claim is more difficult to evaluate. When these services appear
under the rubrics of community control or treatment, they are no
more the 'same' as their middle-class derivatives than the medical
or educational services in the Third World are the same as those
exported from the West. The new clients receive an ersatz version
of the original, administered by low-status and less-motivated
professionals, and are more exposed to the annoyance of evaluation
and experimentation.
Besides the services which are officially provided, community
agencies might allow for all sorts of other hidden and unintended
benefits. The genuine quest for community - perverted as it
usually is by the official status of the agency - might unwittingly
be realized within its interstices. When people come to these places,
they seek and find (from each other and the staff) talk, friendship
and intimacy. Or they simply want time out - adults from their
spouses, their children and their work (or the dole queue), kids
from their school and parents. In these circumstances, 'community
control' or 'community treatment' provides little control or treatment,
but some components of community.
Even if the agency or the agents do not deliver this (and might
not even be aware of it), the vagueness of the new system makes
it malleable enough to be exploited in this way. For generations,
prisoners have managed to subvert the regime, to adapt it ingeniously
to their own purposes and to acquire their own forms of
'resocialization'. The looseness of certain community agencies
makes them even more suitable for these purposes. In the USA,
for some years now, many forms of neighbourhood intervention
have become major unofficial opportunity structures for local
residents and have been absorbed into the local hidden economy
and polity. 29 Offenders have built up a stake in the soft part of the
system: being supported while searching for a job, finding new
hustles, making a legitimate career as an ex-con or ex-addict in
the new self-help agencies. 'Decentralization' was seen in political
terms not as rebuilding small Gemeinschaft villages, but as an
attempt to recreate (often not very successfully) the same local
political machine based on patronage and services which brought
power and mobility to earlier immigrant groups. The soft end of
the system became a 'new career' (as one project was actually
called).
And it is unlikely that the gobbledegook of the new Controltalk
fools anyone. On the contrary, it provides a hip, sophisticated
vocabulary well suited to manipulation by (rather than of) the
client. The 'soft machine' is not a particularly efficient form of