that were recurrently available to prisoners at Penninghame were arrangements that had to be planned and implemented for the entertainment and edification of visitors. The following news items from the Penninghame Post include cases in point: The visit committee are happy to report that St. Vincent de Paul have donated a large quantity of toys and computer games to the crèche, they will be installed when a secure cupboard has been fitted to keep them in the clubhouse. This should keep children of all ages out of mummy’s hair and happily amused during weekend visits. (“Council Business,” 1994, p. 3) Volunteers are required to help with this evening-in for a group of local pensioners. The evening will be a series of games (dominoes, cards, etc.) Your help is needed to make the night a success, as some 106

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of the O.A.P.s may need assistance to fully participate in these events. (“Pensioners’ Night Out,” 1994, p. 1) Pete Williams would like to thank all those who participated in last Wednesday’s hospitality night for the pensioners and handicapped organized by the C-LINK group. All concerned has a good night of singing and dominoes, particularly Gracie who won the £5 first prize, and everyone took home one of Penninghame’s plants kindly donated by the garden party. (“Pete Williams,” 1994, p. 4) It was suggested to us that Penninghame should be delivering firewood to the local pensioners all year round, charging a minimum fee, and not only at Xmas time. This would help to offset the ever increasing price of coal. The lads would be happy to do it. (“Letter to the Editor,” 1994, p. 2) Norman Wisdom’s Children’s Hospice. Help break a record for charity. . . . They build hospitals and care centres all over the third world as well as running convoys into war zones and setting up farming projects in deprived countries. So come out lads and sing your hearts out. Any fund raising ideas should be put to Morag. (“Norman Wisdom’s Children’s Hospice,” 1995, p. 3)

It is noteworthy that opportunities for altruistic behavior were often piggybacked on efforts to link the inside community to the outside community—beyond the most obvious such link, which involved inmates performing humanitarian service functions. One example, mentioned earlier, featured prisoners working with a charitable organization in the community. In such collaboration, it mattered that the inmates not only collected and forwarded financial contributions (which admittedly were bound to be modest in a prison) but that they also expended effort and supplied ideas to support the cause. Hands-on samaritan enterprises are apt to yield the greatest psychological benefit, though some of the most dramatic opportunities of this kind are only rarely afforded to relatively sheltered prison inmates, such as a group that happened to be returning to the prison: The Glasgow bus had a good excuse for being late last Sunday. They were faced with an emergency when a car ran off the road on a bad 107

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bend and ended up on its roof, trapping the woman driver underneath. The coach arrived on the scene seconds after this happened when the passengers took the initiative and bodily lifted the car (a mini metro) enabling the driver to be rescued through the broken roof. . . . Good deed for the lads. (“Passengers Help Out at Traffic Accident,” 1995, p. 1)

The rescue eventuated in the following letter collectively addressed to the prisoners of Penninghame: Dears Sirs: I would like to take this opportunity to say “THANK YOU” to the men who rescued me on Sunday 26th February. I understand they had been returning from weekend leave when my son waved down the bus. I now fully realize that if it were not for them lifting my car off me I would have died. So once again I want to say “Thanks for saving my life.” Yours sincerely, Diane McAllister. (“Letters,” 1995, p. 2)

REPLICATING QUOTIDIAN LIFE Most of the prisoners in Penninghame slept dormitory-style—an arrangement that may have helped to reinforce the prison’s community but did nothing to prepare inmates for the living conditions hopefully available to them following release. To compensate for this deficit in verisimilitude, Penninghame arranged for structural modifications in several outbuildings, which yielded a number of self-contained apartments or suites. On completion of this construction work, announcements such as the following were disseminated: Last week four residents from the house moved into the new east lodge (near the walled garden). This building has solid fuel fired central heating and all the necessary amenities for independent living. These lodges are provided for residents to get into the habit of cooking for themselves; budgeting the housekeeping; shopping, cleaning, laundry, etc. prior to release. They are only open to people with less than twelve months to serve of their sentences. . . . They make extra work for residents but the benefits are independence and privacy as 108

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well as choosing their own menu. (“Residents Move Into East Lodge,” 1995, p. 4)

The lodges not only tasked their residents with obligations equivalent to those entailed in everyday independent living, such as managing budgets, shopping, and preparing meals, but also required four throwntogether residents to do the requisite planning and arrive at decisions as a group. In the process of budgeting, shopping, and allocating household chores, the inmates had to become sensitized to each others’ idiosyncrasies and predilections, to reconcile predictably divergent views, manage any incipient conflict, and organize individual and team activities. To assist the groups—and intervene if needed—an officer was assigned to monitor and supervise the lodges and to act as the staff spokesperson for the residents. The officer who was charged with the function came to take it very seriously, became invested in the lodge concept, and was accorded tenure through the date on which Penninghame open prison—including its lodges—was summarily closed. A noteworthy archival detail: In line with Penninghame’s penchant for naming key facilities after celebrated historical figures, two of the independent living units had been christened the Bruce Lodge and the Wallace Lodge, and they were transferred as such to the London realtor who acquired the prison.

CAT, THE ENTERPRISING JOURNALIST As a responsible scholar, it is incumbent on me to describe some of my scholarly sources. The Penninghame Post happens to be of particular interest; among other reasons, this was a paper that was a truly collaborative enterprise. The physical paper was put out under the auspices of the prison’s one-woman Education Unit staff, which handled the details of production. The inmate-journalist was responsible for the contents of the paper, and as editor-in-chief, had the right to select a pen name. The editor decided (for reasons only known to himself) to call himself “The Cat.” The Post consisted of two sheets folded in half, comprising eight (relatively small) unnumbered pages. The first printing (Issue No. 1) appeared 109

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on the 15th of November 1994 in the wake of the prison’s self-governance experiment, which I describe in Chapter 8. This first edition—which is probably a collector’s item—opened with the following preamble: Welcome to the new Weekly News, and Views centred on the Penninghame Community. Our aim is to keep you informed of all that is happening in Penninghame, by publishing a weekly diary of events and by keeping everyone in touch with the work of the various committees and the council. We hope that we will have the support of everyone at Penninghame in producing this newsletter, as it will eliminate many of the difficulties of communication which has been a failing in the past. This newsletter is about what happens in Penninghame, so please help us keep people informed. (“Welcome,” 1994, p. 1)

There was also the subscript, Health and Hygiene Warning: For those who intend to use this newsletter for any other purpose rather than read it!! The ink on this publication will stain when it comes into contact with wet surfaces, so please avoid contact with sensitive areas!! (“Welcome,” 1994, p. 1)

Despite this scatological addendum, the inaugural issue was filled with businesslike news items, ranging from the schedule for Christmas leave and for the annual open day, to invitations to a football match, the announcement of business courses, and the weekend menu. The paper also contained the membership roster of newly constituted inmate–staff committees, subcommittees, and task forces. The sociologist Erving Goffman, in his iconic book Asylums (1961), alluded to publications such as the Penninghame Post, which he described in less than favorable terms. He wrote, One of the most common forms of institutional ceremony is the house-organ—typically a weekly newspaper or monthly magazine. Usually all the contributors are recruited from within inmate ranks, resulting in a kind of mock hierarchy, while supervision and censorship are provided by a member of the staff who is relatively congenial 110

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to the inmates yet relatively loyal to his fellow officials. . . . The writing is done by inmates but expresses the official view of the functions of the institution, the staff ’s theory of human nature, an idealized version of inmate–staff relationships, and the stance an ideal convert ought to take—in short, it presents the institutional line. (pp. 95–96)

Goffman (1961) observed, “Interestingly enough, inmates who make this compact with the staff often do not cease to affirm the counter-mores. They introduce whatever open criticism of the institution the censors will permit” (p. 96). One presumes that Goffman could have easily accommodated off-color jokes about printer’s ink. In his book, Goffman (1961) dealt exclusively with what he called “total institutions,” which he described as institutions in which “there is a basic split between a large managed group, conveniently called inmates, and a small supervisory staff ” and where “each grouping tends to conceive of the other in terms of narrow, hostile stereotypes, staff often seeing inmates as bitter, secretive, and untrustworthy, while inmates often see staff as condescending, highhanded, and mean” (p. 7). This portrait is one that quite accurately describes almost all correctional facilities. However, it is exactly the sort of situation that Penninghame as an inmate–staff community was designed to circumvent. Whether the open prison in fact succeeded or failed in doing this can be best ascertained by examining instances in which the interests of the inmates and demands made by the prison administration appreciably diverged. An excellent example of such a divergence was the mandating of random drug testing, which was instituted across-the-board in the Scottish Prison Service.

FINESSING A DIVIDE The implementation of mandated drug testing was announced in Penninghame at a community meeting in late January 1995. The notification generated a great deal of anxiety among the residents, in partial response to which a follow-up announcement provided that “there will be a period of grace until the first of March before the introduction of random drug testing proper” (“Random Testing,” 1995, p. 1). By way of additional reassurance, 111

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the administration reiterated, “The policy at Penninghame is to treat people with drug problems and not simply to send them back to closed conditions (as happens at other places) so an indication of consumption is needed for monitoring progress” (“Random Testing,” 1995, p. 1). The staff and prisoners at Penninghame had long been aware of three uncontestable facts: (a) an open prison such as Penninghame (by virtue of its openness) facilitates the importation of commodities that are valued by residents, which hypothetically include technically illicit substances; (b) many men incarcerated in Scotland—presumably including some of the residents of Penninghame—have long-standing histories of substance use and abuse; (c) despite the prison system’s concerted and commendable efforts, it would be too much to expect that as a result there would be no demand for drugs among long-term prisoners. These were the sorts of facts known to the staff that the inmates knew that the staff knew and the staff knew that inmates knew that the staff knew. In light of such shared knowledge, the question of whether Penninghame could be designated a “drug-free establishment” had been sorrowfully tabled. The inmates at Penninghame happened to share one other strongly felt conviction, which they were anxious to communicate to the staff. The Post enunciated this presupposition in a double-bordered box under the paper’s masthead, by way of a formal disclaimer. The statement read, The picture of a hypodermic syringe in this space last week has caused some consternation among residents who think it implies the use of injections here. We apologize for any misunderstanding (it was the only appropriate graphic on the computer) and we have been asked to state that: “There are no I.V. drug users at Penninghame.” Editor. (“Random Testing,” 1995, p. 1)

The righteous indignation in this message (as per the heavy emphasis in the original) implied a corollary presumption, which was implicitly also emphasized: The residents of Penninghame wanted it understood that many of them believed that the smoking of marijuana was an innocent and innocuous pastime not worthy of staff concern or attention. Monitoring of usage violated this expectation, especially given the shared 112

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information that the presence of hash could be detected in urine samples for up to 30 days (“Random Testing,” 1995, p. 1). The result of this situation was a Mexican standoff, requiring intersecting compromises, one by some of the residents, who would have to make do with what they felt was a diminished quality of life, and one by the staff, who would have to settle for sullen acquiescence where they had hoped for amicable cooperation and understanding. Under these circumstances, the most constructive resolution that one could achieve in subservience to the community model was to initiate honest and informal communication, in furtherance of which end the last editor of the Post (whose Goffmanesque pen name was “Judas”) reported to his readers, Many people have asked what would happen if they were to provide a urine sample for analysis which proved positive for hash, but no other drugs; until now, the only answer has been “I don’t know,” which isn’t much of an answer on which to make decisions about your lifestyle. This state of affairs was brought up in a recent conversation with His Gaffership and Judas, and was settled in very definite fashion when Bwana assured Judas that anyone who tests positive for cannabis only will not be RTCC [demoted to close conditions] at least for the first offense. . . . Any subsequent offences will be treated according to the good faith shown by the guilty parties in addressing their “Offending Behavior,” to use the trade jargon. In real terms, then, if you restrict your drug use to purely dope smoking, you’ll get at least a second chance if you are captured. (“Straight From the Governor’s Mouth,” 1995, p. 2)

Two entries from the Post might serve to illustrate other ameliorative and tension-reducing attributes of the Penninghame paradigm, one of which has to do with the informality of relations among members of the community. In one related story, the Post thus reported, A certain gentleman was using Vick’s inhaler on Sunday evening. A couple of the lads pretended that the inhaler actually contained opiates and could therefore cause one to fail a drug test. The gentleman 113

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in question never got a wink of sleep on Sunday night, and was first down to the surgery come Monday morning—to “own up” to using Vick’s inhaler. (“Mug of the Week,” 1996, p. 4)

In the second story (which anticipates some of the developments I review elsewhere), the Post announced the introduction of a medical review board “to assess the drug testing programme” (“Medical Review Board,” 1995, p. 4). The Post then relayed the following invitation to the prisoners: Olaf the social worker is keen to set up a “liaison committee” of two residents (with a good knowledge or close association to drugs) to attend at meetings of this board to take an active part in discussions and provide the residents perspective. These changes are to be arrived at by a democratic process and it is felt important that representations be made by us at the planning stages. This committee will be separate from the other usual house committees and will be involved with the medical staff as well as social work and management on a regular basis. (“Medical Review Board,” 1995, p. 4).

In connection with this proposal, it is gratifying to note the type of qualifications that Olaf the social worker indicated he would like his participants to have. Olaf had never heard of New Careers, but he could sense that—as Doug Grant would have put it—there are benefits to enlisting persons who are products of a problem in efforts to address the problem. Such persons—in this case, inmates “with close association to drugs”— have unique subject-matter expertise based on relevant experience, which includes experience with undesirable consequences that are reliably generated by the problem; they are likely to have credibility among their peers, and they can offer a sense of what might be accepted and therefore doable, by way of interventions, and what is bound to generate resistance and might therefore fail to work.

