Social Determinism and Social Disobedience: A Reply to Fraley

Abstract

The building and managing of places of confinement-whether for paupers, felons, or the insane-has always excited reformers, including social scientists in the contemporary period. What most gives reason for excitement is that these institutions appear to offer the possibility of imposing total social control. Total social control is a vaulting idea. It has inspired generations of reformers to think that they can create the perfect social order, and that the perfect social order will rehabilitate those subjected to it. Little wonder that institutions give rise to utopian dreams and projects. Indeed, it was various utopian dreams that led reformers to create institutions in the first place. And when each system of social control failed to rehabilitate, new utopian projects were undertaken, leading to periodic shifts in the architecture, the social structuring, and in the managing of places of confinement. Before the invention of institutions, offenders were pretty much treated as by nature incorrigible, which justified killing them. Or they were viewed as just enough in control of their natural impulses to obey the rules if whipped, branded, or maimed. Institutional movements, by contrast, define social behavior as less a product of human nature and more a product of societal arrangements: perfect social arrangements, perfect social obedience. Chronology of Institutional Confinement To Solve Sociobehavioral Problems Utopian correctional projects thus express critiques of society. Each critique explains what is wrong about prevailing societal arrangements, such that disapproved behavior, whether indolence, madness, or crime, results. Each critique, therefore, suggests a model of how society should be organized. Institutions are where reformers try to bring their models into being. They are social experiments. And what fires the imagination of reformers is that by showing how offenders can be made over, they will have succeeded in showing how society itself can, and should, be made over. This is what Professor Fraley means when he says that our society as a whole lacks a "coherent, general, applied behavior technology, n with the result that we have a "discredited educational system, an unchecked population expansion,