Compassionate workers staff repressive agencies because state requirements are assumed congruent with public need.

Evidence

This, of course, begins to explain how people with humanitarian impulses can work for impersonal, paternalistic, or repressive public service agencies. Most people never question that the requirements of the state are congruent with the needs and interests oflarge numbers of people. Thus, teachers with compassion for children work in brutalizing schools and picture themselves as victimized by the same system that victimizes their pupils. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1315

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the bureaucratic-discretion literature’s finding that individual intent is decoupled from structural effect.