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10

Building a Sense of Advancement Into Long Terms of Confinement

A

short prison term can be conceived of as an intermission in one’s ordinary day-to-day life, but a long period of confinement has to serve as a substitute for a substantial chunk of one’s free-world existence. The term normalization has gained importance in this regard because it is a concept invoked in sophisticated circles to describe the effort to arrange life inside institutions to achieve as much equivalence to life outside institutions as possible—to make the experience of living in confinement as close to “normal” as can be arranged under such inauspicious circumstances. There are obvious difficulties in pursuing this objective, beyond the built-in constraints and circumscriptions of confinement itself. One attribute of prison life, for example, is that of its day-in, day-out sameness and monotony, of the lack of highlights that are provided by even marginal free-world routines. More critical can be the pointlessness of simply doing

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14373-010 Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment: Applying Social Psychology in Prisons and Policing, by H. Toch Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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time, the absence of any opportunity for self-improvement or experiential progression. This is especially a problem for the longest term prisoners, who spend years in prison vegetating or gravitating among a veritable jumble of unrelated or disconnected assignments. For such prisoners, a “normal” (or free-world equivalent) existence would be one that would instead offer some chances for advancement, in the dictionary definition of a “career,” or of “a field or pursuit of consecutive progression or achievement” (“Career,” 1984, p. 240). To my mind, “sentence planning” in Scottish prisons could be understood as one way to attain career equivalence for long-term prisoners. Under the system, a staff member in the prison works with the inmate to help him or her to formulate short-term and long-term plans for activities that are congruent with his or her interests. In Scotland, that staff member happens to be a correctional officer functioning as a “personal officer.” But it could in theory be any staff member (including a psychologist) who acquires a regular caseload of prisoners whose records he keeps and monitors over time. To the extent to which the prisoner comes to perfect or develop skills along the way, opportunities should be provided for him or her to exercise these skills. If the inmate is trained as a plumber or a carpenter, there is no reason why he or she should not function as such in the prison. The obverse ought also to be the case: If the inmate is working as a librarian, he or she could be acquiring some knowledge and proficiency in library science, which could make him or her a professional librarian. Moreover, educational progression in prisons need not end, as it usually does, with a high school equivalency diploma. The availability of computers and access to MOOCs (massive online open courses) make progression at the college level easier than it has been in the past. The long and the short of the scheme is that being in prison ought not to foreclose the opportunity for demonstrating competence, for being creative or becoming useful, or for having one’s constructive contributions valued and rewarded. If there are in-house career opportunities for long-term inmates, there must be choice points for the prisoner to review his or her involvements and decide whether to continue on a given path or to explore new and different options. Major reviews can occur at transitional junctures between 116

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career stages (such as early, mid-career, and prerelease) and when a prisoner is transferred from one institution to another. But linear progression and logical sequence must never be sacrificed, because they are key ingredients of a meaningful career. Career continuity can be provided in a prison system by case managers tasked to keep in touch with the inmate and staff who work with the inmate, to make sure that the torch is passed smoothly and effectively along the way (Toch, 1995a, 1995b, 1995c).

A PRISON SYSTEM AS A CAREER LADDER Most systems have prison settings that range from high custody to low custody. These are usually defined by the system as sets of security arrangements designed for inmates who pose different degrees of risk. But from the long-term inmate’s perspective, such custody gradations come to be experienced as structural career stages. The incoming long-term prisoner at Stage 1 finds he has to adjust to imprisonment itself and must simultaneously cope with a setting that offers substantial and onerous restrictions. Assuming that he retains his equilibrium, chooses his companions with discernment, and settles down to a diligent routine, the prisoner can eventually verify that he will be promoted to an environment presenting fewer constraints (Stage 2) and from there can graduate to a lowercustody milieu that offers tangible increments of freedom and transitional experiences preparatory to release from prison (Stage 3). Getting out of prison at the discretion of prison authorities (Stage 4) would then loom as the ultimate promotion in a structurally ordained scheme.

TAKING THE DIFFICULT FINAL STEPS In Scotland, prison settings appropriately known as top-end are relatively relaxed enclaves in mainline prisons, or self-contained semi-open prisons. Semi-open prisons feed inmates into open prisons, but sometimes the line between the two domains can be evanescent. A case in point at the time of my involvement was Dungavel, which after serving as an aristocratic hunting lodge, became a prison categorized as semi-open. But Dungavel was casually transmuted into an open prison in 1994 by virtue 117

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of an arrangement that left the gates permanently open, though the prison’s fence was left in place—mainly to keep the neighborhood’s dogs and children from trespassing. The transition from semi-open to open was announced in a speech by the warden, John Bywalec, who “addressed the prisoners, about a third of them serving life sentences, and told them that the ‘eyes of the community will be on you from April 1’” (Freeman, 1994, para. 6). The audience to this hortatory oration was composed of men “adjudged to present no risk to the public. . . . who have worked hard to achieve this status, displaying mature and stable behavior, who have accepted responsibility and have addressed their offending behavior” (Freeman, 1994, para. 8–9). Most of these carefully select prisoners had already been working in the community outside the prison, and many had engaged in public service volunteer activities. The prison also had an unusually generous provision for family visitations and had been granting several of the inmates unescorted home leaves. As it happened, my transactions at Dungavel—which started out as one more exercise in my prison democratization campaign—were shaped by concerns related to these excursions and reunions. In meetings with groups of prisoners and staff on the prison grounds that had been advertised as dealing with participatory governance, the discussion turned to interventions that might further family reintegration and enhance the benefits of the home leave experience. In recording this change in agenda, I explained at the time that “this issue. . . . heavily preempts the prisoners’ attention” (Toch, 1994b) and that in considering the nature of the problem as it appeared to unfold, it looked to me like Conflicts and other interpersonal problems that manifest themselves during home leave are glossed over, both to project an image of impervious manliness and to preclude the possibility of an adverse parole decision. The latter consideration also enters into the recalcitrance of family members who might have useful information to share. With confidentiality assured, one can envisage a number of vehicles for getting the information on the table, working through problems, and thereby making the leave a true rehearsal and test situation for reintegration, as well as a constructive prelude to it. (Toch, 1994b) 118

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The prison had already experimented with support groups for wives, and efforts to engage in pre-leave counseling had been undertaken at Dungavel and elsewhere. The discussion therefore came to center on post-leave debriefings and on the possibility of having debriefing sessions conducted by the prisoners’ personal officers. It was recognized during the discussion that this idea “might encounter resistance from custodyoriented officers,” but the hope was that other officers “might be attracted by the presumption that they understood the prisoner better than anyone else” (Toch, 1994b). Moreover, if any program of this kind were to be implemented, remunerative training would have to be provided, which the officers would predictably welcome. It was understood that resistance from prisoners would also have to be overcome, and in this case the inmates’ misgivings appeared to be more substantial than expected, despite the fact that under the personal officer scheme there are provisions for strict confidentiality. It became obvious that there might be unaccountable difficulties in extending a process that appeared to have been working effectively for sentence planning to the provision of assistance to inmates with problems encountered in the community.

RESPONDING TO PRISON SURVEY DATA The Scottish Prison Service had a built-in data-feedback and self-study process consisting of periodic opinion surveys conducted and disseminated by Ed Wozniak and his minions. These surveys were comprehensive in coverage, with equivalent questions asked of prisoners and prison staff. Following each of the surveys, Wozniak and his troops fed back the information that had been meticulously tabulated, highlighting noteworthy or interesting comparisons and differences. One of those highlights from Wozniak’s 1994 survey caught the eye of John Bywalec, the warden of Dungavel. Bywalec noted with some concern that at Dungavel “while staff perceive sentence planning fairly positively, the prisoners on the other hand are extremely negative in their views of this important initiative” (Bywalec, 1994). To address this issue, Bywalec invited “each personal 119

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officer [at his prison] to discuss this matter with their group of prisoners” (Bywalec, 1994). Although the resulting deliberations were no doubt scintillating, they were unlikely to be revealing because the venue invited the prisoners to express off-putting reservations to their officer-interlocutors, whose feelings they would have no desire to hurt. Moreover, neither the officers nor prisoners were likely to consider that the problem might be strictly chronological—sentence planning might not have been a relevant modality for comparison purposes when the issues of concern to the inmates originated in the community and in relations with their families. Correction officers in the United Kingdom are called prison officers— an appropriate title that connotes both the officers’ jurisdiction and their arena of expertise. The scope of the officers’ designated proficiency (augmented by in-service training) makes it eminently appropriate for a prisoner to talk to his personal officer about enrolling in an anger management seminar or considering a plumbing module. But even with the officer’s enhanced role and expanded jurisdiction, his or her availability as a counselor might provide no comfort, reassurance, or confidence to the distressed prisoner who had just discovered that his 8-year absence from home had resoundingly estranged him from his wife and children. The inmate’s reluctance would be especially understandable given the fact that intimate relatedness and exploration of feelings are routinely frowned on in male prisons—both by prisoners and by prison staff members, who are not trained social workers. The failure to bring up concerns related to marital or family problems in sentence planning sessions would thus not be unexpected. The fact that a prisoner might come back from leave with an unresolved personal crisis but with nothing in particular to report to his trusty personal officer would be no reflection on the officer or the personal officer scheme or on sentence planning as a modality. The difficulties that prisoners run into when they are released into the community have to be addressed in a timely fashion. But such mis­ adventures have to be worked through in an appropriate venue, which does not happen to be the vehicle for career planning in the prison. What a wounded inmate returning from a disappointing furlough requires is 120

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the assistance of someone who has experience with the sort of problems that are presented for (and by) offenders released after protracted periods of confinement. This expertise has to do with the travails of reintegration and readjustment and their eventual resolution.

AN IRONIC POSTMORTEM Dungavel was one of several pioneering and innovative prisons in Scotland that ended up being closed in a misconceived effort to save money by abandoning vulnerable quality projects. Dungavel’s afterlife, however, was particularly grotesque. The plant was turned over to the English Home Office, which in 2001 reopened Dungavel as an internment facility for asylum seekers whose applications had been rejected. This outcome could not have been more at variance with the original concept of an open prison. The refashioned Dungavel was run by the British administration. The prison’s neighbors, however, took unfriendly notice when the media learned that “babies and young children [had] been held there prior to deportation, in some cases for over a year” (see http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Dungavel, para. 4). Following a series of widely publicized demonstrations, the child incarceration practice was discontinued, but shortly thereafter, Scottish activists charged that the Dungavel population included badly injured victims of torture and rape who had been scheduled for forcible repatriation to their countries of origin. (Briggs & McKay, 2012). This was arguably a particularly ironic twist in the afterlife of a prerelease facility.

A CHANGE OF PACE: AN EXCURSION TO A MID-CAREER ENCLAVE Some prisons are multipurpose facilities. Greenock prison in Scotland had been originally intended to function as a repository for offenders sentenced by courts in the west of the country. But the grounds of the prison contained several single-accommodation housing units that were self-contained and lent themselves to being administered as mini-prisons 121

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within the prison. One of these housing units was Darroch Hall, and this building was drafted to serve in an exciting new capacity, as a setting to offer enriched programming for long-term prisoners during the mid-career stage of their incarceration. The advertised intention was to “provide a national facility for selected prisoners serving 12 years or over, affording them an opportunity for progression towards release” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_Prison_Greenock, para. 1). My assignment was to assist in this endeavor by working with residents and staff to try to add further detail to Darroch Hall’s mission statement. The idea was congruent with prevailing practice. As I noted at the time, “mission statements are taken seriously in Scotland, where quality management strategies are popular. The Prison Service has a mission statement, as do all prisons and autonomous special units” (Toch, 1995b, p. 38). Whether Darroch Hall as a mere cellblock could qualify under this precedent was a matter of definition, depending on how the enclave’s autonomy was construed. In any event, we barged ahead, but my impression was that the project was starting out on a distinctly inauspicious note: I [had] cited the Prison Service mission statement, and the prisoners questioned whether this statement guided the agency’s actions. . . . One inmate reviewed a long and checkered prison career to document his reluctance to place trust in new initiatives. Another prisoner cited societal and systemic constraints to make a case for the proposition that local reform was futile. Other prisoners opined that mission statements should be drafted after more fundamental concerns had been addressed. (Toch, 1995b, p. 38)

With the support of Derek Watt, Darroch Hall’s principal officer (and its de facto warden), the discussion was gently refocused, and several mission statement planks were nominated and considered. To my mind, the most impressive example of diplomatic compromise crafted by the group was the following (lightly edited) provision: “Staff in D[arrock] Hall will enforce prison rules with flexible consistency [emphasis added], maximizing fairness and equity, while considering special needs and mitigating 122

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circumstances of individual prisoners.” The most hotly debated and controversial plank that emerged read somewhat as follows: “Uncontrolled use of serious drugs poses a danger to the [Darroch Hall] community, and such usage will be discouraged by prisoners and staff.”1 Three draft provisos appeared to have particular application to the mid-career status of the Darroch Hall residents and are therefore worth recalling, because career planning tends to be least complicated at the inception of a prison term, when the most immediate need is for the prisoner to embark on the sentence, and at the end of the term, when the task is to prepare the inmate for release, than it is during mid-career, when the long-term prisoner is most likely to flounder: Staff in D[arroch] Hall is mindful of the importance of family ties to the welfare of prisoners. All possible effort will be made to create a climate for visits and family contacts that will make such experiences pleasant and profitable. Prisoners in D[arroch] Hall are dedicated to the constructive use of their time, given the goal of eventually becoming contributing members of society. Staff are dedicated to fully support prisoner efforts at self-advancement. . . . D[arroch] Hall prisoners and staff are aware of the danger that sentence planning can become a meaningless exercise if the process is not taken seriously by every officer and prisoner; opting out of sentence planning will be discouraged, and every effort will be made to implement sentence planning recommendations.

The proceedings to this point had operated with textbook efficacy, until the discussion was redeployed by one of the prisoners at the meeting. The man’s gambit happened to violate a particularly impressive mission statement proviso that had been formulated earlier during the session: D[arroch] Hall intends to operate—insofar as it can—as a prison community. A community aims at free, open and honest communication— especially between prisoners and staff. A community makes decisions 1

These quotations are from the author’s notes about the community meeting at the prison (“Discussion points for D Hall Mission Statement”), which were made in late 1994.

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for the common good, in the interest of its majority but with full regard for those of its minority, especially prisoners who are disadvantaged or vulnerable.

