Language and Social Reality: The Case of Telling the Convict Code

LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL REALITY The Case of Telling the Convict Code

by D. LAWRENCE WIEDER

Department of Sociology University of California Santa Barbara, CaZ!fornia

1974

MOUTON THE HAGUE· PARIS

© Copyright 1974 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

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Printed in Belgium by NICI, Ghent

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The materials for this book were collected while I was employed as a research analyst by the Research Division of the California

Department of Corrections. The work was made possible by the support and interest of John Conrad, the Chief of the Research

Division at that time. I received much counsel, stimulation, and support from Al Himmelson and Don Miller, my immediate supervisors in the Research Division. I am especially indebted to Don Miller, who was also doing research at the East Los Angeles Halfway House where the study was carried out. The patterns of resident behavior reported in Chapter Three were, in many instances, jointly observed and clarified in discussions between the two of us. The survey materials reported in that chapter are based on a schedule that we jointly designed, and both of us carried out the interviewing.

I also owe a particular debt to the staff of the East Los Angeles Halfway House. This study could not have been done without their freely given and unstinted cooperation. They not only made the various scenes of halfway house and their own meetings and conferences available to me, but they also spent many patient hours explaining the character of their work to me. I wish to acknowledge my considerable intellectual debt to Professor Harold Garfinkel. Those familiar with his work will recognize in the present research the full extent of this indebtedness. At UCLA, he served as the chairman of my doctoral committee which read the original manuscript (my dissertation) which served as the basis of this book. He also made typing funds

6

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

available to me through the project "Decision Making in Common Sense Situations of Choice", which was carried out by Drs. Gar­ finkel, Churchill, and Sacks and sponsored by the Air Force Office of

Scientific Research, Office of

Aerospace

Research,

United States Air Force, under grant number AF-AFOSR-757-67. Some readers may be puzzled by the lack of citation of the writings of Erving Goffman in this work. It is clear to me that his writings have had a considerable impact on the character of my ethnographic

observations.

Goffman

gives

the

ethnographer

what amounts to a set of powerful glasses. This kind of influence is so general that particular textual locations which offer the possibility of citing him rarely permit the clear acknowledgment of the the importance of the intellectual debt. Professors Thomas Wilson and Don Zimmerman, University of California, Santa Barbara, read and commented on the work.

I am indebted to them for their encouragement and criticisms. Zimmerman's influence is nearly impossible to document. We have been close friends for ten years and have shared much in discussions, in mutual orientations to scholarly problems, and in collaborative research and writing. Ms. Phyllis Bennis made many editorial suggestions and typed the early drafts of this work. Karen Wieder gave the pres­ ent version of the work a

line by line

and

paragraph

by

paragraph editing. With her unstinting effort and influence, many serious deformations of the English language and other various obscurities of style were avoided. Those deformations, obscurities, and other infelicities that remain are due to my own stubbornness. While many have contributed to this effort, the author alone bears the responsibility for the study.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

5

Acknowledgments Preface

9

by Don H. Zimmerman. PART I Rules as Explanations of Action.

29

.

46

History and Organization of the Halfway House. Patterns of Resident Behavior. .

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

73

The Convict Code as an Explanation of Deviant Behavior

113

PART II An Introduction to an Ethnomethodological Analysis of the Convict Code

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

129 132

'Telling the Code': Folk Sociology and Social Reality Persuasion and Reflexive Formulation

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

167

'Telling the Code' as a Guide to Per ception: the Inner Structure of Social Reality .

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

183

TABLE OF CONTENTS

8

'Telling the Code' as an Exhibition of Order

215

Bibliography

225

Index

233

.

.

.

DON H. ZIMMERMAN

PREFACE

Because any theory of social interaction presupposes a theory of signs of some sort, a study that poses fundamental questions for contemporary sociological treatments of interaction

may

raise critical issues for semiotics as well. This is indeed the case with Professor Wieder's book. A central sociological theorem'r> that social behavior is rule-governed, is subjected to close scrutiny, and important facets of the relationship between norms and conduct which are ordinarily overlooked are brought into clear empirical focus.l As a consequence, Wieder poses a challenge to much of current sociological thought on this matter, and the alternative analysis he proposes constitutes the major contribution of the book. However, invite

a

the implications of his investigation

thoroughgoing reconsideration of the nature

semiotic theory appropriate to the

of

a

analysis of human social

interaction,2 and my remarks will be focused on this aspect. 1 That normative constructs such as value, norm, and role are central resources for sociological accounts of patterned behavior in society is beyond doubt. An early attempt to formulate a consistent rationale for the use of normative constructs in sociological theory is to be found in Parsons (1937). More recently, Wilson (1970a) has examined the 'paradigmatic' (Kuhn, 1962) character of the normative approach to the explanation of social conduct. 2 For the limited purposes of this introduction, Morris' (1964) statement of the semiotic process will be employed to characterize the basic framework of sign-referent relationships as they bear upon sociology and the social sciences. Thus, to the extent that viewpoints critical of Morris' (1964) position in fact differ significantly from it in their basic logical structure, and in ways pertinent to the kinds of issues raised here, the scope and import of the discussion that follows may require reassessment.

10

PREFACE I

Wieder set out to investigate the operation of a halfway house program designed for parolees previously convicted of narcotics offenses. The aim of the East Los Angeles Halfway House project was to increase the chances of successful parole among this high­ risk group of felons. As Wieder documents,the program had met with little success,and his presence in the setting as a research sociologist was for the purpose of assessing the reasons for its ineffectiveness. Wieder's findings in this regard (discussed in Part I) are similar to those reported in the substantial literature that has emerged from sociological studies of correctional and rehabilitative organizations.

Residents of the halfway house,

like convicts in prison,were found to adhere to the 'convict code', a collection of norms (e.g.,'Do not snitch', 'Show your loyalty to the residents', etc.) which systematically blocked the kind of cooperation and mutual trust between residents and staff required for establishing the 'therapeutic community' essential to the rehabilitative aims of the organizatioQ. This initial phase of his investigation is indispensable for what follows it. However,this book is not primarily concerned with the difficulties posed for rehabilitative programs by the operation of a convict code,but rather these difficulties are the empirical background for framing more basic problems. The approach that Wieder takes (anticipated in the first chapter and spelled out in unusually clear terms in Part 11) succeeds in transforming an otherwise standard kind of sociological study of a specific arena of social life into an unqrthodox and illuminating inquiry into lay and professional uses of a normative order as a persuasive explanation of conduct. In Part I, Wieder describes the convict code as a set of maxims or rules which residents,staff,and Wieder himself alluded to, sometimes formulated in part,and often invoked as an account or an excuse in the face of particular,troublesome behaviors. The code was used on those occasions in which participants sought to understand or make clear to others the meaning and

11

PREFACE

implication of acts or verbal expressions occurring in the setting. In addition, it was employed to locate those acts or expressions which were perceived to be subject to the convict code and thought to be generated by it. Wieder goes on to formulate the code as an explicit system of rules and to show that it demonstrably influenced resident-staff interactions in the ways one would expect if the code, in fact, functioned as a controlling normative order. Up to this point, Wieder's analysis employs the well-established procedure of treating the 'telling of the code' as a kind of layman's description of a set of norms having an existence independent of the teller and the occasion of the telling, thus furnishing the resources for accounting for the social activities observed by the researcher, i.e., he analyzes them as actions in accord with a socially enforced system of norms. It will be useful at this point to examine this mode of explanation more closely, since its implications are central to Wieder's argument. Moreover, the link between semiotics and sociology may clearly be seen in its terms. Wilson ( 1970a) views the attempt to explain patterned social interaction in terms of compliance with rules as giving rise to what he calls the 'normative paradigm' in sociological theory and research. He argues that sociologists, aspiring to the ideal of deductive explanation (the hypothetico-deductive model), employ the construct 'rule' as an empirical term in their theories. The elements constituting this paradigm are displayed in Figure 1. FIGURE

1

Normative Paradigm (Wilson, 1970a) Rule

�

(Situation,

t

occasion

Action)

t

behavior

Actor

A 'rule' is to be understood as a linkage between a situation (5) and an action (A), where S is a well-defined class of occasions

12

PREFACE

(concrete social settings demarcated by distinctive physical and social features) and A is a well-defined class of behaviors (distin­ guishable movements, gestures, and verbalizations). This for­ mulation encompasses a wide range of theoretical constructs in sociology and other social sciences, since the linkage between S and A may take the form of learned dispositions (e.g., socialized motives, needs, habits, etc.) or socially sanctioned expectations (e.g., role expectations).3 For example, Wieder notes that residents of the halfway house, by virtue of their common prison experience, were socialized to the code; moreover, they expressed fear of the consequences of violating these shared norms. That rules such as the dispositions and expectations making up the convict code are shared is crucial since: ...if social interaction is to be stable [i.e., if systematic reinforcement or sanctioning is to occur], the different participants must define situations and actions in essentially the same way, since otherwise rules could not operate to produce coherent interaction over time. Within the normative paradigm, this cognitive agreement is provided by the assumption that actors share a system of culturally-established symbols and meanings. (Wilson, 1970a: 699.)

II

The relevance of semiotic theory to the central sociological concern with rule-governed conduct can now be made explicit. Morris (1964 : 58), in the context of an examination of the relevance of semiotics to the analysis of social systems developed by Parsons (1953), asserts that, "signs ... turn out to be central features of social systems". Social systems are regarded by Parsons (1953) as organized in terms of institutions, which in turn are built up 3

Wilson (1970a: 699) argues that, "Specific theories based on the normative

paradigm are, of course, formulated in widely varying terminologies and differ from one another in important ways concerning further psychological and sociological assumptions." His point is that the framework provided by the normative paradigm characterizes theoretical positions that on other grounds are considered quite distinct, if not

antagonistic.

13

PREFACE

from systems of roles. Role relationships are conceived of as founded on complementary expectations, i.e., the anticipations that

respective role-incumbents

have

about

the

role-relevant

behavior of their partner(s), such as husband vis-a-vis wife as wife, and conversely. The construct

role is, of course, one type

of linkage between situation and action in the normative paradigm sense, i.e., it functions as a rule. At the same time, Morris (1964: 59) concludes that, "role behavior is a type of sign controlled behavior". Thus ; we should examine more closely the relationship between

Morris' (1964) semiotic and Wilson's (1970a) formulation of s ociology's central explanatory scheme. In Morris' scheme, a sign must be understood as signifying a

kind of object (1964: 2); hence, the term signification refers to a class of objects, rather than some particular object. Similarly, Wilson

(1970a) defines situations and actions as classes of

situations actions are silJ...nifications. Further, Wilson's (1970a: 699) actor - paralleling Morris' (1964) interpreter "treats specific occasions and behaviors, respectively. In semiotic terms,

and

-

occasions as instances of situations and concrete behaviors as

occasion and behavior function signs relative to the normative paradigm notion, i.e., their

instances of actions". Consequently, as

occurrence signifies a situation or action. However, there is another complexity:

behavior functions as an interpretant relative

to the semiotic scheme. From the point of view of semiotics, a social act as defined within the normative paradigm involves what might be called a ·sign sequence'. That is, a particular occasion (sign plus context)4 is recognized by the actor (interpreter) as an instance of some situation (signification). In conformity with a rule, the actor (interpreter) emits some behavior (interpretant) that is seen as an instance of a particular action (another signifi­ cation). Thus, in a social act, there are two sign-signification relationships: occasion-situation and behavior-actml1. Of course, 4

It should be noted that Morris (1964) provides a distinction between sign and context which is missing from Wilson's (1970a) scheme, although

such a distinction is clearly called for. Morris' (1964) formulation is, of course, the more general of the two.

14

PREFACE

the emitted behavior in its context establishes a new occasion that in tum is seen as an instance of a situation which calls forth further responses.5 These relations are displayed in Figure 2. FlOURE 2

The Sign Sequence of a Social Act (Wilson, 1970a; Morris, 1964)

Sign Sequence (first part)

Normative Paradigm

Sign Sequence (second part)

Rule

------

SIGNIFICATION - - (Situation, Action) - - SIGNIFICATION

t

SIGN + CONTEXT - - occasion

t

behavior - - INTERPRETANT; a/so, SIGN + CONTEXT

Actor (Interpreter) Key: t

sign-signification relation parallel concepts Capitalized terms semiotic concepts Lower case terms normative paradigm concepts =

- -

=

=

=

It is clear that the particular semiotic discussed here can be related in a rather straightforward manner to what Wilson (1970a) claims with good justification to be sociology's basic explanatory model. This compatibility extends beyond the mapping of terms from one system into the other. As indicated earlier, the normative paradigm carries with it the additional assumption of a shared cognitive culture, including language and gestures. If signs exercise control over behavior, then the idea that regular, recurring patterns of behavior enacted by a plurality of actors presupposes that such actors share a common system of signs, at least to some degree. 5

It might be added tbat since the notion of sanctioning (or reinforcement) is crucial to an account of regularity in social behavior, the possibility of evaluation must be built into the concept of action. A behavior (interpretant), triggered by the recognition of a given situation, which itself cannot be rec­ ognized as signifying the appropriate action linked to that situation (rule) can, thus, be subject to sanction.

