144 Stories of Change
they were, as Rothman notes, 'the most aggressive and optimistic
of the lot'. Rehabilitation was to be given another turn - not
change through internal insight this time but change through
external compliance. Never mind that this was still treatment and
never mind that this offered even weaker safeguards to civil
liberties than psychodynamic methods. The mOve made both
managerial and ideological sense. Compared with psychoanalytically
derived models, behaviour modification is simply the better
technology and is uniquely suited to settings like the prison. You
can observe behaviour in a way that you cannot observe insights;
you do not have to rely on verbal skills or indeed any talking at all
and, above all, methods such as aversive therapy and operant
conditioning regimes allow you to continue doing what you have
always done.
Those who believe that the burial of treatment was premature
and that! 'effective correctional treatment' is, indeed, attainable
have op~nly acknowledged the reasons why behaviour modification
so rapidly and dramatically became the fashionable form of
treatment from the later sixties through the seventies.46 As Ross
and McKay note, operant conditioning was adopted so eagerly
because it was 'new', but also because it was a fancy, socially
acceptable, professionalized version of what generations of wardens
had been doing for decades. Overnight the much-abused custodians
could become treaters, experts and scientists. The new theorists
were so different from the old ones: they talked a simple everyday
language; they worked with easily observable and measurable
yariables; and they suggested things which could easily be done,
mdeed always had been done. No need for esoteric ideas about
repression, sublimation, guilt or whatever; no need to turn the
prison into a hospital, no need to transfer authority to 'shrinks'.
Instead, 'a psychologist who actually behaved more like an administrator
than an administrator.'47
There was also no reason to view the inmate as a poor, sick
person who needed love, care, warmth or understanding. Though
no harsh regime or punishment for its own sake: it was to be a
scientifically managed programme of behavioural change. Even
the old hard core - the poorly motivated, behaviour-disordered
and inarticulate, abandoned by the psychodynamic therapists
as 'untreatable' - could be accepted. And all this economically
feasible, quick and administratively efficient (lots of standardized
forms to check).
For Ross and his colleagues, determined to save behaviourism
from this zealous co-option and to claim for it more modest