DESCENDING THE MASLOWIAN ESCALATOR Darroch Hall had been advertised as offering “single cells and en-suite toilets,” but the number of single cells (54) was usually short of the demand for accommodations, requiring some more-or-less temporary double celling. This set of circumstances framed the ensuing digressive discussion, which was increasingly animated: The debate next turned to issues of a housekeeping nature and focused on assignments to double and single cells. The ostensible issue was the prioritizing of single-cell assignments, but the concern revolved around a specific individual and his assignment, with pressure to exact a decision in this matter becoming quite intense. (Toch, 1995b, p. 38)

This procedural gambit was much more consequential than it sounded, because the objective was to evict a person who was not present at the meeting, in favor of someone who prominently was. Although this sleazy campaign failed, the attempt to hijack the agenda of our meeting succeeded to an unfortunate extent: At this stage the mission statement [the document that I had been trying to get the group to draft as a way of promoting self-governance] had to be tabled, but the group expressed satisfaction at the opportunity for what it saw as an open and honest exchange. This satisfaction was somewhat tempered when the prisoner on whose behalf cellassignment [and as a corollary, eviction of the incumbent] pressure had been exercised exploded in anger and left the meeting in a huff. It was subsequently resolved that the mission statement project would be resuscitated at a more convenient juncture. (Toch, 1995b, p. 38)

There is always the danger in efforts to orchestrate organizational change that at unexpected moments unresolved needs of individual participants relating to lower (physiological, safety, or ego) levels of the 124

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Maslowian hierarchy can be triggered, and culminate in unscheduled expressions of anxiety. Such occasions are particularly prone to arise in settings that have been heavily in the business of responding, or failing to respond, to lower-level needs. If personal and organizational development is to be achieved in such settings, a continuous effort is required to divorce the substance of reform from the extrinsic reward and punishment system. In prisons this is particularly hard because prisoners’ progress can be equated (especially by prisoners themselves) with increased access to fringe benefits or with degrees of amelioration of sanctions. Unfortunately, progressive prison systems can add to the problem because they often proudly institute, emphasize, and institutionalize the punctilious deployment of Mickey Mouse incentives as an advance over their obsessive deployment of Mickey Mouse punitive sanctions. Prison administrators can defend this practice as humane—which it, relatively speaking, may be. But they can also invoke behavioral science as their authority—and psychology in particular, because in the popular mind, psychology is often equated with the systematic use of rewards to reinforce behavior. The problem probably lies in the prevailing conception of psychology as a discipline, a conception that shortchanges some of our more humanistic concerns—those relating to singular human personality attributes and aspirations—in favor of a more attractively simplistic conception of human nature and motivation. For a number of reasons—including the obvious need to prevent wholesale stultification, deterioration, and impairment, the administrators of prisons have always had to be cognizant of distinctly psychological issues, though they may not have labeled them as such. These are the sorts of concerns that have to do with the requisites for surviving under stressful conditions of incarceration, and the limitations to human resilience under stress (Toch, 1975, 1992b). As the job specification of progressive prison administrators has evolved, their “psychological” concerns have come to include the concern with providing a meaningful prison experience to the long-term inmate— to offer a prison existence that transcends mere physical and emotional survival. The notion of enabling in-house careers accommodates this 125

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expanded mission, and it presupposes that opportunities can be provided to keep pace with the evolving skills and expanded horizons of inmates. These career paths would be expected to vary, depending on the interests and motivation of the prisoners as well as their maturity and level of development. In sentence planning, as a case in point, the interests and motives of the prisoner are engaged in an effort to encourage activities designed to enhance his or her personal knowledge and skills. One presumes the prisoner would be an enthusiastic participant in this process and in the pursuit of its goals. The prisoner would therefore be expected to enjoy any achievements attained as he or she progresses and as his or her career unfolds. These are intrinsic rewards, and they do not exclude (nor compete with) any rewards that the prison might provide to communicate its approval of the inmate’s dedication. By the same token, the prison’s dispensation of benefits would not materially affect the attainments to which they respond, though they might enhance the satisfaction they yield. On their own, however, the prison’s “incentives” can become a diversion: The prisoner whose life revolves around the pursuit of fringe benefits is likely to be an uninspiring deadbeat. So as not to end on a negative note, let me add the following caveat: As long as we imprison many persons for unconscionably long periods of time, our prisons have to shoulder the obligation to support, encourage, and reinforce the personal development of the long-term residents of prisons. To the extent to which any incentive system can contribute to this objective (rather than detracting from it), it must be considered a constructive application of psychological knowledge.

THE LIVELY AFTERLIFE OF DARROCH HALL Darroch Hall was not a prison but a self-contained environment within a multi-environment prison. As a site for a reform attempt or effort at enrichment—such as the activity with which I was trying to be associated— this sort of environment is particularly congenial because its compactness and intimacy and relative disengagement make it an ideal setting for 126

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the development of an autonomous communal experiment, which can encompass both staff and prisoners. Darroch Hall in the 90s had attempted to provide a stimulating environment for long-term prisoners in mid-sentence. It continued to discharge this function for a decade thereafter, until (in September 2007) the premises were requisitioned to serve a different clientele. For the following 2 years, the building was inhabited by young offenders serving relatively short sentences. According to a report of the period, A major advantage of Darroch Hall is that the young offenders [YOs] being held there are now closer to their homes. There are five visit sessions allocated to YOs each week. . . . The visit facility is bright and spacious; hot and cold refreshments are available, and there is a children’s play area. . . . Visitors spoken to were positive about the visit experience and the individual information and support available. (HM Inspectorate of Prisons, 2009, Section 4.18)

On other counts, the report noted, there were many formal and informal educational opportunities available, with “very good relationships between YOs and education staff,” and “young offenders spend a lot of time out of their cells” and “the YOs spoke of the ‘day going quickly’” (HM Inspectorate of Prisons, 2009, Section 4.34). In March 2009, before the encomium of Darroch Hall as a YO prison had been finalized, the cellblock was transmogrified—on what was designated an “emergency” basis—into an overflow repository for female prisoners. Press reports under headlines such as “Cons in Telly Catfights” talked of a crisis in the prison from which the residents were drawn. As per the succinct headline, there were reports of proliferating conflict, and a prison’s “insider” was quoted as explaining, “When the natives are restless, it spells trouble for everyone and they decided to ship them out before it gets out of control” (Burns, 2009, para. 10). Putting aside the unusual circumstances of this last move, the history of Darroch Hall neatly conformed to an organizational model that has been called unit management: The idea of functional units was simple: take a prison and divide it into smaller groups of inmates and staff members. Each group of 127

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inmates (50–100 in 1970) would have its own staff team. The inmates would stay with their units and would be individually programmed. Each unit would become a specialized “mini-prison” within a larger prison. . . . The arrangement is analogous to neighborhoods in a city. Each neighborhood can be intimate . . . [and] has its own cultural flavor. (Toch, 1992a, p. 15)

Each cohort of prisoners in units such as Darroch Hall comes paired with its own team of staff members who have special skills and qualifications to run programs that meet the unique needs of their charges. Darroch Hall neatly met this prescription, but the rest of its checkered history may have been less than ideal: At some juncture, one would expect the staff team and prisoners of a functional unit to take up permanent residence in their new home, so that a unit culture can develop and live up to its potential. Sufficient longevity must be achieved to allow the unit to attain the “major goals” of unit management, which are (1) To establish a safe, humane environment (for both staff and inmates) which minimizes the detrimental effects of confinement, and (2) To deliver a wide range of counseling, social, education, and vocational training programs designed to aid offenders to make a successful return to the community. (Levinson, 1999, p. 10)

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J

ohn Pearce, my friend, sponsor, and host in the Scottish Prison Service, described the early days of his career as a then-young prison warden as “a morass of riotous incidents, assaults on staff and hostile litigation . . .  followed in the second half of the 80s with violent incidents and hostage taking across the Service, together with the concomitant heightened media and political focus” (Pearce, 1997, p. x). He added, “There were times when individual establishments were almost down on their knees, as problem succeeded problem” (Pearce, 1997, p. x). One of the endangered establishments John Pearce was here alluding to is an old, end-of-the-road Scottish prison located in the northernmost corner of the country near the maritime town of Peterhead. Newsreels of the period featured images of rioting at Peterhead in 1987, showing correctional officers with ropes around their necks, displayed on the roof of the prison by inmates ostentatiously and gleefully pressing knives against http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14373-011 Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment: Applying Social Psychology in Prisons and Policing, by H. Toch Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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their backs. Several officers taken hostage in the prison ended up being seriously injured in the process. Memories of such encounters die hard, especially in relatively small towns where successive generations of relatives tend to work in a prison and where solidarity among officers may be prized. In Peterhead, more tangible reminders were also available in the shape of several surviving riot participants held in strict solitary confinement under deliberately austere conditions. The designation of these conditions included written specifications such as the following: HYGIENE: Slop outs [primitive sanitary arrangements that have to be scheduled where integrated plumbing facilities—including toilets— are not yet available] will be done on an individual basis; every prisoner will be offered a chance to slop out twice each day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon only. There will be no more additional slop outs. Prisoners will be allowed a maximum of 10 minutes for each slop out. Near the end of slop out time prisoners shall be informed verbally, 2 minute warning; at the end of this period they shall be ordered to return to their cell, failure to comply with this order shall result being placed in their cell by the approved control and restraint method. . . . EDUCATION: There is [sic] no facilities for education and whilst on limited regime this privilege is withdrawn. . . . SEARCHES: All prisoners will be searched weekly and quarterly searched in accordance with Standing Orders. (HMP Peterhead, n.d.)

A 1992 newspaper account more fully described the daily life of the designated “intractable” prisoners: [They] will sleep for much of the day, each in his small, Spartan cell, with a reinforced cardboard table and chair. At night, when the surrounding prison is sleeping, they either trade insults or attempt a shouted conversation to break the monotony. They are “locked down” for 23 hours a day. (Hetherington, 1992, p. 2)

The newspaper account went on to note, however, that several reform proposals had been advanced, which were partly designed to ameliorate the situation: 130

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One idea is to set good behaviour targets for the hard men by giving them the option of gradually moving back to the mainstream, after a spell in another section of Peterhead, which is shortly to be refurbished. Counseling is also being considered. (Hetherington, 1992, p. 2)

With regard to the implementation of such reforms, however, the author of the news story and the author’s informants alluded to the probability that reformers might encounter local resistance to the relocation of the segregated inmates. The story mentioned that attempts at such reform “will mean reassuring some anxious officers, with bitter experience of Peterhead violence, before attempting to counsel the prisoners themselves” (Hetherington, 1992, p. 2). This observation proved to be somewhat of an understatement as reform efforts got under way.

A Set of Marching Orders On May 20, 1993, a faxed letter arrived in Albany from Edinburgh, signed by Ed Wozniak, one of my favorite multidexterous prison administrators, among whose responsibilities was to direct and commission research and related activities for the Scottish Prison Service. In this letter, Wozniak referred to the prisoners in lockdown in Peterhead. He explained, This [lockdown] means that they are effectively in solitary confinement and only get out of their cells in the company of four officers, in full body armour, for exercise and ablutions. All communication with other prisoners is by shouting from cell to cell. (E. Wozniak, personal communication, May 20, 1993)

Wozniak went on to confirm, “It is proposed to open a new unit  .  .  .  to which these prisoners can progress,” and in this connection, he wrote, “What Peterhead staff want is to consider the issues which surround the whole problem of difficult prisoners.” Ed Wozniak concluded with, “And this is where I feel you come in” (E. Wozniak, personal communication, May 20, 1993). In a subsequent message—and in a rejoinder to my predictable objections—Wozniak wrote, 131

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I don’t think you need fear about carrying credibility with security conscious staff . . . there is no doubt in my mind that they don’t want someone with a security background like their own. They want someone who will raise a whole series of issues around a difficult prisoner which will present a challenge to them. Someone who can perhaps cast new interpretations on their behaviour and that of their “captives”. . . . They aren’t convinced that how they manage things at present is the correct way but they are afraid of doing things differently (E. Wozniak, personal communication, May 21, 1993).

Ed Wozniak mentioned that the officers who were in line to operate the new unit for the sequestered inmates would be “largely volunteers who over recent months have been arguing for specific training to allow them to develop their role with difficult prisoners” (E. Wozniak, personal communication, May 21, 1993). This observation gained importance in the context of the bifurcated history of the prison. The newspaper account had alluded to this history, noting that Peterhead had been serving as a last-ditch dumping ground for particularly difficult prisoners but was simultaneously functioning as a humane, low-pressure environment for men requiring protection, who happened to be mostly sex offenders. As a case in point, the article quoted one such prisoner, who volunteered, “You are liberated when you come in here. . . . We get on with the officers quite well. You can talk to them if you have a problem” (Hetherington, 1992, p. 2). The point being that this testimonial would have been wildly inapplicable to the security-minded officers guarding the segregated prisoners— thus raising the possibility of appreciable cultural differences among the Peterhead staff.

Some Shared Admonitions A small building on the grounds of Peterhead prison, to be known as “E Hall,” was prepared to accommodate the segregated inmates, but there was no consensus among the staff about the nature of the E Hall regime, nor even about what the word regime might mean in relation to a setting for difficult prisoners. A senior staff member of the prison summarized 132

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these divergent connotations in a report dated 1 year after the 1993 planning sessions in which I ended up participating. He wrote, E Hall was originally intended as a semi lockdown regime, acting as a halfway house between lockdown and the mainstream. However, after the visit by Professor Hans Toch in June, 1993, it was felt that the facility would be better utilized dealing with those prisoners regarded as subversive or manipulative within a mainstream setting. In common with the way Peterhead was working with Sex Offenders, it was envisioned that the staff in E hall would challenge the prisoner on his offending behaviour whilst in prison, with a view to effecting changes in attitude prior to returning to the sending establishment. . . . E hall would also be available as a conduit for those existing prisoners in the [lockdown] cells, giving them a chance to prove that they could cope in association before moving on to a freshly negotiated exit location. (Simpson, 1994, p. 2)

The 1993 planning process alluded to here opened with several presentations to the Peterhead prison staff. I had serendipitously saved some of my own semilegible crib sheets and can therefore resuscitate a few choice excerpts from my introductory remarks: A situation devoutly to be avoided is one in which one’s prisoners sit in their cells, day in and day out, wallowing in bouts of self-pity, bitterness, a carefully nurtured sense of personal injustice, a paranoid view of the system, and a carefully cultivated hatred for their keepers— which is YOU. So whatever one does, one must ask, how can one avoid connotations of unfairness and capriciousness? Some questions we must pose, 77 Are there ways in which the prisoner will be able to achieve an

improved quality of life in the program, through actions he can take or refrain from taking? 77 How much constructive activity have we made available to the prisoner? Can inmates be paired or grouped to engage in conjoint activities? 77 How about contacts of a noncustodial nature between staff and the prisoner? What have we learned about the prisoner in our 133

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dealings with him? Do we think we understand why he has done what he has done by way of transgressions? Why does the prisoner think he has done what he has done? Can the prisoner get a better handle on the motives for his own misbehavior? 77 That question, Do we understand why the prisoner has done what he has done? is related to another question, which is, Do we think it is part of our job to assess when the prisoner is likely to no longer keep doing what he has done? Has the prisoner changed? 77 And it is related to our key question, Do we think it is part of our job to affect the prisoner’s adjustment to prison in such a way as to reduce his tendency to misbehave? . . . Or is our operation to be just a storage depot? Finally, as to our forthcoming exercise: 77 Is everyone in on the planning who will be affected by the planning?