PREFACE

15

Morris' (1955: 36) definition of language provides for most of the essential features of a shared cultural system: ... a language is a set of p!urisituationa! signs with interpersonal signifi­ cata common to members of an interpreter-family [read: group or culture) and combinable in some ways but not in others to form compound signs. [Emphasis added.]

Or, to paraphrase this definition in a slightly different terminology, a language - or cultural system - consists of a collection of signs that do not substantially alter in their signification across a delimited set of situations. Such signs have the same signification, within a specified population, for both producers and interpreters of signs and are subject to constraints (a grammar) in their combination (i.e., only certain combinations are permitted; others are negatively sanctioned). Keeping in mind that a rule can be understood as a structured relationship of signs and their significata within a sequence, one could speak as ",ell of pI uri­ situational rules known in the same way by a collectivity of actors. Furthermore, rules, in this sense, specify a 'grammar' of inter­ action by providing for the sanctioned relationship between a situation and an action within it. One element missing in Morris' (1955) definition relevant to most treatments of the concept of culture is transpersonality (the independence of the system from the actors constrained by it). Culture (like language) presumably remains relatively stable from generation to generation, changing slowly for the most part.

III

Given the close ties between semiotics and sociology indicated by the preceding discussion, the relevance of Wieder's central thesis in Part II is inescapable. In earlier chapters, he furnishes an analysis of resident behavior in the halfway house. This analysis provides a characterization of the code as a sub-culture, displaying the general properties of a culture: (1) it was thought to be more or less uniformly shared by residents of the halfway house (them-

16

PREFACE

selves a sub-population of a larger population of convicts);

(2) the maxims of the code were treated as plurisituational rules; (3) these rules were viewed as constraining (i.e., they functioned as an enforced and enforceable 'grammar' for interactions between residents and between residents and staff); and (4) it was en­ countered as trans personal, i.e., it was independent of the successive cohorts of residents passing through the house. That is, Wieder as an observer and analyst, as well as the residents and staff, encountered and treated the code as a shared, plurisituational, constraining, and transpersonal normative order. It has already been indicated that Wieder does not rest with these rather commonplace results, but pushes his analysis well beyond the usual stopping point. He goes on to consider the formulations of the code by residents and staff (e.g., talk about the code, talk about behavior in terms of the code, etc.) and his own ethnographic descriJ}tion, based on these formulations, as events within that setting rather than simply as reports on that setting. That is, he redefines the field of data to include his initial finding (based and built upon the talk done by the 'natives') that the code governed conduct in the setting. This, then, becomes his problematic phenomenon: How do parties to the setting find the code to be the source of, and hence the ready explanation for, the distinctive patterns of behavior found in the halfway house? Wieder's answer to this question poses the fundamental issues for both semiotics and sociology alluded to at the beginning of this preface. He observes, first of all, that the code was made available through talk in the setting. The primary source of the rules, in terms of which particular behaviors were accounted for, were linguistic expressions. That is, in their telling, the maxims of the code were made observable as rules.6It is from this observation that the notion 6

It is worth noting at this point that Wieder is not employing the familiar distinction between 'idealized' and 'actual' norms. His analysis of 'the code' as a kind of verbal activity does not imply that 'the code' is merely talk in the sense that some other, more covert set of rules or other factors 'actually' governed behavior in the setting. His point, as subsequent discussion will

17

PREFACE

of 'telling the code' springs. Focus on 'telling the code' leads to

use of the natural language to organize social settings. The notion that natural language organizes social settings will be examined below. 7

identifying rules as a phenomenon emerging from the

Thus, Wieder's interest in 'talk' is not in the use of language to furnish more or less 'accurate' reports of a specific feature of social reality (namely, the nature and workings of a normative order), but rather it is in the use of language to accomplish that order as a feature of social reality or any occasion within which that topic is addressed.

In their telling on any occasion, the maxims of the code were observed by Wieder to be employed by staff and residents to collect and

render equivalent an array of otherwise unrelated

behaviors. The sense of structure (e.g., that particular behaviors were the consequence of honoring one or another maxim of the code) was found to be actively accomplished on each occasion by the imaginative work of juxtaposing the behavior with the telling of the maxim. What is more, the code and the behavior it organized were seen to be

reflexively related and, thus, subject

to continuous elaboration and modification.

Each particular

of conduct that staff and residents described as caused by the code (which was never stated 'in fuW, but rather invoked 'in relevant make clear, is that the matter of rules or norms and their relationship to conduct is essentially a phenomenon of natural language accounts of behavior. 7 Some terminological problems require attention here, however. The term 'natural language' is often used in the context of linguistic and philosophical discourse in contrast to the terms 'artificial language' or 'formal language', the latter two referring to such things as various logical calculi or computer languages. The contrast implied in Wieder's usage (and in ethnomethodological discourse in general) is between the use of 'natural language' to organize social settings and other, alternative principles that might be advanced to account for orderly social interaction, e.g., the operation of cultural or social­ structural influences (when conceived of as existing prior to, and independently of the setting in question) or 'schedules of reinforcement', etc. Moreove-r, the term 'natural language' is used more broadly to encompass both linguistic, paralinguistic and gestural activities, the focus being the full exercise of native competence by members to jointly accomplish the features of a setting as an intersubjectively shared and sharable state of affairs (cf. Garfinkel, 1967; Garfinkel and Sacks, 1970; Cicourel, 1970).

18

PREFACE

part', on any given occasion) enriched and extended the possible meanings of the various provisions of the code which, in tum, made possible an even greater scope for those provisions in collecting further instances of behavior as code-governed. What this amounts to is

the finding that the plurisituationality of the

rules of the code is a situated accomplishment, or outcome, of the skilled use of the code, rather than a precondition for its use. That is, the actors' sense of the 'relative constancy' of the meaning of the code for conduct across situations is accomplished

in

situations; the equivalence of behaviors classifiable as fulfilling the code is a consequence of the use of the code to analyze behavior, rather than a prior achievement, making the code usable for that purpose. Note that in raising this point, Wieder is not denying that the code-in-use appears to users (tellers and hearers) to exhibit plurisituational meanings; nor is he proposing that in some ultimate sense the code (and by obvious extension, any normative order) does not exhibit some form of plurisituationality. What his analysis leads to is a different conception of what could be meant by plurisituationality and an account of how rules (the word 'signs' could be substituted here) come to

achieve pluri­

situationality. In Wieder's view, the plurisituationality, as an

experienced feature of normative orders, is an on-going, never­ ending accomplishment of the use of natural language expressions to analyze and organize activities in settings where these selfsame expressions are constituents of those activities. Thus, to say that a resident's tardiness in attending a therapy group session scheduled by the halfway house staff is a behavior which 'shows loyalty to' fellow residents' by resisting staff is to render that particular piece of conduct equivalent to past instances of behavior which were analyzed as complying with that rule. By making the equivalence (via use of the rule as the analysis of the meaning of the behavior in question), the present behavior is thus joined with past behaviors analyzed by that rule and 'reaches out' to future

behaviors

anticipatorily

subject to that rule, i.e., the

present use retrospectively and prospectively unites an array

PREFACE

19

of known and yet-to-be-encountered behaviors as the same action. Such a proced ';lre 'demonstrates' (by virtue of having been sucess­ fully undertaken as one stream of activity on that occasion) that behaviors encountered in the setting are subject to analysis in terms of rules and, thus, are normatively controlled. The reflexive use of natural language makes observable, and thus constitutes, the features of members' social reality. The focus of Wieder's analysis is the accomplishment of pluri­ situationality by the use of the code as a natural language vehicle for understanding activities in the halfway house. By altering the meaning of plurisituationality, his analysis also alters the meaning of the notion that cultures (or systems of signs) are 'shared', are 'constraining', and are 'transpersonal'. If the relationship of a rule to behavior is achieved in its specifics on each and every occasion of the rule's use, in what sense can we say that a rule is shared by a collectivity? How can we demonstrate that a normative order constrains (and in some sense generates) definite behaviors, if we must await this determination in each and every case? (Cf. Wilson, 1970a: 702-705; and Chapter Eight of this book.) In what sense can a normative order which is 'created anew' on each occasion be treated as transpersonal? The paradoxical flavor of these reflections stems, in part, from the prevailing preference for employing constructs which incorporate these properties in order to furnish a resourl,e for analyzing the par ticulars of social behavior. Wieder's findings would appear to snatch that resource away. Yet it must be reemphasized that it would be a mistake of the first magnitude to suppose that Wieder is arguing that such properties are not

experienced as features of sign systems, e.g.,

he argues that the users of the convict code do experience those properties. He is to be understood as proposing that it is the member of society who, through the use of procedures Wieder describes, methodically assures that his natural language accounts of social conduct display the properties of plurisituationaIity, constraint, transpersonality, and of being shared as a condition of competent talk within and about a society. The details of Wieder's

20

PREFACE

argument on this point, i.e., that such properties are a member's accomplishment, must be left for a reading of the book itself.

IV

Wieder is led to the treatment which he accords the convict code in light of a growing body of theory and research within sociology that has come to be known as ethnomethodology (cf. Garfinkel, 1967). A few comments from an ethnomethodological standpoint should serve to provide a broader context for Wieder's investi­ gation. The human sciences, like the natural sciences, make use of the procedure of idealization to organize relevant aspects of the phenomena they address. Such selective, abstract, and logically consistent constructions have proved highly successful in advancing the work of natural scientists.. Attempts to emulate this practice in the human sciences, e.g., linguistics, anthropology, sociology, economics, semiotics, etc., often emerge in the form of a distinction between the observable particulars of actual behavior of whatever type, on the one hand, and a theoretically prior, abstract construction which is assumed to represent some constellation of factors which lie behind and generate certain features of observed behavior, on the other. This theoretical option is exemplified by current distinctions made between language and speech, culture and behavior, lin­ guistic competence and linguistic performance, and semantics and pragmatics. The convict code, as ordinarily conceived, vis-a­ vis the behavior of residents, reflects this sort of distinction. Thus, one side of the distinction is an idealization intended to advance the interests of explanation, and the other side is taken as the objective data to be explained. One mtionale for this practice is that it provides a way of explicitly delimiting a set of theoretically relevant dimensions vis-a-vis a field of data viewed as the complex result of the interaction of many different variables, some of which are extraneous to what the theory

21

PREFACE

proposes to explain.8 Following this approach, research interests in various disciplines are often directed toward constructing a 'model' or theory that represents the essential relationships between the critical variables thought to characterize the pheno­ menon of interest and, thence, to the determination of the empirical conditions under which the idealized outcomes generated by the model most

closely approximate actual observation.

Whether couched in quantitative terms (e.g., the proportion of variance explained under specified conditions) or in a system of rules (e.g., a system of 'phrase structure' and 'transformational' rules for generating all and only grammatical sentences in a language, cf. Chomsky,

1965), a necessary consequence is the

suppression of whole classes of data. In the case of the convict code, a view of the code as an idealized system of norms which, under

certain conditions, accounts for some determinable proportion of

resident behavior in the halfway house systematically ignores the question of the empirical connection ofa 'rule' with a 'behavior' and, of course, any dat,a that might bear upon that determination. The necessity to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant data must be readily granted. The thrust of these remarks should . not be construed as a general critique of the use of idealizations in· theory and research. For any particular idealization, or any class ofideaHzations, however, it is always appropriate to ask whether or not the conception thus advanced (and the 'purification' of data that is its inevitable consequence) compromises the claims advanced for a particular analysis. If, for example, it turns out that the 'extraneous' factors (and their corresponding data) weeded out by a given idealization play a critical role in accom­ plishing an analysis of the residue of surviving data (and are smuggled in without

acknowledgment,

or

without

empirical

control), then some further stock-taking is in order: An argument for this view in linguistics may be found in Chomsky (1965, 1972) and Katz (1966). Critiques of Chomsky's position on this matter' are advanced from a behaviorist perspective by Scott (1971: 52-55), from a 'structuralist' stance in linguistics by Hockett (1967, 1968), and from an etbnomethodologica1 viewpoint by Cicourel (1970).

8

22

PREFACE

From an ethnomethodological point of found in many of the human sciences are

view,

idealizations

misplaced.

They lead

the theorist to treat his subject matter in such a way as to all but foreclose the investigation of rertain fundamental features of human behavior - specifically, they obscure the possibility that idealization itself is a constituent feature of the activities of human

beings

in

shaping

their

interpersonal

environments.

By making certain features of naturally occurring talk and behavior prominent, current idealizations provide no clear way of recognizing the fact (made apparent by ethnomethodological studies, induding Wieder's) that sign use, or rule use, or culture use involves a naturally occurring process of idealization (e.g., the analyzability of conduct by use of rules) as one of its integral features. Ideal­ ization is an integral feature of sign use, rule use, and culture use in the sense that it is accomplished through the efforts of the users of the idealizations themselves (Garfinkel and Sacks,

1 970).

