NCJ Number
159505
Date Published
1995
Length
35 pages
Annotation
This chapter profiles two alternatives for social-control policies in the future and their consequences.
Abstract
Under dystopian assumptions, crime, delinquency, and allied social problems will continue to increase or at least stay much the same. A further assumption is that no foreseeable innovations and permutations in existing control systems will radically solve these problems. Also, assume that the city, as image and reality, will be the territory where these futures will be most visible. Given these assumptions, it is not likely that much of the destructuring impulse will survive. The response to real or perceived breakdown is to call for more regulation, order, and control. There are two opposed forms of social control: the older patterns of "exclusion," including stigma and segregation; and the "new" counter ideologies of integration and absorption. The latter involves policies of integrating offenders into the community; minimizing the visibility of stigmatization; and preparing families, schools, workplaces, and neighborhood blocks to process their own deviants and exercise social control. For more serious offenders, technological incapacitation would be used. Various electronic devices would monitor the offender and restrict movements. The inclusionary approach, however, upsets the utopian vision of homogeneity, conformity, stratification, and separation. The point of exclusion is to create purified domains that are inhabited by just the right groups. The only way the inclusionary strategy can achieve this is to find means of behavioral modification, either physical or mental, that will bring behaviors into compliance with the will of the majority. 74 notes