And how close can we get to this?

Dealing in the Prisoners My cautious allusion to the possibility of prisoner participation in the planning exercise owed the timidity of its wording to the fear that the proposal would be angrily rejected by some of the older officers. In fact, the idea did not appear to greatly disturb any of the prison staff members, but the suggestion did occasion a furious debate among the prisoners, which lasted late into the night, while the rest of the prison slept. These nocturnal deliberations culminated with the inmate caucus tentatively delegating one of its members to attend one planning session as the group’s designated observer—strictly on a trial basis and subject to immediate recall. This reluctance to participate might impress a disinterested observer as somewhat strange, given that the prisoners had been inhabiting an uninviting dungeon from which they were being offered the chance of release. What the observer might find even more surprising was that the inmates appeared to be assuming that they could enter negotiations holding a winning deck of cards. This stance may have partly reflected the prisoners’ hyper-macho orientation and also their awareness of the fact that their situation had become politically unsustainable—that the conditions under 134

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which they were confined (which had been scintillatingly described in the press) could no longer pass public muster. The prisoners appeared to know that the authorities badly needed to remove and transfer them, and this meant that the prisoners could create considerable embarrassment if they did not allow themselves to be removed. The resulting agenda, therefore, had to comprise a roster of conditions under which the prisoners would be willing to be moved. The counterpart agenda of the custody-oriented officers was to preserve as many restrictions and circumscriptions as the traffic would bear—and this objective was epitomized by the designation “semi-lockdown regime.” The conservative staff ’s proposal rested on the argument that the prisoners’ history of misbehavior demonstrated that they posed a live, imminent, and serious danger to staff members. And given the history of the prison, the salience of this argument did not strike me as particularly surprising. In my introductory remarks I did warn the officers, We can play games around issues of fear and of trust. . . . Fear games are particularly incestuous because one way to demonstrate fearlessness is to overreact, which inspires fear. . . . But fear can also create caricatures or inflated conceptions of one’s opposition, such that the mangy, tired and toothless lion is represented as the King of the Jungle who must be treated with the utmost caution and sustained vigilance.

I did not have the opportunity to make the same argument to the inmates. It would not have helped matters that the long-term confinees were powerfully motivated to think of themselves as kings of the jungle, so as to salvage the remnants of their injured self-esteem, and that as a group the prisoners had a strong incentive to reinforce each other’s inflated self-conceptions. The staff ’s loaded label subversive for some prisoners provided added ammunition in that it evoked an image highlighting principled and effective opposition to agents of authority, which managed to gain credibility whenever anyone in authority appeared to behave in a fashion that could be seen as arbitrary or capricious. A case in point arose at this juncture in the form of a promise to the prisoners that they could anticipate early transfers out of Peterhead, 135

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complete with an estimate of a reasonable range of departure dates. These projections unfortunately proved to be overoptimistic, largely because other prisons in the Scottish system were circumspect about accommodating reputedly notorious malefactors. The resulting stalemates eventually led to a showdown and confrontation, about which the Peterhead administrator observed: The issue of target dates for onward movement raised problems. Intended as a guide to prison management, this was allowed to become almost a contract with the prisoner. Any slippage was seen by the prisoner as a break of that contract and allowed him to focus solely on that issue as an example of injustice. (Simpson, 1994, p. 3)

Prisons have always been obsessive and sometimes picayune about enforcing rules and regulations that govern inmate behavior, and this emphasis has led to a counterpart legalistic orientation among prisoners— particularly among prisoners who experience the brunt of rule enforcement in the shape of punitive sanctions, and most particularly among prisoners who are administratively confined (i.e., locked up because of who they are perceived to be rather than for something they have done).

Changes of Scenery for Difficult Prisoners Four of the 11 prisoners sequestered in Peterhead had been prominent riot participants and perpetrators of hostage taking. In reviewing the career of one of these prisoners 15 years after the 1994 E hall incident and 22 years after the riot, I observed, “The inmate is known to have a refined sense of injustice and is renowned for not being shy about sharing his perceptions” (Toch, 2008a, p. 950). A supervisor in one of the prisons among which the prisoner was rotated, recorded, He is cursed by his past prison behavior and has the baggage of older prison staff memories of him in former times, and of younger prisoners wanting to know all about it and seeing him as some sort of big man. . . . In his favor is that, in general, he has managed to eschew physical violence toward others. . . . He uses the [complaint/grievance] 136

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system prodigiously and somewhat proudly. He sees a conversion in himself from one who struck out to one who now goes on the pen. (Toch, 2008a, p. 951)

“Going to the pen” meant that the prisoner kept himself in practice by filing penny-ante grievances, though he eventually had to lodge one serious complaint when someone stole his dentures. Early in his career, however, he had still made efforts to preserve residues of his gunslinger reputation— largely by engaging in provocative talk. In retrospect, I observed, Such talk serves to keep the inmate’s reputation burnished among staff members and among admiring fellow prisoners. The inmate is also busy helping this process along. A prison nurse who has told him that a doctor cannot see him until the next day records that the inmate “asked, ‘what the f---- do you have to do to see a Doctor in this place? Take a warder hostage?’” The nurse adds to her report, “I then asked [the inmate] if this was a threat, to which he replied that I could take it that way if I wanted.” (Toch, 2008, p. 951)

But by cementing a status as persona non grata, the prisoner discovered that he had become more unpopular and rejected than he had bargained for. He was thus repeatedly relegated to segregation settings for offenses for which he was rarely given the benefit of the doubt. One typically intemperate encounter he had managed to stage with a supportive supervisor ended up being interpreted as an assault by other staff, and he consequently discovered himself “surrounded by officers in riot gear,” complaining that “some of the officers ain’t even from this prison” and noting that his breakfast had not been served (Toch, 2008, p. 953). Toward the end of his long and inauspicious career, in a supplicating letter to a warden of a prison to which he had not yet been assigned, the inmate complained, [This is] very unsettling to a man doing 12 years back to back with 14 years! It may seem no big deal to yourself but I had 36 jail moves my last sentence—this is a lot in 9 years 7 months. I am also being avoided by [the] psychologist who won’t see me due to a personality clash. . . . So what I am saying is can I come to [your prison] in 137

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September sometime, or first days of October?. . . . Prison is prison. But this prison holds a terrible bleak future if I am to stay here and lot of young men want me involved in things because of my past, etc. . . . . Am not saying I am an angel, but deserve a move. (Toch, 2008, p. 951)

Late in the game the prisoner began to see himself as the consistent target of undeserved maltreatment and rejection. A prison social worker who evaluated him during this period recorded, Through the whole of both of [our] interviews, [the inmate] stated that throughout his total of approximately 18 years of custody since the age of 21 years, he had been labeled, victimized and wrongly and unfairly treated by the “prison system and staff.” (Toch, 2008, p. 952)

Another social worker reported that the inmate felt predestined to continue being rejected by others—and to consequent failure—in the community. She wrote that he “identified factors which could pull him into offending as his reputation, adverse publicity in the press, depression, alcohol, peer group influence, social isolation, and police harassment” (Toch, 2008, p. 953). This did not augur a happy ending, but it might have been the best that could be expected under the circumstances. In reviewing this man’s prison career and that of others in his ill-fated generation, I had been constrained to conclude, Prisons and prisoners of this period were apt to be caught in a spiral of reciprocated fear and mutual resentment. This cycle was obviously untenable, but by the time disengagement could be effected, individuals unavoidably carried residues of their segregation experiences and of the explosive involvements that occasioned them. Some prisoners and staff members consequently faced transitional quandaries as they adapted to a new reality in which traumatic bygones could be laid to rest. (Toch, 2008, p. 954)

Laying to rest such bygones can be particularly difficult when it involves having to face some serious personal deficits that one has spent a lifetime disguising through bluff and bluster, and discovering that one’s days of hyper-masculine overcompensation are over. Mosher and 138

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Tompkins (1988) pointed out that the young macho man follows what they call a counter-active script, which presupposes that “challenges by male adversaries require escalating violence to be manly. . . . the rule: escalate anger, daring, callousness until dominance is established” (p. 79) and that “experiencing the invulnerability of youth, the young macho relies on his strength, dominance, toughness, callousness, aggressiveness, violence, virility and physicality” (p. 80). However, a problem arises with age, in that “as physicality declines. . . . the macho man becomes vulnerable to the shameful discovery that he is not as fearless and as free of distress as he has claimed” (p. 81). In prisons this problem is compounded, because in the prison particularly, “hyper-masculinity is a recipe for no-win stalemates. Solitary confinement for young prisoners becomes draconian over time. The punishing experience engenders bitterness and cements recalcitrance” (Toch, 1998, pp. 182–183) and as a result of these hardened attitudes and the confrontations they engender, “hyper-masculine men occupy segregation cells long after their aggressivity is attenuated and their reputation still deserved” (Toch, 1998, pp. 182–183). Despite the attenuation, many inmates are scripted to continue their downhill career, in that “their conceptions of integrity force such prisoners to stage displays of hollow, unconvincing rage,” and in turn, “their counterparts—the guards—follow repressive scripts that are similarly autonomous” (Toch, 1998, pp. 182–183). Hypothetically, the solution to these anachronistic stalemates involves designing and implementing serious de-escalating interventions, but as we have seen, such interventions can predictably invite resistance from both sides of the correctional fence and may thus become difficult to effectuate. The alternative generally has been to rely on the healing passage of time and the mellowing effects of aging. This process will inexorably run its course but is apt to be incredibly painful and frightfully messy. For the aging offender, it will be painful because it calls for the abandonment of cherished assumptions about oneself and one’s dealings with others. For those others, it will be messy because it means taking risks by according credibility to foretokens of change.

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S

ome prescriptions can do a great deal of harm when they are distorted and misapplied. Among the more disquieting examples of such misapplication in the world of corrections have been interventions inspired by the work of B. F. Skinner, who demonstrated with his experiments at Harvard that pigeons could be taught to play table tennis if their backhand proficiency was rewarded with pigeon snacks. Skinner’s work had in turn been inspired by that of Ivan Pavlov, who taught dogs to slobber at the sound of a dinner bell. The use of rewards to motivate prisoners (or anyone else, for that matter) can be considered enlightened management—unless the Skinnerian paradigm is too faithfully replicated. Skinner worked with laboratory animals. As long as he treated his pigeons humanely, he did not need to ask their consent to enlist their participation in team sports, nor could any civil libertarian question Skinner’s right to select the sport for the pigeons to play. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14373-012 Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment: Applying Social Psychology in Prisons and Policing, by H. Toch Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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But such discretion was not as freely available as they might have wished to a controversial group of experimenters who ran an aborted enterprise (euphemistically called START) in the federal prison service between 1972 and 1974. The objective of the group (their table-tennis equivalent) was to promote conformity to a prison regime, and the method they used to enlist their subjects was to peremptorily transfer them to a stripped-down segregation unit, where the prisoners discovered they had to languish for a full year if they did not cooperate with the Skinnerian experimenters. Most of the prisoners elected not to cooperate and went on to publicize their discontent, and several of them initiated litigation, which they eventually won after the START unit had already been shuttered. Because prisons in general are not abounding with privileges that can be freely dispensed by psychologists who opt to run behavior modification programs, de-escalated deprivations are often deployed as the starting point for a schedule of “rewards.” I noted in an earlier review, Ingenuity has been exercised to find ways in which new deprivations could be exacted or additional needs could be frustrated. Such exercises of ingenuity have reached impressive heights (or lows) in the creation of progression or “level” systems in . . . segregation settings, culminating in the design of stripped-down “baseline” environments devoid of any conceivable need-satisfying amenity. (Toch, 2008b, p. 388)

A recent example of the debasement of applied learning theory can be inferred from a program summary by a Maryland prison psychologist (Holwager, 2012), which reads, The BMP [behavior management program] is a basic level system. The first level has the equivalent privileges of disciplinary segregation . . . and lasts approximately one month. The fifth level (top level) has the privileges equivalent to administrative segregation. In administrative segregation, inmates are allowed to have a television and/or radio, but in disciplinary segregation these are not allowed. (p. 78)

The arrangement that is thus alluded to called for five promotional steps before the prisoner would be allowed access to a radio in a solitary 142

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confinement setting. And if this parsimonious progression were not sufficiently uninviting, the author tells us, There are some offenders for whom this program is not structured enough. . . . For them, an individual behavior management plan is designed and they are treated on a one-to-one basis. For these individuals, progress is extremely slow and there are many setbacks. . . . this work can be very frustrating. (Holwager, 2012, p. 78)

One would assume that the process would be considerably more frustrating for its beneficiaries than for those long-suffering perpetrators.