Thus, ethnomethodologists would contend tbat these ideal­ izations in the human sciences have ignored the fact that ideal­ ization occurs naturally within the domain of scientific theorizing and scientific discourse (which is, after all, done from within the world) and takes place as well within the domain of everyday life - in the form of common-sense

typifications

(and, of coUrse,

by reference to rules or maxims of the sort discussed by Wieder) (cf. Husserl,

1960: 1 1 1 ; Schutz, 1 962, 1 964). For ethnomethodology

then, 'idealization' (of either scientific or common-sense fonn) is a

phenomenon for study, not a resource (cf. Garfinkel, 1 967; 1 970; Wilson, 1 970a; Zimmerman, 1970; Zimmerman Pollner, 1 970; and Zimmerman and Wieder, 1 970). Though

Cicoure), and

ethnomethodologists must themselves idealize their phenomena in some fashion when pursuing an analysis, their approach differs from current constructive theorizing in that their idealizations attempt to incorporate the view that, from the outset, societal members

accomplish the orderly structures of their world (cf. Garfinkel and Sacks, 1 970) via the use of idealizations. The phenomena of interest, then, are what Schutz (1962) refers recognize

and

to as second-order phenomena, namely, members' idealizations

PREFACE

23

of their own and others' behavior. (The convict code, as it is told, described, and otherwise employed by the staff and residents of the halfway bouse that Wieder studied, is an example of such a phenomenon.) While it is profitable for the physical scientist to refine common-sense procedures (indeed, to radicalize them) in gaining a purchase on the world of pure (and purified) physical phenomena (cf. Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 66-70), social reality consists of the common-sense, pratical activity of everyday 'idealizations' of the social world and activities within it (cf. Schutz, 1 962; Garfinkel, 1 967; Pollner, 1 970; Wieder, 1970; Zimmerman, 1 970; Zimmerman and Pollner, 1970; Zimmerman and Wieder, 1 970). for etbnomethodologists, idealizations (or rational constructions) of the social world must be recognized as also having the features of being 'done from within the world' and being 'part and parcel of that world', i.e., what Garfinkel ( 1967) calls 'reflexive features'. A consequence of the use of misplaced idealization in the human sciences is that many theories of social science, traditional per­ ceptual psychology, linguistics, and semantics are often invidiously employed as a standard for judging the consistency, clarity, and coherence of members' thoughts and talk, for judging the veridicality of their perceptions, for judging the rationality of their actions, and for judging the consistency between their words and deeds. For example, sociologists have done innumerable studies purporting to show that societal members fail (or deviate) in their attempts to rationally follow rules in terms of rational rule-following as the SOCiologist posits it to be.9 As mentioned earlier, these procedures motivate a concern 9

In a somewhat analogous fashion, psychological research often encounters

a lack of 'veridicality' in members' perceptions under a variety of conditions. Often, the assertion of non-veridicality in perception is founded on an idealization of the perceptual process which allows little room for the active, constructive interplay between stimulus input and other levels of cognitive process. What is 'really there' exterior to receptor organs is thus viewed as subject to distortion or error, as opposed to being transformed in lawful ways relative to the multitudinous perceptual tasks that require attention

in the course of coming to terms with an external environment (cf. Neisser, 1967; and Handel, 1972).

24

PREFACE

on the part of some scientists and scholars to discover the variables which influence the degree to which members approximate the ideal - a strategy which contains a double irony. In the first instance, the comparison inevitably yields a finding that members fall short of the ideal, while, in the second instance, the ideal (at least prototypically) is generated out of a purification of the members' original work - the working of the members' (and the scientists' and scholars') common-sense knowledge of the world. Wieder's study intentionally sidesteps this double irony (although specifically examining some empirical aspects of it) in the interest of examining the features of the 'process of idealization' itself (in the form of 'telling the code') as an integral aspect of the continuous generation of social reality. The role of natural language in generating the societal member's sense of social reality is clearly pivotal. Recall that Wieder proceeds in his investigation by noting that rules, as naturally occurring phenomena (and, by direct analogy, semiosis as a naturally occurring human phenomena), are observable to social scientists and other scholars in and through the societrl members' talk. We can observe rules (as we can observe human semiosis), because societal members 'talk' rules and 'tell' rules, and they do so by making rules evident to each other by talking about rules, although by talking about rules, they simultaneously accomplish or actualize those rules as well. How they do so and with what consequences is one point at issue in Wieder's work. In an analogous way, one could argue that human semiosis is known by humans (including semioticians), because humans were already talking about features of language and about signs prior to the development of any scholarship concerning the matter.10 This is so because of the curious feature of natural language use, which is that the factual existence of a natural language, the properties of that language (in a semiotic sense), and the uses 10

It would then follow that we can study animal semiotics only by anthro­ pomorphizing, but this is not a fatal flaw, inasmuch as it would appear that we also understand each other in a similar way by using what Husser! (1960: 108-120) calIs "analogic apperception". Wieder makes a parallel point.

25

PREFACE

of that language can be described in terms of that selfsame natural language - a property that natural language does not share unrestrictedly with formal languages (Tarski, 1936). That humans recognize their own language as language depends upon this reflexive feature of natural language use. The reflexive features of natural language use (especially natural langua�e expressions of 'social rules') is one basic theme, finding, and topic for clarification and explication of Wieder's study (cf. the discussion in section III of this preface). By saying that natural language use (or more specifically, naturally occurring expressions of social rules) is reflexive, Wieder, following Garfinkel (1967), means that the expressions are unavoidably and simul­ taneously both descriptions of orderly human affairs and features of those same affairs which, in and by describing, they make orderly. Natural language use 'makes' human affairs orderly (and is, thus, productive of experienced social reality) by acting as 'embedded instruction' for seeing those affairs as orderly. By 'telling the convict eo4e' (a set of social rules), residents of a halfway house made their 'affairs appear orderly to any outsider who heard their talk and 'employed it as embedded instruction' for seeing those affairs. This is the sense of Wieder's assertion that naturall�nguage use organizes social settings. This reflexivity may be seen in the following Il'etaphorical example (see Figure 3). FIGURE 3

projection

in,de,ntation

The names appearing on or in each figure instruct the viewer to see each display in a particular, structured way. They tell the viewer how to see the lines for what they are 'this time'. The names are embedded instructions. Their sense is fulfilled by their placement in juxtaposition with the figures. Although they are

26

PREFACE

descriptive of the figures, they must 'be there' as aspects of the figures for there to be much likelihood that the figures will be seen in the fashion that they are, in contrast to the other possibilities that the 'lines on the page' offer, e.g., they could be seen as merely lines on the page, or as the left figure indenting and the right figure projecting, or as both indenting, both projecting, both flat, etc. The figures could be seen in the fashion 'called forth' by the instructions found in Figure 3 without the instructions literally being there, but in light of the number of possible alternatives, this predse outcome is not probable. Moreover, when displays involved are human affairs, rather than lines on a page, the possibilities offered by such displays appear to be infinite.

v

In these brief remarks, it has been possible only to suggest the direction of Wieder's argument and the general nature of his conclusions. I have tried to spell out the significance of Wieder's investigation for a semiotic theory that has relevance to the empirical study of human social interaction. It seems evident that his findings have important implications for semiotics and constitute a major, empirically based challenge to much standard doctrine in the theory of signs, as well as in sociology. To judge the cogency of the argument and the soundness of the conclusions, it is, of course, necessary to tum to the book itself. There can be no doubt, however, that the issues raised in it are important. Santa Barbara, California September, 1972

PART I

1

RULES AS EXPLANATIONS OF ACTION

The idea that human action can be explained by showing that the actors follow rules which 'predict' and explain their action is at once an extraordinarily important idea for social science and is, at the same time, extraordinarily commonplace in common­ sense thought. In various ways, the idea is foundational for sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and some areas of economics and political science, especially for those works based on game­ theory. It is, however, of special interest in anthropology and sociology, for in these disciplines rules are generally conceived of as open to observation, and the social scientist's formulation of them is intendedly isomorphic with the societal members' under­ standing of them. It is most often the case that the sociologist's substantive conception of a rule is based on the members' under­ standing of that same rule. Sociologists' formuJations, according to Schutz (1962: 6), ... refer to and are founded upon the thought objects constructed by the common-sense thought of man living his everyday life among his fellow­ men. Thus, the constructs used by the social scientist are, so to speak, constructs of the second degree, namely constructs of the constructs made by the actors on the social scene, whose behavior the scientist observes and tries to explain in accordance with the procedural rules of his science.

In using the idea of rule-governed conduct, the sociologist capitalizes on common-sense thought as a resource for his own observations and theorizing. Zimmerman and Pollner (1970: 84-85) summarize Schutz's writings on this availability of such

30

RULES AS EXPLANATIONS OF ACTION

ideas as rules within the social world as experienced by those living within it. According to Schutz, the world, as it presents itself to the member operating under the jurisdiction of the attitude of everyday life, is a historical, already organized world .... The member takes for granted that the social world and, more specifically, the aspect of it relevant to his interest at hand, is actually or potentially assembled by rule or reCipe. That is, he may know, or take it that he could determine by inquiry, the rules or recipes whereby he and others might gear into or understand some activity. Put another way, the member assumes that such structures are actually or potentially locatable and determinable in their features by recourse to such. prac­ tices as asking for or giving instructions concerning a given matter. Everyday activities and the perceived connected features present them­ selves with the promise that they may be understood and acted upon in practically sufficient ways by competent employment of appropriate proverbs, paradigms, motives, organizational charts, and the like. What are the consequences of employing the same conceptions about the nature of the social world that lay members of the society employ in dealing with their 'practical circumstances? Zimmerman and Pollner (1970: 82) argue, Sociology's acceptance of the lay member's formulation of the formal and substantive features of sociology's topical concerns .makes sociology an integral feature of the very order of affairs it seeks to describe. It makes sociology into an eminently folk discipline deprived of any prospect or hope of making fundamental structures of folk activity a phenomenon. How can the fundamental structures of folk activity be treated as phenomena in their own right and no longer be used as resources? Garfinkel has provided several answers, one of which is phrased in the following terms (1967: vii), In doing sociology, lay and professional, every reference to the 'real

world' ... is a reference to the organized activities of everyday life. Thereby, in contrast to certain versions of Durkheim that teach that the objective reality of social facts is sociology's fundamental principle, the lesson is taken instead, and used as a study policy, that the objective reality of social facts as an ongoing accomplishment of the concerted activities of daily life, with the ordinary, artful ways of that accomplish-

31

RULES AS EXPLANATIONS OF ACTION

ment being by members known, used, and taken for granted, is, for members doing sociology, a fundamental phenomenon . . . . Ethno­ methodological studies analyze everyday activities as members' methods

for

making those same activities visibly-rational-and-reportable-for­

all-practical-purposes, i.e., 'accountable ', as organizations of common­ place everyday activities.

These interests were further specified by Garfinkel in his recommendations for making pratical actions accessible to study as 'pure' topics of inquiry. One of these recommendations (1967 : 33) was that, . . . any social setting be viewed as self-organizing with respect to the intelligible character of its own appearances as either representations of or as evidences-of-a-social-order. Any setting organizes its activities to make its properties as an organized environment of practical activities detectable, countable, recordable, reportable. . . analyzable - in short,

accountable. Organized

social

arrangements

consist

of

various

methods

for

accomplishing the accountability of a setting's organizational ways as a concerted undertaking.

One important method of accomplishing a setting's accountability, of accomplishing "the intelligible character of its own appearances as either representations [-of-a-social-order] or as evidences-of-a­ social-order", is the members' use of the idea of rule-governed conduct in talking about their own affairs among one another. But before considering how rules may be examined in this way as phenomena in their own right - their place and use in traditional social science should first be reviewed, because, as constructs of the second degree, we would expect that many of the formalized features and uses of rules in social scientific accounts have their basis in the folk sociological theorizing of societal members. Thus, examining the professional uses of the idea of rule-governed conduct should give us an initial clue to its uses among lay members. -

The Theory of Normative Culture ill Contemporary Sociology : The Tradition of Weber and Durkheim

The idea that normative orders are both observable social facts in themselves and are productive of other observable social facts

32

RULES AS EXPLANATIONS OF ACTION

is a cornerstone of contemporary sociological theory and method. In his monumental study of social order, Parsons (1 937) demonstrated that normative orders are essential components of the study of action. In that work, Parsons showed that it is logically impossible to account for the observed regularities of the behavior of man in society without providing for a normative order. Norms are essential features of the conception of social phenomena. The central place of norms and normative culture in contemporary sociological analysis can be seen by considering that most, if not all, traditional sociology is concerned with some aspect of the problem of accounting for the formal structures of everyday activities, i.e., accounting for, in Garfinkel and Sacks' terms ( 1 970: 346), those actions which "upon analysis [show] the properties of uniformity, reproducibility, repetitiveness, standard­ ization, [and] typicality ... [and which show] these properties . . . independent[ly] of particular production cohorts . . . . The problem, of course, has been phrased in various ways. Garfinkel (1959) (in his discussions of Parsons) and Zimmerman and Wieder (1 970) discuss it as the problem of order. Robin Williams (1 960) refers to it as the problem of accounting for the social structures - those social phenomena which are patterned, recurrent, and persistent over time. And Inkles ( 1 964), in discussing the aims of sociology, describes sociology's basic problem as the discovery, description, and explanation of social events which occur in a more or less regular sequence and pattern. Although there is certainly debate over how sociology shall account for the formal structures of everyday activities,l the very prevalence of the explanatory uses of the concepts of role, norm, value, attitude, definition of the situation, stereotype, orientation, culture, sub-culture, and any other listing of sociology's funda­ mental concepts, shows where sociology locates the source or cause of its formal structures. All of these explanatory concepts refer to elements of the actor's situation as he knows or perceives it. In one fashion or another, sociologists provide for "

1

For example, see the discussions of Homans (1964), Blumer (1962), Turner (1962), and Wrong (1961).

