Inside tbe System 55
resocialization and thus the property of welfare or treatment
agencies. But just as likely, youths previously defined as status
offenders and hence eligible for decarceration, diversion or even
decriminalization, can now be relabelled upwards as real delinquents.
The police might push up the arrest rates of such offenders
in order to compensate for the loss of the status offender
market. As Lemert says, they are simply doing what comes naturally
and easily to them: dipping into the reservoir of youths who
might otherwise have gone free. 19 And this dipping does not occur
randomly. Research evidence is mounting, for example, that
girls with little prior system contact are a particularly vulnerable
group for further processing by the new programmes. 20
The suction principle is even more complicated by the fact
that as the system changes, so all its component parts adjust themselves,
in good cybernetic fashion, to take into account the new
feedback. The disposition received by an offender arriving at a
particular level is now affected by the knowledge that he was
'diverted' at an earlier level. The most severe punishments go not
just to the worst offenders in legalistic terms, but to those who
foul up at their previous level. In 1981, for example, about one
out of every five admissions to prison in the USA were for conditional
release violations rather than as direct sentences from the
court.
Sometimes, with radical system changes, whole stages might be
skipped. This appears to be one of the effects of Intermediate
Treatment in Britain. Some previous shallow-enders (who might
have received probation, fines or conditional discharges) become
defined as unsuitable for the new programmes and are sucked
straight into the custodial end of the system. The new 'care
order' (a custodial sentence based on welfare lather than legalistic
criteria) permits Some marginal delinquents to go to custody while
the new system prefers to take others who f.light not have committed
offences at all but come from 'deprived backgrounds'.
Many of the care orders which fail to demonstrate the supposedly
objective criteria for care (one study found as many as 89 per cent
were in this category}2l are renewed not because of further
offences, but because the client fouls up in the system (by being
uncooperative or by absconding).
In summary, net expansion occurs through a series of what
Illich nicely called 'iatrogenic feedback loops'. The juvenile court
diverted from the adult system; diversion agencies divert from the
juvenile courts·; new diversion agencies divert from the diversion
agencies. Each stage creates the deviant it wants and constructs its