A CALL FROM WISCONSIN The events that culminated in my sporadic ruminations about these issues had their inception in December 2000 with a phone call from the Wisconsin Department of Justice. In this call I was told that the state prison system had somehow indicated that it would be helpful if I was to spend time in a newly opened high-security prison, in connection with some pending litigation. By way of follow-up I was sent a formal-looking contract that tasked me “to tour and evaluate Wisconsin’s SuperMax Correctional Institution” and to “spend an afternoon . . . speaking with staff and inmates.” In a subsequent message, I was informed that inmates would now be off limits because they had become litigants as a result of class certification. The prison I was contracted to visit sits in the southwestern corner of the state near the small town of Boscobel, which was previously renowned as the “wild turkey hunting capital of Wisconsin” (see http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Boscobel,_Wisconsin, para. 2) and as the point of origin of Gideon Bibles. I eventually discovered that the prison is an incredibly stark and uninviting edifice, as one might expect from an assembly of 1,759 slabs of precast concrete, comprising not only the substantial exterior walls but also the furnishings and accommodations for the prisoners. Boscobel prison was built to function as a setting for unmitigated solitary confinement, with minimal public and program space and virtually no provision for exercise or recreation. Visitation for prisoners—in 143

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the event that any of the inmates’ friends or relatives should entertain a taxing trip across the state—was offered mainly via intramural long distance, through a booth in the lobby with a television camera and screen. The entire prison is in fact electronically web connected, with the latest surveillance and video equipment. At the time Boscobel was opened in 1999, the state’s prisons had become inconveniently overcrowded. There was thus arguably a need for additional space, but no planners within the system during the period had envisaged a 500-cell segregation facility as a response to this need. The prison arrived, when it did, as an unsolicited gift from an outgoing administration in tune with its conservative constituency. But once any prison has been built, it needs to be deployed, and Boscobel came to be used to accommodate an overflow of prisoners who had been serving segregation sentences elsewhere.

THE BOSCOBEL WELCOME WAGON An inmate newly arrived at Boscobel would be informed in writing that he was entering a “Level Program Process,” that “the Supermax Correctional Institution (SMCI) Level Program Process is designed to encourage your positive adjustment while at SMCI and provide an opportunity for your successful return to a less restrictive institution,” and that this involved “[a] controlled increase in privileges and responsibilities in order to promote acceptable conduct” (Berge, 2000, p. 3). The inmate would be told that as a first step he was to be placed in something called “Alpha Unit,” that “this level of the incentive program will be a minimum of 30 days in duration,” and that “inmates assigned to this level will not have electronic equipment, will not participate in programs, and will have fewest privileges” (Berge, 2000, p. 3). What this roster of adversities could never convey to the inmate was the magnitude of the stimulus deprivation he would experience while he was locked into a small, sealed, sarcophagus-like space with nothing to do or to occupy his mind; it could never convey the extent of the grinding monotony, boredom, and enforced inactivity he would be facing and the increasing discomfort of this protracted and unmitigated bare-bones seclusion. 144

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To add insult to the impending injury, the prisoner’s orientation included gratuitously demeaning instructions that reflected (among other things) a conspicuous lack of trust and respect and a penchant for punitive backups: Linens are to be handed in free of knots. If there are knots in any piece of linen your dirty linen will be returned to you and you will not receive clean ones. (Berge, 2000, p. 11) When meals are delivered you will be required to stand in the middle of the cell with the cell light on in full view of the Officer. You will be required to wear trousers during meal delivery/pickup. The officer will instruct you when you may move to the trap door and retrieve you meal tray. Failure to do this will be considered a meal refusal. (Berge, 2000, p. 12) You are expected to stand at your door with the cell light on if you want your medication. You will wear your trousers during med. Pass. You will give your name and numbers as requested. . . . You will proceed to the door only when directed and take the medication while being observed by staff. You will open your mouth for inspection upon request. You will set the cup on the trap and move to the center of the cell. The cup will be retrieved and the trap shut. Any refusal to follow orders will be considered a [medication] refusal. (Berge, 2000, p. 13) Anytime you are out of your cell you will be placed in restraints and a hands on escort will be used by a minimum of two ­officers. . . . You will be required to kneel for application of leg restraints. (Berge, 2000, p. 13)

The prisoners who were locked into Alpha Unit during the time of my visit were under continuous observation from a glass-enclosed control room in which a female sergeant stood, surrounded by a bank of small screens around the ceiling, each of which briefly revealed a recumbent inmate unsuccessfully trying to sleep on a brightly illuminated cot. The sergeant in the control booth at this time proved to be a humane and decent person who had transcended her stultifying assignment by taking a warm, personal interest in each of her charges. She had read all the information available about each of them, though none of this information that she had gone out of her way to acquire could be of any benefit to the 145

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inmates, because they were uninterruptedly locked in their cells while she was sequestered in her observation booth. Before I left the prison, I mentioned the sergeant’s situation to the warden as an example of what I thought was deplorable waste. I said that by way of contrast I had noticed opportunities for staff members to make more positive contributions in higher reaches of the level system. On Level 4, for example, I had happened to pick up a copy of a letter typed by a prisoner and signed by six others, addressed to the National Football League, which read: I am an inmate currently residing in a Supermax prison located in Boscobel, Wisconsin. At this institution the inmates must earn the privilege of watching television. Currently we have a limit of five television channels; however, none of those five channels broadcast National Football League games. In this institution there is a level system that an inmate must follow. . . . At the present time there are seven of us on level four— we have televisions in our cell and one in the dayroom. I must mention that we are all football fans. I’m writing this letter on their behalf. . . . We would like you to grant permission to a staff member to record selective NFL games at home, bring them to the institution and show them to inmates who are eligible to watch them. Understand that in allowing that to occur you will allow inmates to watch a sport which they have a passion for. You will also give inmates the opportunity to go into the dayroom, not only to watch football games, but to also interact with other inmates in a social setting. (Lipofsky, 2000)

Needless to say, the permission requested in this letter was forthcoming, giving rise to the attendant benefits.

PROMULGATING THE VULNERABILITY OF ALPHA LEVEL At the start of my visit, it had been made clear to me that litigation had been initiated and that my hosts in Madison had been assigned to defend the prison system. At the conclusion of my visit, I felt I needed to immediately 146

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convey to my sponsors that I had concluded that the draconian conditions in Alpha Unit would prove indefensible. Before I left the prison, I also decided to express these reservations to the warden. He was gracious in response but said that he understood that all the levels in a Level Program Process needed to be different from each other, which circumscribed the number of amenities that could be made available at entry into the system. I hoped that I could make a more convincing case in my subsequent debriefing by the Justice Department in Madison. That session appeared to proceed without a hitch, and within days I was rewarded with a thoughtful letter that said, “You will be pleased to know that the time spent in level one at the Wisconsin supermax will soon be decreased from 30 days to either 7 or 14 days” (S. Davis, personal communication, March 15, 2001). This appeared to be good news, but by this time, additional developments had unfolded in fairly rapid succession.

A LANDMARK COURT DECISION AND SETTLEMENT One of the amendments to the U.S. Constitution has attempted to place limits on our primitive retributive urges by proscribing the inflicting of “cruel and unusual” punishment. Federal courts in states with the most substantial supermax prisons (such as Texas and California) were recently asked to consider whether these new types of prisons might not qualify as being cruel and unusual—especially because long-term solitary confinement has been repeatedly found by psychologists and psychiatrists to be profoundly stress-inducing (see Haney, 2003; Kupers, 2008). The courts had partially bought the argument (and the evidence) to the extent of holding that particularly vulnerable prisoners—such as inmates who are seriously mentally ill—ought not to be housed in stripped-down solitary confinement settings (Madrid v. Gomez, 1995). Consequently, the litigation that was initiated in 2000 in Wisconsin centered on the claim that mentally ill prisoners had been inappropriately sent to Boscobel, where they were being subjected to demonstrably damaging conditions— particularly in Alpha Unit, where they tended to remain for unconscionably long periods. 147

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On October 10, 2001, Judge Barbara Crabb of the U.S. District Court in the Western District of Wisconsin concurred with this proposition. The judge issued a preliminary injunction on the basis of her conclusion that “most inmates have a difficult time handling these conditions of extreme social isolation and sensory deprivation, but for seriously mentally ill inmates, the condition can be devastating” (Jones’El v. Berge, 2001, p. 1098). In formulating this assessment, the judge used a definition of psychological harm more comprehensive than one that dealt strictly with impact on the mentally ill. In line with a sophisticated report from the social psychiatrist Terry Kupers (2001), the judge held, Confinement in a supermaximum security prison such as Supermax is known to cause severe psychiatric morbidity, disability, suffering and mortality. Prisoners in segregated housing units who have no history of serious mental illness and who are not prone to psychiatric decompensation (breakdown) often develop a constellation of symptoms known as “[Segregated Housing Unit] Syndrome” . . .  The extremely isolating conditions in supermaximum confinement cause SHU Syndrome in relatively healthy prisoners who have histories of serious mental illness, as well as prisoners who have never suffered a breakdown in the past but are prone to break down when the stress and trauma become exceptionally severe. (Jones’El v. Berge, 2001, pp. 1101–1102)

In relation to Alpha Unit (aka Level 1) specifically, the judge pointed to data that showed Seriously mentally ill inmates have difficulty following the rules necessary to advance up the level system and, as a result, find themselves “stuck” . . . These inmates are stuck in the lowest levels, a circumstance that by itself suggests the inappropriateness of subjecting such persons to an incentive program that is so all encompassing and harsh. (Jones’El v. Berge, 2001, pp. 1101, 1117)

The judge also insightfully observed that “many of the severe conditions serve no legitimate penological interest; they can only be considered punishment for punishment’s sake” (Jones’El v. Berge, 2001, p. 1117). 148

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Judge Crabb directed the prison to arrange for outside evaluations of several categories of prisoners she deemed to be at risk, which included “those who have spent longer than 30 days at Level One” and “those who have spent longer than 90 days at Supermax without progressing beyond Level Two” (Jones’El v. Berge, 2001, p. 1126). She also arranged for the removal of those inmates at Boscobel who were most at-risk. The judge gave the authorities 90 days to implement her order. Her decision, however, almost immediately sparked intensive negotiations aimed at achieving an amicable resolution to reform Boscobel prison and to ameliorate the most psychologically damaging features of its environment. By January 3, 2002, newspapers in Madison were able to report that “changes to be made at the Supermax prison near Boscobel as a result of a tentative agreement resolving a federal lawsuit are numerous and wideranging” (Miller, 2002, p. 3A), but they also acknowledged that Many [changes] have already been instituted by the state Department of Corrections. . . . Prisoners in the Level 1 or Alpha unit . . . will have additional reading material and access to some video programs. The department previously announced it was changing its rules to limit the holding of prisoners in that unit to seven days, with one possible seven-day extension. (Miller, 2002, p. 3A)

After eight negotiating sessions between the parties, a formal settlement agreement was submitted to Judge Crabb for approval and signature. Boscobel prison was henceforth to lose its grim, end-of-the-road “supermax” appellation. However, a multilevel promotional arrangement was to be retained—a process to “utilize programming and a reward system to prepare inmates to progress to level five in order to transition to another less restrictive institution, or to society” (United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, 2002, Article 4.2, p. 4). As for conditions in Alpha level, the settlement’s stipulations read as follows: 5.1 Under current DOC [Department of Corrections] rules, every prisoner who enters SMCI is automatically assigned to Level 1. While 149

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that will be the norm, an entering inmate could move directly to a different level based on a decision of the Warden under existing DOC rules: 5.2 Those placed on Level 1 will stay no longer than seven days with the following exceptions: 5.2,1 The Warden, for cause, may permit an extension of the stay, in which case the inmate may be housed on Level 1 for no longer than an additional 7 days. . . . 5.4 It is the goal of the Parties that the vast majority of inmates shall be on Levels 3, 4, and 5. (United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, 2002, p. 5–6)

The settlement also provided (among other things) that intrusive night lights be attenuated to reasonable levels and that sleeping prisoners “be permitted to cover their eyes so long as some facial skin is exposed for inspection purposes” (9.2, p. 7). The settlement additionally specified that “food shall not be used as punishment” (13.10, p. 10).

THE SAGA OF PRISONER NATHAN GILLIS Some firmly established habits of mind unfortunately die hard, even in the face of what at first glance might appear to be the most carefully crafted provisions about the way people are to be treated. The Boscobel settlement had unwittingly left elbow room for abuse by authorizing the newly baptized (nonsupermax) prison to retain its behavior modification promotional process—a supposedly ameliorated level system—with ambiguous conceptual underpinnings. A man who early on paid the price for this ambiguity was an inmate named Nathan Gillis, who was transferred to Boscobel on February 15, 2002, virtually on the day the Boscobel agreement was signed. Like other incoming prisoners, Gillis was assigned to Alpha Unit, where he drew attention to himself by taking casual exception to the provision in the unit’s handbook that ordained that “you must lay in the bed with your head toward the toilet” (Berge, 2000, p. 4). Gillis was repeatedly observed to sleep heading in an unauthorized direction. In reviewing the chronology that 150

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ensued, I recorded that “Boscobel officials never claimed that the mandate relating to sleeping position was being rigorously enforced” but that “one week after Nathan Gillis checked into Alpha Unit, the unit’s [new] manager decided that he needed to address the direction-of-slumber problem” (Toch, 2008b, p. 392). Nathan Gillis and other prisoners were notified that the head-nearthe-toilet rule would henceforth be strictly enforced. However, the notification appeared not to deter Nathan Gillis from continuing to ignore the mandate from time to time, oblivious to “the dilemma he posed for a supervisor who had placed a premium in conforming to the rule” (Toch, 2008b, p. 392 ). Gillis obviously also did not realize that given the prevailing reasoning in the related Boscobel behavior modification incentive systems, it would almost follow that his supervisor “decided to solve the Gillis problem by tightening the screws” (Toch, 2008b, p. 393). And given Gillis’s recalcitrance under prevailing conditions, this would mean arranging circumstances more onerous (less “reinforcing”) than those on Alpha level. In a brief to the courts at a subsequent stage of the game, prison officials argued in support of the unit manager’s decision: Normal counseling and discipline were ineffective in correcting [Gillis’s] behavior. The defendants drafted and implemented a plan that they believed would better demonstrate the cause and effect between inappropriate behavior and undesirable consequences as well as demonstrating to the inmate that he was in control of his behavior and was ultimately responsible for any undesirable and uncomfortable consequences. The intent . . . was to change Gillis behavior, not to punish him. (Gillis v. Litscher Defendant-Appellees Brief, 2006, p. 28)