RULES

AS

33

EXPLANATIONS OF ACTION

the uniform, reproducible, repetitive, standardized, typical features of action which are independent of particular production cohorts by discovering or positing regularities in the situations of action as perceived by the actors and toward which their actions are directed. 'Regularities' in observed actions are thereby accounted for by 'regularities' in perceived situations. Weber and Durkheim in their originative and quite compatible discussions provide the most useful and detailed elaborations of the character of social scientific explanation.

Weber's "Correct Causal Interpretation of Social Action" Weber's formulation of sociology and its tasks was directed to this very paradigm of explanation. For Weber and those that followed, sociology's fundamental problem is the explanation of regularly occurring patterns of behavior (that can be described without reference to the subjective states of the actors) in terms of the motivated character of those same actions from the point of view of the acting actors. Weber ( 1947) referred to this as the problem of providing a correct causal interpretation of action.2 Weber's requirements for the correct causal interpretation of action are cogent for sociology today and are recapitulated without direct acknowledgement in the writings of, e.g., Thomas (1 928) and Blumer (1 962).

A correct causal interpretation of action

involves a twofold task. The investigator must detect

some

uniform patterns of behavior that can be described without reference to their subjective sense for the actors, and he must describe and appreciate the meaning of the action in its context for the actor in such a way that the investigator 'sees' that the repetitive, uniform way of acting follows from a 'typical' or 'correct' course 2 Garfinkel has elaborated Weber's discussion in identifying the problem of a correct causal interpretation of action with the problem of order and the terms of a theory of adequate description in his unpublished Parsons' Primer (1959). For a much briefer published account of a similar treatment of the problem of order, see Zimmerman and Wieder (1970).

34

RULES

of 'reasoning'.

AS EXPLANATIONS OF ACTION

A correct causal interpretation of action yields the

following model :3 The members of society are conceived of as a population of actors who, in the course of leading out their lives, engage in actions that can be described as regular and repetitive. . These patterns of action are differentiated and are associated with named social positions in such a way that when any member of the population assumes any given social position, he displays . the appropriate associated pattern of action. The sociologist is thereby faced with the theoretical task of distributing motives around a theoretically conceived society in such a way that : a.

those motives typically produce regular patterns of action;

b.

those motives are typical of any member of the population who assumes a particular position ;

c.

those motives are not a matter solely of biology, character structure, or rational adaptation to material circumstances.

Norms and the associated concept of roles are the most common theorist's method of distributing motives and definitions of the situation .

Durkheim and Social Facts Durkheim's analysis of social facts, in

The Rules of the Sociological Method (1938), provides for all the characteristics of sociological

explanation that have just been examined. In fact for Durkheim, social facts are regular-patterns-of-action-which-are-produced-by­ compliance-to-a-normative-order. This means that the identifi­ cation of social facts parallels Weber's problem of doing correct causal interpretations of action.

For Durkheim,

social facts

exhaustively constitute the proper domain of sociology and are, above all else, objective as opposed to subjective phenomena. Durkheim defines them as objective ways of acting, thinking, and feeling. To say that these occurrences are objective means 3 The discussion of this model of explanation, which is typically employed in sociology, draws heavily though indirectly on Garfinkel's Parsons' Primer (1959). The discussion also draws on Schutz's (1964: 81-88) description of the social scientific use of rational-typical constructions.

RULES AS EXPLANATIONS OF ACTION

35

that they are observable events in the real world and that they display three properties : exteriority, constraint, and typicality. In saying that a way of acting, thinking, or feeling has the property of exteriority, Durkheim means that the individual member's particular way of acting, thinking, or feeling is not that member's creation (1938 : 1). These ways of acting "are not developed by ourselves but come to us from without" (p. 4) and "could not have [been] arrived at spontaneously" (p. 6). As such, they are the sources of our habitual patterns of action, thought, and feeling (p. 6). A pattern of acting, thinking, or feeling which has exteriority would be experienced by the individual actor as not his doing or responsibility. Even though he engages in it, it has nothing in particular to do with him. One feature of the formal structures of everyday activity is derivative of Durkheim's feature of exteriority - that the regularities are independent of any particular production cohort. A pattern shows constraint when, by reason of the actor's membership in the society or some partial group within it (p. 7), the pattern of acting, thinking, or feeling is "endowed with coercive power" (p. 2). Although the individual may accede to the pattern and, thereby, not feel or recognize the constraint of it, it is nevertheless present, as he would discover if he were to resist the pattern (p. 2). A pattern has the property of constraint if the individual cannot change it or if it offers resistance to those who try to change it. Resistance may be manifested in the variety of ways that other members can negatively sanction the innovator, or in the inability of the innovator to gear his activity to those following the typical pattern (pp. 2-3). Efforts to behave in a way other than that provided for by the pattern will be recognized by others as, and impressed upon the innovator as, immoral, impolite, or unrealistic. In saying that a pattern of acting, thinking, or feeling has the property of typicality, Durkheim means that it is distinct from individual manifestations in two senses (p. 7). First, every observable occurrence which expresses a social fact is jointly the product of the individual psyche in adaptation to its particular

36

RULES AS EXPLANATIONS OF ACTION

concrete circumstances and the product of a social fact (p. 8). It is the typical pattern or average pattern that expresses the social fact, for in the typicality, the individual contributions cancel each other out (pp. 8, 44-45). Durkheim also speaks of them as repetitive (p. 7) and consistent and regular (p. 28). Thus, social facts are 'expressed' in those aspects of the observable activities of daily life which show the formal structural properties of typicality, consistency, regularity or standardization, and repetitiveness . However, there is a second sense of independence from individual manifestations which provides Durkheim with the grounds for saying that regular activities 'express' social facts. An observable pattern of regular, typical, consistent, repe­ titive acting, thinking, or feeling is not necessarily a social fact for Durkheim. It must also be the case that the observed pattern is produced because it "is more or less obligatory" for the members (p. 9). The social fact is "repeated in the [action of the] individual because [it is] imposed on him" in the sense of exteriority and constraint (p. 9). Social facts, then, are those aspects of the observable activity of daily life (which include ways of acting, thinking, and feeling) which have the properties of regularity (uniformity, reproduci­ bility, repetitiveness, standardization, and typicality) and indepen­ dence of particular production cohorts (exteriority), and which show those two sets of properties by reason of the fact that activities with those properties are produced as a matter of motivated compliance to a normative order. The construction, 'social fact', is at least one solution to Weber's problem of adequate causal analysis and a solution to the general sociological tasks of theoretically constructing a society whose members produce regular patterns of motivated action in a differentiated fashion.

Norms and Explanation The attempt to account for the formal structures of everyday activities typically leads the sociologist to search for an appropriate

RULES AS EXPLANATIONS OF ACTION

37

normative culture in terms of norms, values, and cultural cate­ gories.4 The very way in which norms and normative culture are conceived provides for counting them as formal structures as well. Norms and values serve as instructions to the actor, and their contents must be empirically established. The actor's motivation to comply with the norms and values must also be established . These motives are found in the demonstration that the actor has internalized the normative elements, and, therefore, compliance with them is a condition of his capacity to count his own action as morally correct, and/or the actor can be found to comply with normative elements as a condition of his position within his community, i.e., a condition of retaining the respect of others and a condition of receiving rewards. 5

This basic conceptual apparatus and its variations is used in almost every sub-field of sociology. Its basic features are rarely questioned. Rather than subject the basic formulation to detailed scrutiny, sociologists and other social scientists generally have taken for granted the appropriateness of their solution to the problem of explaining action and have used it as a framework for endless empirical studies and for developing specific questions. Given that action is to be explained by reference to rules, a rather standardized set of questions is posed. The character of these questions may be illustrated by an examination of studies of deviant behavior. These studies have special relevance here, because they serve as one framework for the empirical materials presented in this work.

4 When other conceptualizations are employed instead of norms, values, and cultural categories, they show the same formal characteristics and, thus, can be conceived as variations on explanations based on the idea of normative culture. See Wilson (1970b). The explanation which employs rules as an account of motives employs 5 the notion of motive at two levels of analysis. There is the motive contained in the rule itself (e.g., he was motivated to step to the rear of the line, because there is a rule which says that) and the motive to comply (e.g., he was motivated to comply with the 'rear of the line' rule, because he wished to retain the respect of the others standing in the line).

38

RULES AS EXPLANATIONS OF ACTION

The Use of the Theory of Normative Culture in Studies of Deviant Behavior The most common form of sociological analyses of criminal deviant behavior conceptualizes deviant behavior as a formal structure of objective activities and locates the source of deviance in the formal structure of the deviant's perceived environment which is conceived of as a deviant or contra-normative sub­ culture. In such treatments, deviance is defined as those uniform, reproducible, repetitive, standardized, and typical patterns of

departures from an authorized (or establishment, or formal, or societal, or legitimate, etc.) normative order which occur with such regularity that they may be conceived of as independent of the particular actors producing the deviance and thereby cannot be attributed to their biography as it would be psychiatrically conceived. The analyst then locates a sub-culture or contra-nor­ mative culture which 'serves as' a set of instructions for producing actions which are deviant from the perspective of the societal or establishment order. For example, Miller

(1958 : 5) characterized his task as that of

describing: . . . law violating acts committed by members of adolescent street comer groups in lower class communities - and . . . show[ing] that the dominant component of motivation underlying these acts consists in a directed attempt by the actor to adhere to forms of behavior, and to achieve standards of value as they are defined within that community.

Within the standard theories, deviance is the result of a delinquent sub-culture (Cohen, 1955 ; Cloward and Ohlin, 1961 ; Finestone, 1957), or "differential association wIth a delinquent sub-oulture" (Sutherland and Cressey, 1955 : 74-81), or "culture conflict" between a legitimate culture and an imported different culture, or an indigenous deviant sub-culture (Sellin,

1938 ; Mi1ler. 1958),

or a cultural transmission of a deviant sub-culture (Shaw and McCay,

1942). All of these- ways of theorizing about the sources

of deviance are essentially the same in their basic approach to explanation.

39

RULES AS EXPLANATIONS OF ACTION

This is not to say that contemporary students of deviance devote an or even most of their attention to the relatively simple matter of locating, describing, and analyzing sub-cultures which produce some observed pattern of deviance. It is simply that irrespective of the dominant question the traditional analyst addresses, he portrays deviance as the product of motivated compliance to patterns of ('deviant') normative culture. Within this general scheme of analysis, it is typical that only the earlier studies of some specific social phenomena are directed toward the discovery of a set of norms which correspond to some observed pattern of behavior. Later studies tend to be directed toward such related questions as, 'What accounts for the thematic content of the observed norms '. For example, in the field of deviance, Sutherland and Cressey's work on differential association

(1955) is a formulation of the conditions under which a societal member will comply with rules which generate behavior deemed to be deviant in a larger societal context. Merton's classic analysis of anomie

(1957) concerns the conditions under which societal

members lose commitment to the dominant normative order and will no longer comply with its norms. Cohen (1955) and Finestone (1957) attempted to account for the thematic content of delinquent norms, while Cloward and Ohlin (1961) attempted to answer all these questions in such a way that they could account for the distributional characteristics of delinquent acts.

Another Way of Treating Rules While it has been traditional to build upon the basic idea of explaining

action

by

reference

to

rules

or

other

rule-like

constructions, it is possible to proceed in the opposite direction by subjecting the basic explanatory kernel to further scrutiny. Since the late nineteen-fifties, a group of scholars who call them­ selves ethnomethodologists (though not this group exclusively) has questioned the feasibility of explaining action by reference to rules. Ethnomethodological studies that have empirically investigated

40

RULES AS EXPLANATIONS OF ACTION

the ways in which rules are actually employed find that persons continually discover the scope and applicability of a rule in the developing occasions in which rules are used (Garfinkel, 1967 : 18-24; Leiter, 1969; Wieder, 1970; and Zimmerman, 1970). This suggests that the claim that an ensemble of actions which occurred in a variety of occasions is explained by the discovery of a rule which was complied with by the actors in those occasions is a weak assertion, because the rule can vary in its sense from occasion to occasion. One could not 'deduce' or 'predict' a pattern of behavior from such a rule. Because of this character of rules in use, Zimmerman (1970 : 233) has argued that, . . . it would seem that the notion of action-in-accord-with-a-rule is a matter not of compliance or noncompliance per se but of the various ways in which persons

satisfy themselves and others concerning what

is or is not 'reasonable' compliance in particular situations. Reference to rules might then be seen as a common-sense method of accounting for or making available for talk the orderly features of everyday activities, thereby

making out these activities as orderly in some fashion.

