Inside the System 79
their homes as a service commitment'.67 The family having a
delinquent living with them is seen as a 'remarkable correctional
resource' for the future. In Britain and Scandinavia a number of
alternative systems of family placement besides salaried foster
parents have been tried, for example 'together at home' - the
system of intensive help in Sweden in which social workers spend
hours sharing the family's life and tasks. Other programmes
require selected adults to act as parent models or surrogates. Once
these parents are trained, children with 'behavioural problems' are
placed in their model homes.
The delinquent's own family is also used in this way. This is
standard practice in various behavioural contract programmes.
Joe's family, in the ADP programme, becomes a 'correctional
resource' and under the watchful eye of the university psychologist,
it learns the correct behavioural sequences and reinforcement
schedules. In Intensive IT and other tracking or befriending programmes,
parents and siblings are parties to the behavioural contract
and are expected to play an active role in retraining their
errant child. In the regions of the system not influenced by behaviourist
psychology, the fashion is for family sensitivity groups,
weekend marathon family encounters, conjoint family therapy,
PET (Parent Effectiveness Training) and the like. One must assume
that a family with a member under house arrest is also a 'treatment
resource'.
But the purposeful use of families in this way is less significant
- statistically and socially - than the overall senses in which the
contemporary family has become a site for expert invasion and
penetration. As Lasch argues, the same market forces which undermined
the traditional functions of the family are now - far
from restoring these functions - undermining them still further. 68
The increasing array of guidance, instruction, therapy, counselling
and advice now being offered to the family strengthens the process
of its 'proletarianisation', which started well before the era of
'reintegration '.
School
The discovery by reintegrationists that most children go to school
as well as live in families, coincided with the emergence in the
1970s of the school as a major site where crime, delinquency and
violence actually took place. This has meant that the penetration
of the school has taken both a soft and a hard edge. The soft