The distinction was apparently lost to Gillis, as was the assumption that he ought to be taking personal credit for engendering the new conditions under which he was confined, which a judge later listed as Stripped naked in a small prison cell with nothing except a toilet; forced to sleep on a concrete floor or slab; denied any human contact; fed nothing but “nutri loaf” [explicitly proscribed under the Boscobel settlement]; and given just a modicum of toilet paper—four 151

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squares—only a few times. Although this may sound like a stay in a Soviet gulag in the 1930s, it is. . . . Wisconsin in 2002. (Gillis v. Litscher Defendants-Appellees Brief, 2006, p. 489)

As for the “cause and effect between inappropriate behavior and undesirable consequences” (Gillis v. Litscher Defendants-Appellees Brief, 2006, p. 489), the connection may not have been obvious to Gillis, judging by his initial response to the intervention: In the evening of the first day as he was held naked in his segregation cell with zero property, Gillis self-inflicted wounds on his body and wrote the words “help me” in blood on the walls of his cell. . . . [Later] Gillis further injured his hand and smeared feces on his cell wall . . . Gillis reported that he was hearing voices and asked, “What can you do to stop the voices?” (Gillis v. Litscher Appellant Brief, 2000, p. 8)

Despite the prison’s stated intention to “change Gillis behavior, not to punish him,” he was at this juncture formally disciplined for defacing his cell with various bodily fluids. He was also subject to continued and indefinite sequestration under depriving conditions to modify his sleeping behavior, because the initial experience had not done the job. The brief succinctly pointed out that “instead of ending the harsh ­conditions. . . . [The prison’s] response was to further punish Gillis as his mental condition deteriorated” (Gillis v. Litscher Appellant Brief, 2000, p. 391). The deterioration of Nathan Gillis would not have come as much of a surprise to B. F. Skinner, the father of the behavior modification. Skinner consistently pointed out that using punishment to try to modify behavior not only would not work in the long run but also would reliably invite undesirable repercussions. He also recognized that the urge to punish is suspect, because it satisfies retaliatory needs, such as those of the disrespected Boscobel supervisor who could not make Nathan Gillis conform: We “instinctively” attack anyone whose behavior displeases us— perhaps not in physical assault, but with criticism, disapproval, blame, or ridicule. Whether or not there is an inherited tendency to do this, the immediate effect of the practice is reinforcing enough to explain its currency. In the long run, however, punishment does 152

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not actually eliminate behavior from a repertoire, and its temporary achievement is obtained at tremendous cost. . . . Punished behavior . . . evokes reflexes characteristic of fear, anxiety, and other emotions. . . . Since the variables responsible for these emotional patterns are generated by the organism itself, no appropriate escape behavior is available. The condition may be chronic and may result in “psychosomatic” illness or otherwise interfere with effective behavior of the individual in daily life. (Skinner, 1953/1972, pp. 30–31)

AN AMBIVALENT PRISON At present, Boscobel is somewhat of a hybrid creature. It is called the “Wisconsin Secure Program Facility,” and the name reflects the prison’s split institutional personality. The emphasis on “secure” derives mainly from the inherited goals inescapably imposed by the austere physical plant and congruent history and tradition. The “program” connotations mostly reflect the more recent add-ons to the physical plant and inmate population. The “secure” component appears to predominate. The prison’s mission statement—per its 2011 Annual Report—lists objectives such as Staff will be vigilant to the potential for inmate manipulation and victimization of themselves and other staff. Recognizing the risks posed by inmates, supervision, control, safety and security will be carried out at the highest level. The Wisconsin Secure Program Facility will endeavor to provide immediate access to other correctional institutions in accepting disruptive offenders. The operating philosophy of the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility will support the accomplishment of Department-wide mission and goals by managing and controlling negative inmate behavior and providing a deterrent to disruptive behavior throughout the system.

Overshadowed by such goals, the roster includes a resolve to “promote programs that provide offenders with opportunities for positive change,” a recognition that “program/treatment involves every function 153

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of the institution” and the aspiration that “all basic needs and constitutional rights of inmates will be met, preserving the basic human rights and dignity of offenders” (Wisconsin Secure Program Facility, 2011, p. 6). As mentioned previously, the behavioral promotional system has survived the prison’s transmutation. The Annual Report thus tells us that for prisoners in the “high risk” group (the bulk of the prison’s population), The following privileges are offered but vary at different phases based on behavior: phone calls, earned pay, reading lists, TV channels, TV time, canteen items, recreation equipment, leisure time activities, group education, group treatment, day room time, group recreation, property allowances. Appropriate behavior and participation in programming will result in an increase in number and frequency of the privileges listed. This serves to provide positive reinforcement to inmates for appropriate behavior over time. (Wisconsin Secure Program Facility, 2011, p. 18)

In other words, the sum of the conditions of confinement to which each prisoner is subjected within this all-encompassing regime (which happens to involve absolute control of every detail of the prisoner’s life) is to be left to the mercy of prison staff, with the proviso that every staff decision can be blamed on the prisoner and his presumed rate of progress or lack of progress. It is a no-lose game, except for the prisoner.

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I

t is ironic that psychology as a discipline could ever be invoked to justify the enactment of deprivations or the effort to withhold responses to basic human needs and aspirations, but we have seen an example of such a derivation in the horrifying application of primitive learning theory I have just delineated (Chapter 12). As it happens, accounts of similar practices can be drawn from other prison systems, and some can be observed on a daily basis. As a case in point, consider the following report of an ongoing intervention described as a provision of “behavioral health services”: A major factor in reinforcing the incentive for change was reducing the comfort level in maximum custody. . . . Removing television access, except as part of the behavioral health program, had a motivational impact. Scheduling individual recreation time, eliminating group time on the tier, requiring hands cuffed behind inmates’ backs and minimizing time outside the cell were all sound security procedures for risk mitigation—and were motivational. . . . Privileges were shifted to focus inmates on moving up in custody as opposed to becoming comfortable in SHU. The intent is for no inmate to become so comfortable that he is willing to stay in SHU rather than doing the hard work to change. (Schmitt & Galloway, 2013, p. 58) http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14373-013 Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment: Applying Social Psychology in Prisons and Policing, by H. Toch Copyright © 2014 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

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In this enticing statement of purpose, the prisoner’s ability to satisfy self-indulgent needs—such as having access to occasional human contacts or opportunities of walking to an exercise yard unencumbered with hardware—is identified as stultifying “comfort.” The prisoner’s righteous indignation when his rock-bottom, hardscrabble existence is made even more rock-bottom and hardscrabble is seen as requiring preemptive “risk mitigation.” However, his despair and anxiety in the face of these newly enacted strictures can be harnessed as “motivating.” And the prisoner can be “motivated” on his own behalf (and ours) to engage in the “hard work” of “changing.” Changing, in the paradigm, is defined as the completion of what sounds to the uninitiated like demeaning (for adults) homework assignments, which require the prisoners to provide written responses to unflattering descriptions of defects of character to which they presumably must confess. The prisoners must also respond audibly, so their humiliation can be witnessed by inmates in neighboring cells, for which they are then rewarded with the soundtrack of a presumptively change-inspiring (and therefore, again denigrating) film. According to the report, Inmates attend groups from within their cells. The food slots of all inmates wishing to participate are opened to facilitate their ability to participate in the group’s discussion and listen to movies. Inmates are not permitted to watch the movies if they are not completing their homework and actively participating in the pre- and post-movie discussions. (Schmitt & Galloway, 2013, p. 58)

The incentive used to “motivate” the prisoners’ compliance—in this case, their willingness to go along with a quasi-kindergarten regime including homework assignments and a movie soundtrack as reward— is the desire to escape the unmitigated deprivation to which they have been subjected by the regime. The authors thus candidly admit that “the inmates in maximum-custody are often bored and the movies serve as an incentive to join the group” (Schmitt & Galloway, 2013, p. 58). Any student of Psychology 101 might recognize what sounds like a rationale that could conceivably undergird this scenario. He or she might 156

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recall classic experiments in the development of learning theory that featured hungry white rats who were being rewarded with rat goodies for running mazes or pressing levers that had been ordained as correct solutions to rat problems. The similarity of the paradigm is obvious, and so is the applicability of the rationale to the prison situation. A fat rat licking its chops after a satisfying rat dinner would not be a candidate for expeditious maze running—any more than would the pampered maximum-custody prisoner content with his unimpeded access to a luxurious exercise cage. And in both instances, no one in his right mind would contest the goal of the enterprise, such as an experimenter’s right to determine which maze or lever should qualify as the target behavior deserving of rat compensation. Of course, rats are not human beings, though they may technically qualify as prisoners. Rats that run mazes are laboratory animals and as such are legally entitled to regulatory agency protections that ensure humane conditions of care. The laboratory’s caretaker is not authorized to deprive his lab animal of sustenance to the point of starvation (which would in any event impede maze running), and he certainly cannot routinely cuff the rat’s little paws behind its back when he lets the poor thing out of its cage. The “behavioral health” staff members would no doubt contend that their regime is still within the pale of the minimal level of care mandated for prison inmates by the courts—taking into account that they are dealing with a subgroup of prisoners who have been formally designated as recalcitrant and deserving of punitive or risk-aversive measures. And the psychologically sophisticated behavioral health staff members might resoundingly reject any direct rat-running analogies, contending that they are demonstrably aware of the fact that they are dealing with human beings and not rats, as evidenced by their method of change promotion, which is “cognitive–behavioral” as opposed to the strictly behaviorcentered approach of learning theorists to the running of mazes. After all, the rats that were immortalized in Psych 101 were never asked to complete homework assignments, nor were they allowed to communicate with neighboring rats through their little food slots. 157

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WHOSE COGNITION? The technology that is nowadays at issue in cognitive–behavioral interventions may in fact be “cognitive,” as advertised, but the cognition that is involved appears to be that of the staff or the psychologists and not that of the prisoners who complete homework assignments and whose contributions to the process are circumscribed and regimented, as is mobility of the maze-running rats. In the previously cited “behavioral health” intervention, for example, the design of the maze equivalent was arrived at as follows: The behavioral health team started by assessing the needs of the maximum-custody population. Observations of behavior patterns indicated clear areas of deficit common to most maximum-custody inmates. Overall, maximum-custody inmates have difficulties with frustration tolerance/anger management, impulse control, problem solving and relationship/communication skills. (Schmitt & Galloway, 2013)

The contribution of the prisoners to the intervention flowing from this analysis would be to obediently attest to the applicability of the preordained diagnosis to their own frustration-intolerant, flagrantly impulsive, and interpersonally deficient behavior. The prisoners would then have to go through the motions of resolving to become frustration tolerant, congenitally patient, and socially proficient as a condition of their release—or rather, to earn the mitigation of the exacerbation of the pains of their confinement that had been induced by their therapists. Irrespective of whose cognition may be at issue, there are serious questions that can be raised about the ungenerous perspective that underlies such a view of motivation. The industrial psychologist Ross Stagner, in a foreword to a now-defunct monograph (Toch & Grant, 1982), explicated the issue as follows: The problem arises from the fact that human beings are not merely biological units demanding food, freedom from pain, sexual gratification and protection from the weather. While there be still a few psychologists holding to this diminished view of human nature, it is generally recognized that an individual also has dignity, a feeling 158

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of self-respect, a sense of achievement, freedom to make decisions affecting his or her fate, and self-actualization. (Stagner, 1982, p. 8)

Unfortunately, the number of psychologists who appear willing to entertain a diminished conception of human nature increases when the human nature at issue is that of prisoners, of offenders, or of offending prisoners. Craig Haney noted the consequences of this fact when he pointed out, Widespread stereotypes that cast prisoners in subhuman terms implied that they did not warrant the same minimal considerations—or deserve the same limits to the level of pain and harm to which they legitimately could be subjected—as other persons. However, these views are at odds with what we know about the psychological effects of the conditions under which prisoners are kept and to which they are required to adapt. (Haney, 2006, p. 169)

What Stagner could have said about conceptions of human nature is that psychologists and other observers of human nature will often have the opportunity to observe whatever conception of human nature they have themselves produced, because human subjects—like those famous Psych 101 rats—are constrained to respond among the options made available to them. If we operate on the assumption (as described earlier) that the people we deal with can only be trusted with their hands cuffed behind their backs, we cannot expect much by way of achievement and self-actualization. And if we foreclose too drastically the options we are willing to provide (as in the Wisconsin behavior management program described in Chapter 12), we might even expect to observe mental illness as a manifestation of the helplessness we have engendered—and we can observe this even with laboratory rats (Seligman, 1975).

WHOSE CHANGE? If there is one thing we have learned as psychologists about inducing meaningful change—change that takes hold and has an impact we expect to endure—it is that the people we want to change have to actively participate in the process and have to internalize its goals. Your aspiring change agent 159

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(such as your psychologist in the prison segregation unit) may have definitive ideas about the improvements he or she wishes to effect in the client, but for those improvements to occur the client must institute them—which means that he or she must buy into the scheme—or the best that change agent can expect for his or her efforts is sullen and resentful acquiescence. What has to have taken place is a change “transaction” in the precise sense in which Dewey defined the term (as cited in Cantril, 1960; see Chapter 1), meaning that for the result to occur you need a “buyer” as well as a “seller,” and the two will have had agreed on the terms. The fact that the client—in this case, the unsavory prisoner with the checkered past—may at first blush appear uninviting to the aspiring change agent is no justification for disengagement—as in the earlier example in which communication occurs through the food slot—nor for just going through the motions, because this at best gets your client to play along and adds documentation to his or her (and your) cynical worldview. We know that if a change agent is genuinely afraid of a prospective client, there is not much hope for a meaningful relationship to unfold.