Such a suggestion calls for a thoroughgoing reconception of the possible phenomena of study, including a reconception of the formal structures of everyday life, as in Garfinkel and Sacks' proposal (1970 : 346) : . . . by formal structures we understand everyday activities (a) in that they exhibit upon analysis the properties of uniformity, reproducibility, repetitiveness, standardization, typicality and so on; (b) in that these properties are independent of particular production cohorts;

(c) in

that particular-cohort independence is a phenomenon for members' recognition ; and (d) in that the phenomena (a), (b), and (c) are every particular cohort's practical, situated accomplishment. The above development of formal structures contrasts with that which prevails in sociology and the social sciences in that the ethnomethodol­ ogical procedure . . . provides for the specifications (c) and (d) by studying everyday activities as practical ongoing achievements.

In line with these interests, Zimmerman and I (1970 : 288-89) recently proposed that there were three steps involved in making norms a pure topic, in contrast to a resource, of study. The first

41

RULES AS EXPLANATIONS OF ACTION

step was to suspend the assumption that social conduct is rule­ governed. The second step was to notice that the regular, coherent, connected patterns of social life are

described

and

explained

as

regular, coherent, and connected by showing their relation to rules (or related concepts) by laymen and professional sociologists alike. The third step was to treat the appearances of described and explained patterns of orderly conduct as

appearances

produced

by the members' use of such procedures as analyzing an event as an instance of compliance (or noncompliance) with a rule.

I shall follow these steps and the reconceptions of formal structures in the examination of moral orders in the chapters to follow. Can it be observed that the properties of regular activities are matters of members' recognition and that that recognition is a member's accomplishment ? How could such observations be made ? How can members be observed at the work of producing the

appearances

of orderly conduct through such procedures as

analyzing events as instances of compliance with a rule ? Strangely, perhaps, the necessary observational materials are close at hand and within the reach of any ethnographer who has been faced with the task of discovering and describing a normative culture. The observational materials, however, have gone largely unnoticed and almost entirely unreported. These necessary data have gone unnoticed and unreported because of the way that the objects of analysis and the data for analysis have been conceived. Traditional objects of analysis (e.g., rules) have been conceived in such a way as to disregard many properties that their empirical counterparts (the data) must have as visible occurrences in actual ongoing occasions within a social world. For example, the traditional conception of rules does not provide for the way in which rules might be routinely observable in actual ongoing occasions, nor does it provide for the properties of those 'displays of rules'. I would like to say that the data-gathering occasion has been altogether ignored for its possible analysis as a social occasion, but to say that would result in many complaints. After all, a critic might say, have we not described the various roles of the observer ? Have we

42

RULES AS

EXPLANATIONS OF ACTION

not described and analyzed the many features of data-gathering occasions that might bias our results ? Indeed, there have been

many such studies. But they have not treated the following matters which are essential to the possibility of observing social life as an ongoing, orderly, more or less concerted accomplishment of members, because to do so would necessitate a thoroughgoing reconceptualization, of social events as data and as objects of analysis. Traditional analysts and observers have known but have not noticed the following : (l) Somehow, members o f societies are doing something that makes it possible for social scientists to observe their affairs as 'regular', i.e., as uniform, reproducible, repetitive, standardized, and typical, and that their affairs have these properties of 'regularity'

independently

of particular

production

cohorts.

By and large, what members are doing that makes their affairs observable in this way is talking, not only for social scientists, but among themselves as well.

(2) While social scientists talk of members' affairs as showing 'regularity', members also talk about their affairs as showing regularity. Just as social scientists engage in explaining members' conduct by reference to rules and rule-like constructions, members also explain their conduct in this way.

(3) By treating members' talk as 'expressing' an underlying, shared, cognitive order, the social scientist disregards the fact of that talk as an essential feature of the setting in which it occurs. He disregards the reflexivity of that talk - that members' accounts are constituent features of the settings (and objects in them) that those

accounts

make

observable.

Garfinkel

(1967 : 9-10) has

argued, .. . by his accounting practices the member makes familiar, common­ place activities of everyday life recognizable as familiar, commonplace activities. . . [In doing this, the member proceeds] in such a way that at the same time that the member 'in the midst' of witnessed actual settings recognizes that witnessed settings have an accomplished sense, an accomplished facticity, an accomplished objectivity, an accomplished familiarity, an accomplished accountability, for the member the organizational hows of these accomplishments are unproblematic, are

RULES

43

AS EXPLANATIONS OF ACTION

known vaguely, and are known only in the doing which is done skill­ fully, reliably. uniformly, with enormous standardization and as an unaccountable matter. That accomplishment consists of members doing, recognizing, and using ethnographies.

By examining the members' 'use of ethnographies ' - their situated talk about their own immediate affairs - the appearances of order as an ongoing accomplishment can be made observable. The fact and contents of the members' use of ethnographies may be observed by direct inspection, but simple direct inspection will not illuminate the temporally engaged methods of that work. We can, however, treat the ethnographic occasion itself as an object of study. By directing attention to the ethnographer's work and his encounters with his subjects or informants, the work of the accomplished sense,

facticity,

familiarity,

objectivity,

uniformity, typicality, etc. of everyday activities may be observed at first hand. The ethnographer's experience as

such,

as an 'object

in a social world', then becomes a primary source of data. The formal structures of everyday life in general, and the place of norms in these structures in particular, may be made accessible to study by embarking on a traditional ethnography of a normative culture and then turning our attention to the production of that ethnography as an accomplishment in the context of the ethno­ grapher's interactions with his informants and the informants' folk use of 'ethnographies'. It is with these interests that the following chapters examine the convict code as it appeared and was used in a halfway house for paroled narcotic-addict felons. The remainder of Part I (Chapters Two, Three, and Four) presents a traditional ethno­ graphy. Chapter Two examines the history and organizational structure of halfway houses in general and the specific halfway house in which the actual observational study was carried out. This chapter serves two purposes. It provides the reader with necessary back­ ground material, and it serves as a way of characterizing the organizational structure of halfway house as an authorized or

44

RULES

AS EXPLANATIONS OF ACTION

legitimate normative order. That normative order will be used in Chapter Three as a device for detecting and analyzing the observed behavior of residents as formal structures of deviant behavior. Chapter

Three

reports

observations

of resident

behaviors

as departures from the authorized normative order. These

be­

haviors are analyzed as social structures observable to both staff and researcher. The fourth chapter reports observations of a normative order, the 'convict code', which was enforced at the halfway house by residents and which (in a traditional sociological treatment) accounts for or explains the observed deviant behaviors noted in Chapter Three. The penalogical literature is examined for identical, similar, and parallel findings on the 'convict code' in terms of its production of patterns of deviant behavior in the prison. Part

II presents an ethnomethodological analysis of the convict

code as a persuasive activity. These chapters will show that the code was offered by residents (in their dealings with me and with staff) and by staff (in their dealings with me and with each other) as 'embedded instruction' for seeing the formal structures of resident conduct. These accounts share many formal and sub­ stantive properties with the explanations of professional sociol­ ogists. As events in the setting of the halfway house, explanations based on and referring to the�convict code - 'telling the code' ..

were more than simple descriptions of resident activities. They were persuasive explanations which were consequential in the interactions in which they were 'told '. Although 'telling the code' was persuasive, this does not mean that its use as a schema of interpretation for seeing and describing halfway house events, by those who were 'persuaded', was simply a matter of using or repeating what they had heard. By 'dissecting' the process of ethnographic observation and formulation, we will observe that seeing and describing the behavior of residents as coherent and more or less stably motivated required the work of actively interpreting the pieces of talk and action that one heard and saw.

How the resultant experiential environment was thereby

constituted

45

RULES AS EXPLANATIONS OF ACTION

through the concerted efforts of those who 'told the code' and those who heard it will be a principal topic of the ethnomethodol­ ogical analysis. In that analysis, we will also see how the behavior of parolee residents is recognizable and reportable by lay and professional sociologists (myself and the staff) as deviant behavior that is produced · by rule, how that deviant behavior has the observable and reportable properties of formal structures and social facts that have been enumerated above, and how the residents'

deviant rules have the observable and reportable

properties of formal structures and social facts. The 'how' of these questions pertains to how the residents, in their inter­ actions with staff and researcher, made it happen that their behavior

was

observable

and

reportable

as

deviandy

rule­

governed conduct having the status of formal structure and social fact, i.e., what Garfinkel and Sacks (1970) formulate as "accountable phenomena as practical accomplishments".

2

HISTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF THE HALFWAY HOUSE

Features of Halfway Houses in General Halfway houses for felons were originally employed by various prisoners' aid societies as part of their programs of assistance to the indigent ex-convicts (Barnes and Teeters,

1959 : 549-551).

Called Houses of Industry, Homes for Discharged Prisoners, and Halfway Houses, they began to develop shortly after the Civil War. Such homes typically supplied the ex-prisoner with food, shelter, and often work in their own industry, e.g., the making of brooms and brushes. They were typically staffed by a superintendent and his wife who were supported by the Community Chest or some other charitable source. Their announced intent was simply to give material aid to the ex-prisoner in poverty. In the past ten years, both the State of California and the Federal Government have instituted halfway houses (Glaser, 1964 :

41 5-418). Also during the past decade, public and private halfway houses have become rationalized and their typical program expanded. That is, their personnel and social science consultants have formulated a line of talk or rhetoric about their purpose, intent, and function which makes the typical halfway house structure

describable

as

the

means

to

those

goals.

These

practitioners have formulated why halfway houses are needed and why they should have the organization that they do. This line of talk is delivered to congressional committees, to newspapermen, to magazine writers, on radio discussion programs and in open meetings to the public, at conventions of correctional and law

47

HISTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

enforcement personnel and through their applied journals such as

Federal Probation. This same line of talk is delivered in a less formalized form to the very population that halfway houses serve. It is through these formulations that part of what is desired for parolees and ex-patients by correctional personnel and theorists can be seen.

The bulk of this chapter will examine the practitioners' official

formulations. In many places their language has been quoted or paraphrased, for one of the interests in these formulations is as data. Practitioners' formulations will serve as one source of the definition of ideal resident behavior. Such a definition of ideal resident behavior will be used in the next chapter as one of the standards

against which observed resident

behavior

will

be

compared. Use of the programmatic ideals as a standard is one way in which resident behavior can appropriately be designated as deviant. Throughout the practitioners' literature on halfway houses and the need for halfway houses, five rationalizing themes are prominent.

1 . The first thirty to sixty days after a man has been released from prison are judged by correctional workers to be the most difficult.l They describe the prisoner as having been living in an environment which is both abnormally restricting and upon which the prisoner has become abnormally dependent. Suddenly the prisoner finds himself out of prison, free to do as he chooses, but having to provide for himself. The prisoner is described as not knowing how to use his regained freedom and as terrorized by the prospect of having to live an independent life. Some practitioners express the fear that he will become easily frustrated in his attempts to hold or find work and will quickly return to crime to support himself. His social ties are seen as having been disrupted, leading him to return to those places where he will find 1 Although this is a very widely proposed theme, the most elaborated version appears in the testimony of Harris Isbell before the United States Senate Sub­ Committee on Improvements of the Federal Criminal Code (Hearings : 146 1 1538).

48

HISTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

others like himself and will thereby be led back to his criminal ways by his old and new associates.

2. The halfway house is proposed as a device for helping the ex-prisoner make the terrible and risky transition from captivity to freedom. The halfway house i s described by correctional theorists as "a kind of decompression chamber which gradually prepares him [the ex-prisoner] for the pressures of normal life" (Tunley, 1962 : 5-6). It is often called a "bridge to the community" where, with the staff "running interference, the guests do begin to succeed at finding work, at keeping a job, at solving problems of self-support and independence" (St. Leonard 's House,

Annual

Report, 1 964 : 3). 3. The halfway house is described as a "normal" (Davidson, 1 961 : 1 4-15) or "home-like" environment (Tunley, 1 962 : 1 67). Special efforts may be taken to increase the contrast between the prison and the 'home-like' halfway house by having little or no mandatory program and by keeping house rules to a minimum (Meiners,

1 965).

4. In contrast to programs like Synanon, the halfway house is portrayed as a short-term arrangement where quickly increasing responsibilities are placed on the ex-prisoner and he quickly becomes ready to fully rely on his own efforts (yablonsky, 1 962 ; Casriel, 1 963 ; Sternberg, 1 963 ; and Grupp, 1 965). The attempt is seen as assisting him to withdraw from his dependent relation on

some

organization

which

provides

all

his

physical

needs.

5. The new parolee is portrayed as experiencing severe anxiety and frustration in his initial sojourns into the free world. The staff of halfway houses and the other residents are portrayed as "assisting in the social psychological adjustment of the individual in making the transition" (Grupp, 1965 : 1) by providing "help in all problems of living" (Davidson, 1 961 : 1 5). It would be a place where the man would receive social support and be accepted as making the transition back into the community rather than being rejected as a hopeless delinquent (Pearl, 1966). It would be a place where "immediate help is available if he is unable to resist even

HISTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

minimal stress" (Progress Report of Abuse, 1962 : 53).

an

49

Ad Hoc Panel on Drug

The Practitioners' Demandfor Halfway Houses for Addicts The demand for halfway houses is probably the strongest for a4dicts. The attempt to treat addiction has largely been a failure. Addicts return to the use of drugs after treatment or incarceration at rates from 60 to 95 percent within the first year after their release. A variety of governmental committees, commissions, and experts h,ave asserted that this failure is attributable to the lack of "adequate after-care" for the released addict (Hearings: 14611 538 ; Winick, 1957 ; Davidson, 1961 ; Special Study Commission on Narcotics Report, 1961 ; Progress Report of an Ad Hoc Panel on Drug Abuse, 1962 ; and President's Advisory Commission on Narcotics and Drug Abuse, 1963). The addict at the point of his release is portrayed as a weak individual needing an artificially structured and supportive environment if he is to avoid relapse (Progress Report of an A4. Hoc Panel on Drug Abuse, 1962). It is typical that the addict comes out of prison with no resources and without skills. If he turns to public and private agencies for support, he finds that they do not accept addicts. Thrust back into his old environment, the addict is said to quickly return to crime and narcotics use (Hearings, 1461-1 538 ; Davidson, 1961).

The Practitioners' Demandfor way Houses for Addicts in California Half In California, the Governor's Special Study Commission reported that, "The disappointing lack of success in the rehabilitation of narcotic addicts . . . is due to the lack of any follow-up treatment and mandatory supervision and control" (Special Study Com­ mission on Narcotics Report, 1961). At that time (1961), California already had a special narcotics treatment program for parolee ad­ dicts.2 Parole agents working in this program were given special 2

The program is known as the Narcotic Treatment Control Program and was initiated on October 1 , 1959 (Pearl, 1960; Burkhart and Sathmary, 1964).

50

HISTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

training in working with addicts and had case loads of thirty men as compared with the usual seventy to seventy-five. Agents in this program were grouped into special parole districts and were directed to give larger amounts of individual and group counseling. On relapse, the parolee could be sent to a special short-term (ninety days) treatment unit.s In the treatment unit, the man was given intensive group counseling and 'prepared for reintroduction into the community' . Another part of the program is detection of drug use by nalline testing which involves the intramuscular injection of nalline and the measurement of resulting changes in pupil size (cf. Geis, 1 966 : 24; Weinberg, 1960). The use of this chemical test, two to four times a month, is intended to inhibit the parolees' return to the use of drugs by increasing the certainty that they would be caught if they did use drugs.4 With all this organization and effort, the Narcotic Treatment Control Program was recognized by practitioners as a notable failure. For the first cohort of cases,5 fifty-eight percent . were detected in the use of drugs within six months after release from the institution. It was argued that the Narcotic Treatment Control Program was least effective in dealing with the period immediately following release. Geis summarized the line of reasoning of those who officially reviewed the Narcotic Treatment Control Program experience :

3

These units were located at the california Institution for Men at Chino or at San Quentin. Prior to this time, the only legitimate alternative actions available to parole agents were to send the man who had relapsed to jail for several weeks or to return him to prison as a parole violator, usually for eighteen months. More technically, the parole agent does not actually send the parolee to jail for three weeks or to prison for eighteen months, but recom­ mends those actions to the Adult Authority (parole board). Typically, the Adult Authority does as the agent recommends. 4 It is also proposed by practitioners that if the use of the test fails to inhibit the return to drug use, it will at least facilitate the early apprehension of the addict and permit his short-term incarceration before he becomes truly addicted again and before the size of his habit presses him . into criminal pursuits to support it. S One hundred twenty-one cases were in the cohort.

mSTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

51

Abrupt immersion into free society seemed to be too overwhelming an

a one-time addict to absorb without rather rapid recourse narcotics. . More gradual reintroduction into the com­ munity seemed to be an obvious requirement of a narcotics control program hoping to achieve a degree of success (Geis, 1966: 27). experience for

to re-use

of

.

The Origin and Original Rationale of the East Los Angeles Halfway House It W.lS largely on the initiative of Arthur Pearl, a research specialist who had evaluated the Narcotics Treatment Control Program and who had been on loan from the Department of Corrections to the Governor's Special Study Commission on Narcotics, that the East Los Angeles Halfway House was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Pearl, in a letter to Geis, described the addict as engulfed in a deviant society. He argued that a 'bridge' back into a legitimate society was required to enabJe the addict to avoid relapse. He envisioned a halfway house which would provide channels into legitimate occupations and which would be a means whereby 'social integration' into other domains of the legitimate world could be accomplished (Pearl, 1966). Pearl proposed that a halfway house would provide a better setting for treatment than either regular parole or the prison. His reasoning, which is remarkably similar to the rationale pro­ posed by other practitioners and supporters of halfway houses, was sketched in his successful proposal to NIMH. Pearl proposed that : (1) The halfway house would closely resemble a normal social setting, with a reduced likelihood of the old environment and associates disrupting the addict's treatment, as they frequently do on ordinary parole. (2) Treatment would be facilitated by the possibility of 'working on' the parolee's experiences with his fellow residents and his attitude and behavior at the halfway house. These would be 'normal life experiences' as contrasted with the prison, yet more observable than on regular parole.

52

HISTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

(3) Halfway house would provide greater access to community services and facilities. (4) While at halfway house, the parolee's responsibilities could be gradually increased until he terminated his residency, in contrast to immediate release from prison. (5) Pearl also proposed that the halfway house would protect society by giving the parolee more complete supervision, by an earlier identification of the parolee's troubles, and by gradually releasing him from controlled supervision as he demonstnted his capabilities. Arguing on the basis of the disappointing experience of the Narcotics Treatment Control Program and the stated belief that the period immediately following release from treatment and incarceration was the weakest link in the chain of treatment and supervision, Pearl, in cooperation with the California Department of Corrections,6 made application to NIMH for partial funding of a halfway house for parolee-addicts and support for a research program. The halfway house was to be operated under the auspices of the Department of Corrections and staffed by the department's personnel. The Department of Corrections was also to share in the financing of the operation. 7

The Neighborhood and Building The East Los Angeles Halfway HouseS was located on Breed Street near Brooklyn and Soto in Boyle Heights, in the eastern 6 The application was made under the auspices of the Institute for the Study of Crime and Delinquency, a research institute affiliated with the California Department of Corrections. 7 A special parole district under the Narcotics Treatment Control Program

was formed to service (among others) the parolees assigned to the halfway house and to serve as part of the staff of the halfway house. By October, 1962, a building in East Los Angeles was leased to the state for the house and parole district office, and the first residents were accepted. The halfway house as such was closed in 1 967 as one of the moves the California Department of Corrections made in compliance with Governor Reagan ' s ten percent budget cut for all departments. The demise of the halfway house may also be related to its demonstrated failure in treating addicts .

8

HISTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

53

section of Los Angeles. The neighborhood was once a Jewish community, but is now a Mexican-American ghetto. The area is the largest deharcation point in the state for Mexicans coming into this country. Mexican foods are prominent in the markets. Almost all restaurants in the area are Mexican. One is often first spoken to in Spanish when in a store or restaurant, and only if that attempt fails is English tried. Papers and literature in Spanish are available on the street corners. Both men and women dress 'typically chicano', with many, perhaps most, of the men sporting full mustaches. Although many non-Mexicans live in the neighborhood, people visible on the street are almost exclusively Mexican. The area is reputed by the police and correctional workers to be one of the highest narcotic traffic areas in the state. During the day, on Brooklyn Avenue, one sees the 'harness bulls' or 'black and whites' (motorcycle police and police cruisers) pass by once every ten minutes. At night, the police pass by perhaps , once every three minutes. East Los Angeles was chosen as the location for the halfway house, at least in part, in response to a community request that a program of this type be placed in this high narcotic traffic area. The halfway house was located in a thirty-year-old stucco building that was previously used as a children 's day-care center. A portion of the building also housed the Halfway House Parole District Office. The remainder of the building was used as the residential area. It contained five dormitories (each housing a maximum of six men), a kitchen, a spacious dining r001l1, a large recreation­ meeting room, and a sitting or reception room.

The Plan of the Early Program9 In the staff's and consultant's formulations of the halfway house, it was not simply to be a place of refuge and assistance for the Whether or not this is the case and, if it is, to what extent is not known by me and, in any case, has no particular relevance to the research reported here. 9 This account of the plan of the early program is based largely on official halfway house documents and partly on reconstructions of the early history that I received from those staff who were present at that time.

HISTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

54

first period that an addict parolee was on parole. Following Pearl's lead, it was also to be an experiment designed around a therapeutic program. 10 The announced intent of the program was "to develop a cohesive, nondelinquently oriented peer group"

(Program Statement, 1 964).

This was to be accomplished through a program of mandatory group counseling held for one hour, five nights a week. The program was designed to force the development of a nondelinquent peer group. One method of accomplishing tbis was to punisb the group as a whole for what the staff viewed as the irresponsible behavior of one of the group 's members. For example, the whole group might be restricted to the house on a weekend for the two­ time absence from the group of one of the members. In this way, the group was supposed to become concerned about the behavior of its members and negatively sanction its members for behavior that the staff would ultimately punish. The controls hopefully exercised by the peer group were seen to be more effective than those directly utilized by the staff on an individual deviant.ll Mter the parolee had stayed a minimum of thirty days, he could be considered for release. He was to have demonstrated his strength and readiness to lead a nondelinquent life. The group was to have the right to release one man each week, subject to staff review. In the rationale of the program, this right was considered a reward and was revoked for the following week if the staff felt that the group was not treating the matter of a man's release with due seriousness and deliberation. Under this system, the average stay was approximately sixty-five days. The program of group counseling and other supervision was 10 The therapeutic inspiration was provided by Maxwell Jones' notion of the therapeutic community (Jones, 1953 : 33-62) modified by halfway house staff and consultants for use with addicts on parole. Mter the program got under way, Jones attended a conference held by the Department of Corrections at the halfway house to discuss the application of his ideas to this · type of setting. 11

Available stories indicate, however, that 'group punishment' was never effective device for developing a nondelinquently oriented peer group (Fisher, 1965; Geis, 1966 : 219-244). an

HISTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

55

carried out by a program director, a house manager, and three parole agents whose case load consisted of present and former residents of the halfway house. Besides the program of group counseling, the residents were initially exposed to a week of orientation and work at the halfway house. On the second week, they could search for work. Until they found work, they were to do work projects in the house two mornings a week and most of the day Friday. They were to look for work two mornings and four afternoons a week. They were also to attend hour-long groups for the unemployed, three after­ noons a week. After the resident had found work, he was charged $ 3.00 per day for board and room. Prior to finding employment, if he failed to carry out a work project, he would also be charged $ 3.00 per day. The other distinctive aspect of the initial program was that it was part of an experimental design, with control and experimental groups. 12 12 The development of experimental and control groups involved several steps. All those prospective parolees who had a history of narcotics use and and who, by reason of an employment offer or family residence, would be expected to live within the geographic boundaries of the Halfway House District Parole Office were assigned to a pool of 'eligibles'. Following the setting of a parole date by the Adult Authority, a Social Research Analyst of the Department of Corrections assigned every other case to the halfway house 'experimental group' and the remainder to the 'control group'. Both sets of cases were supervised out of the Halfway House District Office. Each agent's case load was initially composed entirely of 'experimental group' cases (who began their parole by living in the halfway house) or was composed entirely of 'control group ' cases (who never lived in the halfway house). Ordinarily, a parolee must have a 'program' (employment and residence) in order to be released from prison, even if that means staying in prison after the date set for his parole by the Adult Authority. During the operation of the experimental program, this requirement was suspended. Parolees assigned to the 'control group' were released from prison on their assigned dates whether or not they had employment or a specific place to live. On the other hand, a parolee who had both employment and a specific residence could be assigned to the 'experimental group' and halfway house residence even though the parolee was unlikely to see its possible benefit. One year after the program was initiated, inmates who had been selected to become experimental cases were sent to the Narcotics Treatment Control

56

HISTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

In June of 1964, the NIMH grant expired, the Department of Correction assumed complete financial and research responsi­ bilities for the halfway house program, and changes in the program were made. The idea of a therapeutic community was retained at first, but then it too was abandoned. Officially recognized and stated difficulties with the program, as it was then designed, were formulated in April of 1965. Staff cited as difficulties : (1) The attempt to be highly selective in the recruitment of parolees created a severe underpopulation problem for the halfway house. (2) The addict population of the Department of Corrections was seen as minimally committed to change, yet high commitment was required to make a therapeutic community work. (3) The relatively short-term stay at the halfway house meant that members were constantly joining and leaving the group, producing an unstable group. (4) (perhaps most important is the following statement :) "The legal consequences of drug use ... [have] prevented open and candid communication between resident and staff, forcing each to maintain his traditional role, thereby impeding the establishment of the Therapeutic Community group" (Proceedings, 1965). This amounts to staff 's recognition that staff and residents could not easily talk to one another about existing or impending drug use. The plan of the Therapeutic Community provided for making precisely this matter a continuing topic of therapeutic conversations. Staff and residents could not talk directly about existing - or impending drug use in group therapy (or any other place) because the staff would have to jail those who admitted use, residents would be informers if they talked in group session about another resident's difficulty in abstaining, and residents would draw Program at Chino to complete their prison terms as soon as the Adult Authority had set their parole dates. At Chino, the men were exposed to a therapeutic community as preparation for their halfway house experience. They also had contact with their parole-agents-to-be and with other future residents of the halfway house. The pre-release experience was intended to strengthen the halfway house as a 'bridge to the community'.

HISTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

57

suspicion and surveillance on themselves or others if they talked about desires to use. With these troubles 13 recognized and stated to the relevant officials in the Department of Corrections, a new program of 'outward orientation into the community and local neighborhood' was proposed and ultimately initiated. By this time as well, the first results of the experiment were available and known to staff both at halfway house and in Sacra­ mento. Although these results were not mentioned in the staff's statement of a desire to abandon the therapeutic community, 13 There were other troubles, but they were not mentioned in the official documents and, thereby, are not part of this account of the 'official history'. On the basis of (1) the account of Geis and Fisher, (2) what was reconstructed for me by a few staff that were at the halfway house during this period, and (3) what residents who had been there at that time said, another account of that period is available. From these reconstructions it is clear that the participants have another way of talking about that early period. They said what was intended as a therapeutic community not only did not develop, but turned into something that Was exceedingly painful for both residents and staff. Residents tended to view their recruitment as an illegitimate extension of their incarceration that was happening to them and not to members of the control group. After all, they had already been paroled. They found the processes Qf group counseling, group punishment, and the release procedures at best unintelligible, and at worst immOl'3.l. They were exceedingly aware that to talk about drug use was dangerous, but that seemed to be what was asked of them. They found the request that they talk about someone else's bad behavior incredible and immoral. They saw it as incredible that they should be asked to do it and immoral that they inform or interfere with another man's affairs. They also reported that they were often helpless to prevent another man's deviance in any case, since he might use drugs on the other side of town, yet they might be punished as a group for his doing that. They wanted to get out of halfway house, yet they could not cleally see what they had to do to get out. At the very least, the staff knew that the setting was creating intense hostility toward them. One agent reported to me that he found the hostility so intense that when he met his group he would do almost anything to avoid taIking about the house and problems in it. He gave paper and pencil psychological tests and tried to direct the group to talk about abstract psychological themes so as to avoid the hostility. This 'other account' - an account of the residents' behavior formulated in its situated pratical uses is a central topic in terms of the convict code of this work. It is notable that this 'other account' was never a topic in official halfway house documents, though it was a persistent topic of staff talk. -

58

HISTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

by this time they were painfully aware that, on the basis of out­ come statistics, the therapeutic community had failed .14 My interest here in the outcome statistics is not as a demon­ stration that the earlier program of the halfway house was a failure, but as documented accounts that were facts of life to the staff and to the residents as well. They are part of the officially recognized history of the house that the staff was party to and officially acknowledged. As such, they were part of the staff's environment.

The Plan of the Later Program15 Staff then proposed to alter their program. They designed a program which they felt was more realistic for their population than a therapeutic community. In 1965 the organizational and treatment

plan of halfway house became crystalized, although

the treatment program was not fully implemented until 1966. 14

�

The research division of the Depal tment f Corrections compiled the results of the first year's experiences of the cohort going through the halfway house and compared it with the experiences of the control group (Himmelson, 1964). There was no statistically significant difference between the outcomes for those who had gone to halfway house and those who were not given this experience. Sixty-seven percent of the house residents were detected in using drugs or experienced 'serious difficulty' (either being returned to prison or being sentenced on a criminal charge to more than ninety days in jail) within a year of their release from prison, while sixty-five percent of the controls, those who did not go to the halfway house, were detected in the use of drugs or experienced serious difficulty. This was for thirty-seven experimental cases and thirty-nine control cases. The rate of relapse was the same as that ex­ perienced in earlier phases of the Narcotics Treatment Control Program. The experience of the second year's population in halfway house (116 ex­ perimentaIs and 109 controls) showed the same results (Miller, 1965). Approxi­ mately seventy percent of both groups were detected in the use of opiates or experienced serious difficulty during their first year on parole. Moreover, only fifty-four percent of those coming to the halfway house made it through that experience successfully and were released to an outside residence in the com­ munity. The others absconded from the halfway house, were detected by the parole division in the use of opiates, or were arrested and confined by the local p olice for both narcotic and non-narcotic offenses. For additional outcome details, see Wieder (1969 : 41 -44).

15

For further organizational details see Wieder (1969 : 46-57).

mSTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

59

The lines of authority and supervision took the form displayed in Chart 1 . District Supervisor

Assistant

Program / � /' District S,pervisor

Director

I

House Manager

Parole Agents (6)

I

Student Professional Assistant� Parolees on Street (approximately 220)

I

Parolees in Residence (less than 25)

CHART 1 : Lines of Authority

Although the parole agents were allocated to the halfway house for the operation of the treatment program (approximately four to eight hours a week) and for supervising the house in the evenings and weekends, they were under the direct authority of the Assistant District Supervisor and the District Supervisor, not under the authority of the Program Director. While parolees were in residence, they were under two simultaneous systems of authority. They were responsible both to their parole agent and to the halfway house staff. They could be given orders by both parties and could be arrested by both parties. Following a seminar of correctional workers that was held at halfway house in April, 1965, the halfway house staff and district parole agents, "assisted by the District Office parolee population" (Program Revision, 1965 : 1), developed and put into practice a new 'treatment' program. While the previous treatment program of the 'therapeutic community' had as its rationale that the deviance of the population was based on their ties to a deviant peer group, the rationale of the new program proposed that the source of deviance was in the parolee's lack of involvement in the legitimate community. While the 'therapeutic community' was supposed to alter the parolee's deviance by changing the demands of his peer group, the new program was supposed to rehabilitate him

60

HISTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

by getting him involved in the legitimate community. By getting the parolee involved in nondelinquent activities, it was hoped that his past patterns of behavior would change and that this, in turn, would change his associates, his commitments, and other activities. The vehicle that was to alter the kind of activity the parolee engaged in was referred to officially by the staff as a "task-oriented program which focuses on staff-parolee-community involvement and interaction" (Program Revision, 1965 : 1). The halfway house was to be a center from which community resources were made available to fulfill parolee needs, most particularly parolee needs for adequate employment, legitimate recreation, education, and training. The center was to be operated through the joint efforts of parolees (residents and former residents) and halfway house staff. The parolee, ideally, was not only to be directly involved in obtaining his own support from the community, but he was also to have "real responsibility for the program design and implemen­ tation" (Program Revision, 1 965 : 2). The Committee System

Although the new program was rationalized in terms of its relevance for directing the parolee 'outward into the community', the focus and direction of the new program was to be achieved by committees of staff and parolees which met one evening a week. These committees were to plan and develop the various activities of the program which were to be executed throughout the week. Each committee was directed to an 'area of need' which had been located through discussions between staff and residents. Through these discussions, it was 'agreed' that parolees needed assistance in the areas of employment, education,16 recreation, public relations (overcoming the public image of the addict), and orientation (to the program and regime of the halfway house). The organizational structure of the committees was formulated 16 The education committee was quickly dropped because of what staff members called "a lack of attendance and interest on the part of the parolees".

61

HISTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

in the following terms : each resident parolee was to select any committee he wished, althrough he was "expectedl7 to be an active participant of some commitee"

(Program Revision, 1 965 : 2).

Former residents and other parolees in the district were also invited or required to attend by their parole agents. Two staff members were assigned to 'work with' each committee. Each committee would have approximately ten members and was to elect from their own membership a chairman who would direct their efforts. The plan was for the chairman to be a parolee, but possibly an agent, although in practice parole agents were always chairmen. The committees met each Wednesday evening from seven to eight. Mter the committee meeting, a meeting of the chairmen and

other

'interested'ltl

members

gathered

in

the

program

director's office to discuss and coordinate that evening's committee efforts. The committees not only provided their members with an introduction to nondelinquent activities, but also provided another occasion

for parole-agent-parolee

contact.

Requesting

or

demanding a parolee to come to committee meetings at halfway house was one way an agent could increase contact with a parolee who was seen as requiring intensive supervision and observation without giving the parolee the constant feeling that his every move was · being scrutinized. As an accompaniment of 'increased parolee involvement in the legitimate affairs of the community' ,

'supportive supervision"

was another focus of the program. Described as a means of assisting the parolee in meeting the demands of routine anxiety­ producing · situations,

close

supportive

supervision

was

also

supposed to provide a means of focusing the parolee's attention on the importance of meeting personal responsibilities to himself, his family, the program, and his community. At the very least, 17

In every official context that I saw the term 'expected', it meant 'required'. Parolees were given an 'overnight pass' for attendance, which they could use at any time. An overnight pass permitted a parolee to ignore curfew for one evening. IS

62

IllSTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

the parolee would be supervised in meeting these responsibilities by enforcement of the conditions of parole and the rules of the halfway house.

The Programmatic Ideals and Hopes of Halfway House What has been delivered thus far is a euphemistic history. It is stated in terms used by correctional workers and corresponds to the ways they would tell 'their story' in pUblic. Events in this history were also held up as programmatic ideals by the staff when they came to evaluate specific men and specific events and show the character of these programmatic ideals. To speak of these matters as ideals means that they would not have been taken as factual depictions by staff or residents, and while they could be held up as goals for halfway house to achieve, they were not enforceable as day-to-day demands. Staff hoped (and held out as ideals) that residents would :. a.

want to be helped ;

b.

want to do the work of helping others as a means to their

c.

actually do the work of the committees ;

own rehabilitation; d.

say what they really wanted ;

e.

propose steps to reach what they really wanted ;

f.

volunteer to lead the work of carrying out those steps ;

g.

only use staff as a resource for accomplishing those pieces of the work that required official intervention, e.g., signing agreements with the parks department;

h.

accept the minimal set of rules of the halfway house as being there for the residents' own good. Staff rationalized the rules by saying that compliance with them was a sign of respect for the residents' own house and organization. For example, staff would say to a resident, "Look what kind of place it would be for you if you had a bunch of drunks around here" ;

i.

accept staff as working with residents ;

mSTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

j. k.

63

willingly make important organizational decisions together with staff; be open, i.e., willingly talk about themselves and do so truthfully.

This is not to say that in actual practice the staff regarded these goals or ideals as realistic or personally took them to be desirable. Nor did they say, "Here are our goals", in so many words. Indeed, in the halfway house staff's programmatic written statements, the closest they came to stating these as goals was to speak of their desire to 'involve' the resident in the program and to 'involve' him in the affairs of the legitimate community. Instead, these unstated goals became apparent in the variety of ways in which the staff evaluated activities of the halfway house and its residents. For example, the ideal of solidarity and resident self-determination was verbalized at a staff conference in which a dinner for the staff and residents was being planned. Staff said such things as, "The residents have said they really want this, and it will give us an opportunity to be with them and their families in non-business circumstances. " And in another conference, staff described the success of a Christmas party by noting that residents voluntarily undertook the various tasks of the party (e.g., playing Santa Claus) and that staff and residents enjoyed each others ' company. The programmatic ideals were also verbalized every day outside the context of formal staff meetings. For example, they were frequently employed by staff in talking to each other and with residents in characterizing or evaluating the behavior of a resident, as in the evaluation, "Pedro doesn't want to be helped." The Daily Working Concerns of the Staff

The programmatic ideals of the regime of the halfway house were overlaid with a set of day-to-day working concerns. These working concerns are rarely noted in the literature on halfway houses. They are alluded to in references to the need for giving 'supportive supervision ' and 'providing some sort of structured

64

HISTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

environment'. Briefly put, these phrases mean that the staff of this halfway house, and any other halfway house operated under parole authority (and to a lesser extent private halfway house staffs), have as their immediate and continuous responsibility the detection and rectification of deviance in their midst. Staff never forgot that they were dealing with parolees and that they had responsibility for the parolees as their parole agents. This preoccupation was observable in constant references in their talk to each other. Whenever agents gathered, they talked about knowing

what

their charges were doing (as a matter of assertable

fact to other staff) and knowing

that what their charges were doing

was in compliance with the law and the conditions of parole. These were first-order conditions of fulfilling their occupational duties. Knowing 'what' and knowing 'that' were of such an order of concern that it was definitive of being a competent parole agent in the setting. It was one of the fundamental showable parts of doing the work of parole. Not doing that work and not showing that work to supervisors and other staff were taken as occasions for denouncing a parole agent, calling him

'incompetent' , or

'lazy' , and saying that he was 'not doing his job' , 'being un­ realistic' , or 'not taking care of business' .