SO WHAT IS THE ALTERNATIVE? In outlining a change enterprise that might be appropriate for the sort of prisoners who have been relegated to segregation settings where they have often languished indefinitely, one has to think outside the box—both literally and figuratively. One has to consider starting with trust bids that will be viewed with understandable suspicion, and one has to take actions that sincerely respect the intelligence of the prisoners and accord them personal initiative. To this end, my colleague Doug Grant and I have envisaged something we called a self-management study center (Toch & Adams, 2002, pp. 415). In asking ourselves, “What do we have a right to expect from such a center?” we responded, First, chronic maladapters [meaning recalcitrant prisoners, who more often than not suffer from mental health problems] should develop an understanding of and a strategy for managing their own patterns of conduct. Second, the participants should increase their general coping competence, including reading, writing, and thinking 160

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skills. Third, not only should participants become more competent, they should feel more competent. (Toch & Adams, 2002, p. 415)

As to the particulars of the change process, we wrote, The program would be carried out in small groups, not to exceed eight members, including staff. These groups could initially focus on reviews of prison disciplinary incidents, in an effort to define individual patterns of maladaptive inmate involvements. The review could then be expanded to include incidents that are not fully described in documents to enhance the pool of data available to the groups. Pattern analysis would be followed by the design and rehearsal of alternative approaches to social encounters, as well as by periodic review and reevaluation of behavioral approaches over a period of months. (Toch & Adams, 2002, p. 417)

If this prescription sounds vaguely reminiscent of activities and involvements I have been describing in this book, I have to admit that there may be some overlap. And to underline a few of the possible common denominators, we have written of our prescription, The approach we have delineated illustrates a modality of change that differs from other approaches in that (a) it involves the maladaptive person as participant rather than as client; (b) it does not require a categorization of the person’s problem (such as substance abuse, mental illness, or learning disability) to define the service he or she receives; (c) it provides for gradations of environment in which to test developing competence; (d) it mobilizes teams of staff members, including staff primarily concerned with behavioral and mental health problems; (e) it relies on group process and group thinking to buttress staff influence; and (f) it accommodates tailor-made interventions to address individual patterns of maladaptation. (Toch & Adams, 2002, p. 422)

TREATING HUMANS AS HUMAN Expanding the range of options we provide to people across the board is admittedly hard to envisage from some personal and professional perspectives, because it entails taking a fair amount of risk, requiring that 161

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we place trust in the way new options might be exercised. This not only holds true for our expectations at extremes—such as our belief that those disruptive prisoners might assault us without provocation if we took off their cuffs, which would be an extremely strange response—but has also traditionally been the stance managers take toward members of organizations whose work has been closely prescribed and meticulously monitored on the assumption that such top-down regimentation is needed. In this volume I have described any number of occasions on which handcuffs, or their equivalents, have been taken off without serious repercussions. We have never expected, of course, that the act of taking off handcuffs would instantaneously engender dramatic personal transmutations (especially after a lifetime of a person or a group living tightly constrained), but that would not have been the point. The agenda would be to demonstrate that handcuffs or tight supervision are a superfluous management tool as well as an obstacle to effective performance. In practice, such lessons are not necessarily welcomed—especially when they violate long-standing organizational (or professional) assumptions. At times, a decision to allow some handcuffs to be removed is about the extent of risk taking that a system may be ready to tolerate. Beyond that, there is often limited confidence and little interest in encouraging contributions by newly empowered persons that have been heretofore foreclosed. This timidity has repeatedly come as an unpleasant surprise to me—which I admit is a reflection on my prized capacity to profit from experience.

A CASE IN POINT: MOBILIZING CORRECTIONAL OFFICER EXPERTISE In 1980–1981 my colleagues and I used up a great deal of credit to conduct a fairly ambitious experiment to empower correctional officers in New York prisons. Working under federal government auspices and in close collaboration with both union and management representatives, we conducted a survey covering the state system; this showed a high level of alienation among the officers and a substantial desire for job enrichment. 162

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With these data in hand, we set to work staffing week-long intensive workshops for officers in four major prisons. Our officers ended up producing 16 meticulously drafted proposals for prison reform—eight that were locally targeted and eight system-wide. The strongly felt need to which this intervention responded, and the genuineness and passion with which the officers rose to the challenges we posed to them, may be inferred by carefully reading the preamble of one of their proposals. This proposal was one of four that originated in the Great Meadow Prison at Comstock, which at the time was New York State’s end-of-the-road high-security prison. With a bare minimum of editorial assistance from me, the preamble read partly as follows: Prison employees must deal with the public’s lack of information— or misinformation—about prisons. Employees who are the most seriously affected are the correction officers [COs] whose public image ranges from unflattering (turnkey) to degrading (brutal turnkey). The CO’s knowledge of how he is seen contributes to his low morale and deflates his pride and self-esteem. Outstanding work is ignored and it goes unrepeated. At minimum, extra effort yields no sense of accomplishment, but it can also bring trouble. The CO feels disapproving peer pressure; his supervisors rate him negatively; others hog credit for his actions. In the absence of incentives, the CO gives up, and drops back to the bare bones of his job description. The result is boredom, and unused potential. The problem is aggravated by the consequences of lowered pride among a few officers, who become rotten apples (and get away with being rotten apples), set bad examples, and increase the burden and the risk that other officers must carry, It is ironic that self-rehabilitating inmates are in the same boat with officers where bad press is concerned. No one expects prison inmates to make constructive contributions, and there is no incentive for them to do so. Peer pressure against officer–inmate involvements is experienced by inmates as well as officers. What is silliest about this peer pressure is that in the name of security it undermines security. Where discipline problems arise, it is not the officer who “keeps his distance” but the one who enjoys inmate confidence who 163

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has the edge. Good inmate relation is good public relations and good security practice. (Toch & Grant, 1982, p. 223)

All 16 proposals were filled with the sort of detail that benefits from familiarity with the prison setting, and they showed consistent sensitivity to issues of implementation. Again, an illustration may help to convey the flavor: The institution should immediately initiate a program of intramural sports, involving competing teams coached by correction officers. The EPR Committee should compile a list of officers with interest and competence in sports. This list would be limited to COs who volunteer (firmly committing their time) to try to coach inmate teams in the sport of their choice. Where two correction officers are available for any given sport, a two-team league can be formed by circulating signup sheets among inmates through the good offices of the Inmate Liaison Committee. Sports that should be included would be softball, soccer and basketball. There is also interest in competitive boxing. Secondary sports would be ping-pong and volley ball. The teams would function under the auspices of staff now assigned to the gymnasium and the school; they would be managed by inmate-managers appointed by CO-coaches. Each team would have its color and uniform (which the coach would wear as blazer), and a name reflecting sponsorship by a staff or inmate organization (see budget). If security considerations can be satisfied, the teams could compete against extra-mural visiting teams, as well as each other. (Toch & Grant, 1982, pp. 233–234)

The budget related to this proposal—which happened to also originate in the prison at Comstock—reflected comparably relevant detail and attention to implementation issues: The education and gymnasium budget can be drawn on for equipment. Additional expenses can be born by team sponsors, such as inmate civic groups (JCs, Friends of Fortune, NAACP, AA) and the employees’ unions. Commissary funds are an option. Cost of uni164

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forms can be modest if one enlists the cooperation of a tailoring class. Manpower costs include gymnasium staff (COs and recreation instructors), whose role would be expanded. Coaches would require only limited relief, to cover events or preevent training dates that are fixed. Where such situations occur, the coaches must provide the chart sergeant with appropriate (48 hour) notice. (Toch & Grant, 1982, p. 235)

Incidentally, our groups at Comstock consisted of 10 officers with an average of 16.8 years on the job. One of the officers had 31 years on the job, the last 6 of which he had spent (at his own request) on tower duty, where he was resentfully vegetating.

RETAILING DEMOCRACY Review of proposals had to occur in the central office of the prison system and in the prisons in which the proposals originated. The central office had (and has) an elaborate bureaucratic structure, which proved not to be conducive to yielding expedited reviews. Persons who were assigned to prepare comments from various perspectives tended to assign the task reliably low priority. Eventually, several proposals languished in the bottom drawers of various junior administrators and low-level officials. Occasionally, one or another of the ideas was hospitably assessed and ended up being defined as an endorsement of some project that had already been implemented or was currently on the drawing board. There was less foot dragging and cooptation at the local level, where wardens tended to respond—favorably or unfavorably—in fairly expedited fashion. In one prison, the project was unfortunately redefined as in-service “training,” though it was not clear to me what purpose such training could have served. In a second prison, our groups were referred to as “committees,” which suggested that they might be part of some parallel organizational structure. By contrast, one enlightened warden (who had started his career as a CO) showed considerable support and submitted one of the proposals 165

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as a case study in his graduate public administration course. A second warden (also a former CO) prefaced his reaction to one of the proposals with the words, “From where I sit as the superintendent of the largest prison in the state I can say without qualification that [this is] the most urgent problem we face” (Toch & Grant, 1982, p. 247)—which did not necessarily mean that he thought that a solution to the problem was at hand. In the best of all possible worlds the reforms that were suggested by our officers would have been fully or partially implemented. And in this same ideal world, the officers would have been credited for their contributions, which would have gained added stature (and enhanced credibility) from their source. On the first of the two counts, we could claim some limited success, but on the second, we could record almost none. We were thus constrained to adjudge the experiment on the whole as a failure, because as we saw it, The most crucial theme is indivisibility of the grass-roots medium and its message. Worker-participants must feel that they have impact, which means their products must sell. But if products sell and the process does not, the message of the medium (participation) has not been received. Participants feel used, just as they are used at work. In such transactions, the point that workers can plan and that they can significantly change their environments—has been lost. Workers’ ideas may be adopted, but the minds that shaped these ideas have been disrespected, and their ability to shape the ideas has been ignored. (Toch & Grant, 1982, p. 251)

A FINAL OBSERVATION ABOUT APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Social psychology is a variegated discipline and is a branch of psychology (or sociology, as the case may be) that is even more variegated. This proliferation can only increase when we view the work of individual social psychologists like myself, which is bound to reflect idiosyncratic interests and predilections. 166

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I have filed no claim to representing views other than my own. Early in this book (in Chapter 1) I described my formative years at Princeton. I wanted in those days—and would have liked since—to be able to emulate my mentor Hadley Cantril, who prefaced one of his books by proclaiming, For many years it has been my firm conviction that only by studying real, full-blooded problems can the blood of life be kept in the scientific pursuit we know as “psychology.” . . . If too many psychologists for too long a time lose sight of the problems living human beings define as “problems,” psychology will . . . smother itself in the study of trivia. (Cantril, 1958, p. x)

In the book he thus introduced, he defined his approach as follows: So throughout this report we shall try to take a first person view as contrasted with the view of an “outside,” “objective” observer. For if we take the point of view of the “outside” or “scientific” observer, we shall fail to sense the real nature of an individual’s experience as he experiences it: his choices, his worries, the priorities of the values he is striving for and weighing in his decision-making processes. We are trying to find out how people themselves look at things, what frustrations they feel they have, what they feel are their hopes and aspirations, what they hold to be their short-term and long-term purposes. (Cantril, 1958, pp. x–xi)

Early in my experience at Princeton, I garnered an assignment that helped me to improve my ability to ask questions (both in survey form and face-to-face) and to try to convey as faithfully as I could the answers I was receiving. But what if the answers I was getting to my questions should add up to a picture of resoundingly frustrated needs and stunted aspirations, such as those alluded to by Cantril (1958), whose book was titled The Politics of Despair? The word despair clearly implies the desirability of remedial intervention—and could a mere social psychologist such as myself play any role in this connection? I have tried to answer this question as I went along by learning on the job, and this book has attempted to resuscitate some of my educational 167

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experiences, which are hopefully still ongoing. What I have been describing along the way is certainly not a series of success stories, but hopefully, it reflects what has been doable. Craig Haney (2006) pointed out that social psychologists as a profession claim expertise related to the impact of human environments. However, most social psychologists have limited influence over those human environments, and none over the larger environments that shape them. What we can hopefully do is to try to facilitate some remedial efforts by people who in turn may be able to ameliorate environmental harm. It is in that connection that my repeated emphasis on participation might become relevant. Gordon W. Allport (another of my mentors) has pointed out that this emphasis yields an important bonus. He reminded us that “in focusing upon participation social psychology will also be advancing democracy, for . . . the task of obtaining from the common man participation in matters affecting his own destiny is the central problem of democracy” (Allport, 1960, p. 197).