The Specifics of Supervision Whatever else a parole agent does in the accomplishment of his occupational duties, one thing he is continuously engaged in as the showable part of his task is giving accounts about the behavior and location of his case load. He may or may not give them advice and assistance ; it would be rare that anyone in the bureaucracy would know whether or not he did that. The two things that he must show his superiors are accounts about his parolees and accounts about the fact that he is seeing them and finding out about them. It is with respect to the tasks of surveillance, receiving accounts,

verifying

accounts,

reformulating

and transmitting

accounts, and making comparisons between accountable, factual states of affairs in the lives of parolees and the requirements of

mSTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

65

the Adult Authority - it is with respect to these tasks that the parole agent 's environment has an unavoidable, sanctionable structure. These tasks are equivalent to a set of structural features

that any account that dealt with parolees would include (if it covered these matters), and could not contradict

(if

it did not

cover these matters), as conditions of an adequate account about an agent 's work that he would offer to his peers or superiors. The continuous task of parole is to assess the parolee's com­ pliance with the conditions of parole (a set of rules) and with the law, i.e., all laws except minor traffic matters. The parole agent is charged with determining the following matters about his charges : a.

Are they violating any laws ?

b.

Are they employed ? If so, where and for how much and doing what ?

c.

Where do they live and with whom ?

d.

Are they driving ? If s� do they have a license and insurance ?

e.

With whom are they assQciating ?

f.

Are they using drugs or a)cohol ? If alcohol, in excess or not ?

In determining these matters, the parole agent may find a wide variety of concrete determinations relevant to answering these questions. For example, the ways in which a parolee is able to afford the clothes he is wearing is potentially relevant to questions concerning his criminality. While there are a swarm of such considerations in day-to-day parole for men living in their own residences, at halfway house a particular set of such considerations was typical. As matters that parole agents and other staff had to determine and could . not take as settled, the following were prominent questions asked about all residents : a.

Is he using drugs ?

b.

Is he selling drugs ?

c.

Is he drinking or drinking to excess ?

d.

Is he either really employed or really looking for work ?

66 e.

mSTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

Is he respecting the rules and regulations of halfway house ?

In determining answers to these questions and any other questions which had tangential relevance to these questions, parole agents had unlimited rights of interrogation and inspection. About each question they could demand proof, did demand proof, and were required to demand proof.19 Parole agents were charged with enforcing these matters as laws and had the power to put men in jail for violating these regulations. In enforcing the rule prohibiting the use of drugs, they were to ascertain that that rule was being complied with and to deal with violaters of that rule by jailin.g them and writing a report to the Adult Authority about the use. They were to monitor the affairs of their charges in such a way that they would

be able

to detect the sale of drugs. Some parolees were directed by the Adult Authority to abstain from the use of alcohol. All others were permitted to 'drink in moderation'. The agents were also charged with determining that these directives were being followed.

They were to monitor each man's behavi �t in such a way that they could say either that he had a job and what job it was, or that he was making concrete, describable (first the parolee went here, then the parolee went there) efforts to find a job. It was also the agents' task to monitor the behavior of their cases with respect to complyin.g with halfway house rules and to enforce that compliance. It was within the context of these tasks of parole supervision that the day-to-day routines of halfway house had their sense for the staff-participants and were describable by staff as sensible routines for them to require. These activities required of residents that they make their lives observable to staff in such a way that the questions staff had about the conforming character of that life could be answered in 'empirical' terms : that is, if a staff member 19 That is, the agents were 'entitled to' demand proof, and this was openly recognized by the parolees; they did demand proof, but not on all occasions; and they were required to demand proof by their superiors 'whenever appro­ priate occasions arose', although they did not always do this, and there was no guarantee that their superiors would know about 'the appropriate occasions'.

mSTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

67

were asked by one of his colleagues about a particular resident, he could answer in terms of what he had seen or had been shown. The routine activities were used by staff as a standard in terms of which assessments of residents' behavior were formulated. To the extent that the typical routines were adequate descriptions of a resident's life, those routines in fact provided for the ob­ servability referred to above. Those routine activities can be described in terms of the typical career of halfway house residents

The Routines of the Halfway House The day a resident arrived, he was oriented by the house manager in his office. In that session he told about the routines of the halfway house and about some of its other overriding rules, namely that no drug use was permitted and that alcohol was not permitted on the premises. Typically the resident was given a brief history of the organization and its purpose. Then the resident saw the program director in his office where he was given another orientation in which the 'therapeutic program' was emphasized. On the same day the resident saw his parole agent, who might take him to the test center to receive nalline testing. The parole agent also gave the man an initial interview if he were just coming out of prison. The agent typically gave the man an overnight pass on his first night. For the next two days the new resident was assigned a work project by the house manager.20 Although his evenings were free, except for scheduled house meetings to be noted below, the new resident had a midnight curfew. Starting on the fourth day and until he located employment, he was required to be up by six, leave the halfway house by eight, be looking for work during the day, and be back to the halfway house by four. At 4 :00 p.m. he was required to go to a short group2 1 for the unemployed in the house manager's office. At this 20

Labor provided by new residents was the chief source of maintenance labor available to the halfway house. 21 In the language of staff, parolee, and inmate, a 'group' is not a collection of persons, but an occasion at which persons gathered to do therapy or business. The term is used grammatically in the same way that 'party' is used. This

68

HISTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

group he was asked to give evidence of his employment-searching efforts by listing the potential employers he had contacted and by telling what happened with each one of them. He might also have received leads for job-searching for the next day from the house manager who ran this group or from other residents attending the group. The meeting usually took less than one-half hour. The men were then free to do as they chose until midnight when their curfew applied, unless they were scheduled for halfway house meetings that night. On Monday night there was a required house administration meeting from 6 : 30 to 7 :30 p.m., where events of the week were discussed, behavior of the residents was reviewed, and residents were invited to tell 'how they felt' about what the staff was doing and 'what they thought' of the regulations of the regime. On Wednesday night the committees met. On Friday evening there was a brief meeting to review each resident's bill and how he intended to settle it (either cash or doing jobs at halfway house). In addition, there were occasional optional evening programs. These were typically held on Thursday nights and involved such activities as resident pool tournaments and attending 'the fights'. After a resident obtained work, which typically took nine days, his curfew was extended to I :00 a.m., and he no longer was required to go to the 4 :00 p.m. group for the unemployed men. He could then set his own time for getting up in the morning. After he obtained employment and paid his bilI, he was permitted to leave. Most residents left one week after obtaining employment. Another set of routines which was required of all residents, regardless of the length of time they had resided in the house, concerned the control of narcotics use. Daily skin and eye checks were given to all residents who were viewed as particularly risky by staff. Surprise nalline tests were sometimes given to all residents. Urine samples (for a narcotics test) were taken from all residents whenever the house manager's periodic searches of halfway house uncovered evidence that narcotics were being used in the house. particular group met only when there were a sufficient number of unemployed men to warrant it.

HISTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

69

Staff Uses of the Routines Cooperative compliance with the above routines (being in the places at the times specified) and not visibly using drugs would have made a resident's behavior non-notable for the staff when they came to give an account of the resident. A parole agent's question to one of the house staff, "How's Fernando doing ?" would have been answered, "0. K., he's stable - he's giving no trouble. " Rupturing any one of those routines made the resident's behavior notable, open for comment to other staff members, and especially open to question, i.e., it provided the occasions upon which staff were required to question a resident's behavior. It provided the terms in which responses to the question, "How's he doing ?" was answered. For example, 1 observed the following answers : "I don't know, he missed group last night; I'm going to check it out with him as soon as 1 see him" ; or, "He's messing up ; he's not paying his bilt" ; or, "He's messing up ; he's taking an awfully long time finding work" ; or, "Something's up ; he gave a very fuzzy account of how he is going about finding work. " 22 Moreover, compliance with the routine made the resident's behavior observable so that staff could say that they saw him and that he looked and acted 'normally'. That is, compliance with the routine insured that the resident was at halfway house for certain periods each day and gave staff the opportunity to observe his behavior and appearance, thereby detecting at least the more radical forms of narcotic-induced behavior. By keeping track of part of the resident's day through required attendance and by obtaining some information on other parts of his day (either from knowledge of when and where the resident was working or, for the unemployed, keeping track of their job-seeking efforts), the resident's pattern of activities was observed for the possibility of full-time criminal occupations. For example, residents who 22

These quotations come from my field notes and cannot be counted on as verbatim transcriptions of what staff said. They would be extremely close to what was said, however, and what was said many, many times.

70

HISTORY AND

ORGANIZATION

OF HALFWAY HOUSE

made many brief trips in and out of the halfway house frequently were suspected of selling narcotics and keeping their 'stash' in the halfway house. The staff used the routines of the halfway house to detect, observe, and report the deviance of the residents. For the staff, the notable-reportable occurrences (such as not paying a bill, looking bad, etc.) were not simply isolated matters which indicated lack of compliance to an order they were charged with enforcing, but more importantly, they were interpreted as (were elaborated and explained in terms of) the portents of further and more serious deviance.23 Staff were asked to respond to resident behavior not simply as acts in themselves, to be treated judiciously in terms of their conforming or deviant character, and to treat the resident accordingly. Instead, staff were asked, and asked each other, to treat present appearances as acts-as-they-are-part-of-a-thing-be­ coming. Present displays were to be understood as portents of the terrible thing that would happen if action were not taken to 'head off' or 'nip-in-the-bud' the thin$-that-is-becoming. Thus a detected case of rule breaking or drug use was not to be treated in itself as 'merely that" but to be seen as (a) the 'first step' in this resident's cycle of increasing drug use and illegal activities, or this resident's cycle of increasing rule breaking which itself would lead to drug use. The detected case of rule breaking was also to be treated as not simply this particular resident's deviance in-itself, or as-it-was-developing, but was to be seen as (b) one resident's deviance that was about to spread to the whole population of residents. Staff also spoke of their certainty that some portion of the population was using drugs even though that might not be visible at any given moment. Whatever was seen directly was merely 'the top of the iceberg'. Moreover, that which was seen as merely the 'top of the iceberg' was not necessarily seen through the obvious cases of apprehended drug use, but was to be seen as well in a 28

The specifics of the elaboration of portents is described in Wieder (1%9 :

67-78).

HISTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

71

multitude o f 'trivial' occurrences, such as the loss o f a job, or a resident's being up late at night. Deviance that was seen through these minor occurrences still represented 'the top of the iceberg'. This way of looking at appearances as portents meant that the whole population of residents could be seen as using drugs, or in immediate danger of using drugs, or getting into other 'serious trouble' on the occasion and through the occasion of a single resident's making frequent trips through the front door.

Concluding

Remarks

In light of the way staff looked at relatively minor deviance, it can be seen that the conforming and deviant behavior o f the residents on a case-by-case basis was no casual matter to the staff. It was the matter their accounts were frequently directed to, it was the matter they had to write reports about, and it was the matter that their supervisors asked them about. Moreover, questions on the order of, "How are we doing ?", "How is the program doing ?", "Are we doing any good ?", "Was last night's event a success?" were also frequent topics of staff meetings, 'bull sessions', talk at parties, and the like. Finally, the questions, "What's going to happen next ?" and "Where and when will trouble break out ?" were continuously topics of expressed concern, curiosity, and anxiety. In brief, deviance and failure were constant topical matters of any talk about, "What are we doing ?", "What do we do here ?" , and "What do we want to do here ?" They were embedded in every reference to the past, the here and now, the plans about the setting, the locale, the organization, or its members. In each case reference was made directly or by understood implication to the 'programmatic ideals', 'routines', or 'rules ' in locating this deviance or failure. It is deviance recognized by, identified as, located in terms of, and described by reference to

72

HISTORY AND ORGANIZATION OF HALFWAY HOUSE

departures from organizationally employed schemes like 'pro­ grammatic ideals ', 'routines', and 'rules' that is the typical topic the sociologist addresses when he deals with deviance, most particularly and clearly when he deals with deviance in organi­ zational settings. It is deviance recognized, defined, and analyzed in this way which sociologists and laymen alike (in this case the staff and the residents) undertake to explain. Deviance recognized in this fashion is the topic of the next chapter.

3

PATIERNS OF RESIDENT BEHAVIOR

This chapter describes a set of notable behaviors for later analysis. They are notable behaviors in three ways : pattern, meaning within the organization, and in their relation to the convict code.

(1)

These behaviors were observable as patterns of behavior.

That is, they appeared as massively regular.l One could see the patterns on any day and from day to day with the same population of residents. The observable patterns persisted over time while ,

the membership of the populati