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176

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Adams, K., 160–161

Bagby, J. W., 18 Banco, E., 77 Bauer, S., 37 Behavioral health services, 155–157 Behavioral promotional system, 154 Behaviorism, misuse of, in prison system, 141–143 Behavior management programs (BMPs), 142 Behavior patterns, 58, 61 Bennett, Lawrence, 32–33 Berge, G., 144, 145, 150 BMPs (behavior management programs), 142 Boscobel prison (Wisconsin), 141–154 and behaviorism in prisons, 141–143 conditions at, 144–147 Nathan Gillis at, 150–153 litigation involving, 147–150 opening of, 143–144 as Wisconsin Secure Program Facility, 153–154 British House of Commons, 105 Bureaucracy, prison, 165–166 Burke, Jerry, 83–84 Burns, J., 127 Bywalec, John, 118–120

Admissions criteria, for VPU, 51–52 Age and social conservatism, 8 and violence perception, 21–22 Agnew, Paul, 78, 81–83 Alcoholics Anonymous, 42–43 Alderson Women’s Reformatory, 87 Alf, Edward, 10 Allport, Gordon W., 168 Alpha Unit (Boscobel prison), 144, 146–150 Altruistic activities, 105–108, 118 Ames, Adelbert, 12–14 “An Analysis of a Sample of Eccentric Mail to the United Nations” (Toch), 3–4 Anti-social conduct, 22–23 Applied social psychology, 155–168 and meaningful change, 159–160 and prison reform, 165–166 in self-management study center, 160–161 as varied field, 166–168 Asilomar Conference Center, 44 Asylums (Goffman), 110–111 Attica riot, 78 “Award Day Honors,” 85

177

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California Department of

Dunbar, Walter, 84 Dungavel prison, 117–121

Corrections, 30 California Youth Authority, 24 Camp Elliott Experiment, 27–29 Cantril, Hadley, 5–7, 11–13, 15, 19, 167 Career advancement, in prisons, 115–128 Career ladder, 117 Change defined, 156 meaningful, 159–160 motivation for, 68–69 and security, 68 Charity work, 105–108 Cognitive–behavioral interventions, 158–159 Community local, 105–108 Penninghame prison as, 101–105 Conflict Management Section, 51, 71 Confrontation approach, 55 Conservative administrations, 48 Correctional officers exclusion of, 78–80 involvement of, 163 Crabb, Barbara, 148 Crisis, inmates in. See Inmates in crisis Crisis-intervention teams, 81–83 Cultural differences, 18

Edelstein, C., 11 Education, prisoner, 116 Elwin, Edward, 78, 80, 82 Engel, Ed, 17–18 English Home Office, 121 Ethnicity, and violence in California prisons, 35 Experience, differences in, 18–19 Feedback, from peer review panel, 61–62 Football, 15 Freeman, J., 118 Furloughs difficulties related to, 118 prisoners returning from, 103–105

Gain, Charles, 50, 57, 73 Galloway, E. H., 155, 156, 158 Galvin, R., 70–71 Geis, Gilbert, 45 Gender, and violence perception, 21–22 Gillis, Nathan, 150–153 Gillis v. Litscher, 2006, 151–152 Goffman, Erving, 110–111 Goldstein, J., 4 Grant, J. Douglas in California Department of Corrections, 30–31 and Camp Elliott Experiment, 27–29 and Great Meadow Prison, 164–166 and New Careers Development Project, 39–41 and self-management study center, 160 and study of violence, 33 and VPU, 49, 58–59, 63, 64, 70–71 Grant, M. Q., 29

The Daily Princetonian, 15 Darroch Hall, 122–128 The Dartmouth, 15 Dartmouth College, 15 Davis, S., 147 “Democratizing Prisons” (talk by Hans Toch), 87 Deprivation, of prisoners, 142 Dewey, John, 12–14, 160 Dickey, John, 12 Differential treatment model, 29 Difficult prisoners, 136–139 Drug testing, mandated, 111–114

178

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and humanitarian reforms, 80–81 as members of crisis-intervention teams, 81–83 self-destructive behavior by, 76–77 and suicide prevention program, 85 workshop on, 78 and workshop recommendations, 83–84 Inmate–staff relationships, 90, 92, 163–164 Institute for the Study of Crime and Delinquency, 33 Institutional violence, 33–35 “Intervention, Management and Treatment of Inmate Breakdowns” workshop, 78, 79n1 Interventions cognitive–behavioral, 158–159 for individual prisoners, 29 successful, and group dynamics, 73 Intramural sports, 164–165 The Invasion from Mars (Cantril), 6 Ittelson, William, 13–14

Great Meadow Prison (Comstock, New York), 162–165 Greenock prison, 121–122 Group dynamics, 63–73 morale and productivity in, 69–71 and participation, 65–69 and successful interventions, 73 and Violence Prevention Unit, 63–65, 71–72 Guild system in human services, 48 and social change, 44

Hahn, James, 58–59, 62, 71 Haney, Craig, 159, 168 Hastorf, A. H., 15–16 Hawthorne Studies, 68 Hetherington, P., 130–132 Hewitt, Carl in initial interview, 51–52 in phase 2, 58 at Synanon, 53–55 as training officer, 56–57 Hierarchy of needs, 124–125 High school equivalency diplomas, 116 Hindelang, M. J., 8 HM Inspectorate of Prisons, 127 Holwager, J. K., 142, 143 Humane reforms and behavioral science, 125 Humane treatment, of prisoners, 80–81, 161–162 Humanists, xvii Humanizing training, 56–57 Human resources school of management, 88

Jones’El v. Berge, 2001, 148, 149 Kupers, Terry, 148 Laboratory rats, 157, 159 Leadership, 68 Legal and Criminal Psychology (Toch), 30 Levinson, R. B., 128 Lewin, Kurt, 67, 69 Lipofsky, D., 146 Local community, 105–108 Long-term confinements, 115–128 mid-career issues with, 121–124 and normalization, 115–117 and prisoner incentives, 124–126 prison survey data on, 119–121

Industrial psychology, 67–68 Inmates in crisis, 75–85. See also Prisoners and frustrations of correctional officers, 78–80

179

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and prison system as career ladder, 117 in semi-open and open prisons, 117–119 and unit management, 126–128

Manuel Rodriguez as participant in, 34 as social movement, 42–44 and support systems, 46–47 and VPU, 63 New York City Department of Corrections, 78, 81, 85 New York State Department of Corrections, 78, 84 NIMH. See National Institute of Mental Health Normalization, 115–117 Norway, 104

Mandated drug testing, 111–114 Marijuana at Penninghame prison, 112–113 survey data about, 8 Maslow, Abraham, 124–125 Massive online open courses (MOOCs), 116 McMickens, Jacqueline, 78–81, 85 Mental health problems among prisoners at supermax prisons, 147 self-destructive behavior as, 76–77 Mental health staff, 77 Mexican American prison gangs, 35–36 Michigan Department of Corrections, 22 Michigan State University, 30 Mid-career issues, 121–124 Miller, M., 149 MOOCs (massive online open courses), 116 Moore, M., 21–22 Morale, 69–71 Morgan, Alasdair, 105 Mosher, D. L., 139 Motivation for change, 68–69 for violence, research on, 31–33 Murphy, Larry, 64–65

Oakland Police Department, 49–62, 71–73, 87 “Observation,” prisoners under, 77 Onishi, N., 62 Ontiveras, Ricardo, 47 Open prisons, 117–119

Paraprofessionals, 41 Park, James W. L., 35–36 Participation active vs. passive, 41, 88–89 and group dynamics, 65–69 of prisoners, 134–136 Participatory governance, 94–98 Pavlov, Ivan, 141 Pearce, John, 89, 91, 129 Pearl, A., 40 Peer review panel, 58–61, 72 Pelican Bay prison, 37 Penninghame Post, 101–102, 106–107, 109–111, 113–114 Penninghame prison (Scotland), 87–114 anticipating resistance to reform in, 89–91 closing of, 98–99 as community, 101–105 and local community, 105–108 mandated drug testing at, 111–114 participatory governance at, 94–98

National Football League, 146 National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), 33, 50, 78 New Careers Development Project, 39–48, 114 end of, 48 implementation of, 44–46 origins of, 39–41

180

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Prison gangs, 35–37 Prison newspapers, 110–111 Prison officers, 120 Prison populations, 128 Prison reform, 165–166 Prisons. See also specific institutions career advancement in, 115–128 education in, 116 ethnicity and violence in California, 35 human resources in, 88 intramural sports in, 164–165 open, 117–119 semi-open, 117–119 supermax, 147 Prison survey data, 119–121 Prison system behaviorism in, 141–143 bureaucracy in, 165–166 as career ladder, 117 increase of violence in, 32 race riots in, 35 Productivity, 69–71 Professionalism, 79–80 Psychoanalysis, 3–4 Psychologists, 79 Psychology applied social. See Applied social psychology “doing,” xv–xvii industrial, 67–68 transactional, 13–14 Psychology of Crime and Criminal Justice (Toch), 30 The Psychology of Social Movements (Cantril), 5 Public speaking, 63–65 Punishment to modify behavior, 152–153 penological interest vs., 148

and Penninghame Post, 109–111 planning for self-governance in, 91–94 preparing prisoners for release from, 108–109 Penological interest, 148 Perception, study of, 15–16 Personal officers, 116, 119–120 Peterhead prison (Scotland), 129–139 conditions at, 129–131 difficult prisoners at, 136–139 new unit at, 131–132 prisoner participation at, 134–136 staff concerns at, 132–134 Police training, 57 The Politics of Despair (Cantril), 167 Predictive judgment, 24–25 Princeton University Hadley Cantril at, 5 and Dartmouth, 15 stereoscope research at, 17–19 Hugh Taylor at, 11 Hans Toch at, 7–10 transactional psychology at, 13–14 Prison College, 87 Prisoner incentives, 124–126 Prisoner participation, 134–136 Prisoners. See also Inmates in crisis altruistic activities of, 105–108, 118 deprivation of, 142 difficult, 136–139 humane treatment of, 80–81, 161–162 incentives for, 124–126 interventions for individual, 29 matched with staff, 29 and mental health problems, 147 participation of, 134–136 returning from furloughs, 103–105 self-improvement for, 115–116 and staff, choosing reforms, 94 taking responsibility in selfgovernance, 97

Race riots, 35 Rats, laboratory, 157, 159

181

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Self-management study center, 160–161 Semi-open prisons, 117–119 Sentence planning, 116, 119–120, 123, 126 Shelley, Ernest, 22–24 Sherwood, D. W., 24–25 SHU (Segregated Housing Unit ) syndrome, 148 Simpson, T., 133, 136 Skinner, B. F., 141–142, 152–153 SMCI (Supermax Correctional Institution), 144 Smoking policy, at Penninghame prison, 95–96 Social change, 44 Social movement(s) New Careers Development Project as, 42–44 studies on, 9–10 Social psychology, applied. See Applied social psychology Solitary confinement. See Segregation Staff concerns of, at Peterhead prison, 132–134 matched with prisoners, 29 mental health, 77 and prisoners, choosing reforms, 94 Stagner, Ross, 158–159 START unit, 142 Stephens, Darrell, W., 72 Stereoscope research, 17–25 on differences in experience, 18–19 and predictive judgment, 24–25 on violence perception, 19–22, 30–31 on violence proclivity, 22–24 “Subversive” prisoners, 135 Suicide prevention programs, 81–82, 85 Suicides, in prisons, 75, 77, 78

Reagan, Ronald, 48 Reciprocity, in self-help groups, 43 Reforms anticipating resistance to, 89–91 conditions for successful, 73 staff and prisoners choosing, 94 Rehabilitation and altruistic activities, 106 at Camp Elliott Experiment, 28–29 as goal of New Careers Development Project, 45 self, 163 Release, preparation for, 108–109 “The Riders,” 62 Riessman, F., 40 Riots at Peterhead prison, 129–130 race, 35 Rodriguez, Manuel in prison, 47 as violence researcher, 34–35 Role-playing, in police training, 57 Ross, Hamish, 89, 95–98, 103–104

St. Vincent De Paul, 106 Sarbin, T. R., 24–25 Schmitt, T., 155, 156, 158 Schulte, R. M., 20–21 Scottish Prison Service, 89, 91, 102, 116, 119 Security, and change, 68 Segregated Housing Unit (SHU) syndrome, 148 Segregation at Boscobel prison, 143–144 effects of long-term, 147 at Peterhead prison, 130–132 in prisons, 139 Self-destructive behaviors, 76–77 Self-governance, 91–94 Self-help groups, 42–44 Self-improvement, for prisoners, 115–116

182

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Taylor, Sir Hugh S., 9, 11 Thematic analysis, 4 TIME magazine, 27–28 Toch, H., 4, 8, 20–24, 28, 29, 34–36, 42–46, 58–59, 70–71, 75, 76, 88–93, 104–106, 118, 119, 122, 124, 127–128, 136–139, 142, 151, 160–161, 164–166 Tompkins, D. S., 139 Toothman, Edward, 49–50 Transactional psychology, 13–14 Trial panels, of peer review panel, 59–61 Turnover, prisoner, 98

Violence Prevention Unit (VPU), 49–62, 87 admissions criteria for, 51–52 end of, 61–62, 71–72 and group dynamics, 63–65 humanizing training in, 56–57 inception of, 49–51 and New Careers Development Project, 63 peer review panel in, 58–61 and Synanon, 53–55 Violence proclivity, 22–24 Violence research, 27–37 and Camp Elliott Experiment, 27–29 on institutional violence, 33–35 on motivation for violence, 31–33 on prison gangs, 35–37 stereoscope as tool in, 30–31 VPU. See Violence Prevention Unit

United States District Court for the

Warren, Marguerite, 29

Western District of Wisconsin, 149–150 Unit management, 126–128 University of California, 49 U.S. Navy, 10, 27–30

Watt, Derek, 122 Wenk, E. R., 24–25 Wicks, Robert, 78, 83 Williams, Allan, 47 Williams, Pete, 107 Wisconsin Justice Department, 147 Wisconsin Secure Program Facility, 153–154 Wisdom, Norman, 107 Wozniak, Ed, 89, 91, 119, 131–132

Supermax Correctional Institution (SMCI), 144 Supermax prisons, 147 Supervision, as management tool, 162 Support systems, 46–47 Synanon, 53–55

Videotaping, in police training, 57 Violence institutional, 33–35 Violence perception predictive judgment based on, 24–25 stereoscope research on, 19–22, 30–31 and violence proclivity, 22–24

Youthful-offenders at Darroch Hall, 127 and differential treatment model, 29

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About the Author

Hans Toch, PhD, is distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Albany at the State University of New York, where he is affiliated with the School of Criminal Justice. He obtained his PhD in social psychology at Princeton University, has taught at Michigan State University and at Harvard University, and in 1996, served as the Walker-Ames Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. Dr. Toch is a fellow of both the American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Society of Criminology. In 1996, he acted as president of the American Association of Correctional Psychology. He is a recipient of the Hadley Cantril Memorial Award (for Men in Crisis), the August Vollmer Award of the American Society of Criminology for outstanding contributions to applied criminology, the Prix deGreff from the International Society of Criminology for Distinction in Clinical Criminology, and the Research Award of the International Corrections and Prison Association. Dr. Toch’s research interests range from mental health problems and the psychology of violence to issues of organizational reform and planned change. His books include The Social Psychology of Social Move­ ments (1965, 2013), Reforming Human Services: Change Through Par­ t­ici­pation (with J. D. Grant, 1982), Violent Men (1992), Living in Prison (1992), Mosaic of Despair (1992), The Disturbed Violent Offender (with Kenneth Adams, 1994), Police Violence (with William Geller, 1996),

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About the Author

Corrections: A Humanistic Approach (1997), Crime and Punishment (with Robert Johnson, 2000), Acting Out (with Kenneth Adams, 2002), Stress in Policing (2002), Police as Problem Solvers (2005), and Cop Watch: Spectators, Social Media, and Police Reform (2012).

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