Institutions must attribute inmates’ conduct to personal will to make them manageably self-directing.
Evidence
Similarly, in important respects clients to some degree must be responsible for themselves. Without this assumption there can be no client growth within the current structure of arrangements and no client contribution to changing those arrangements, individually or collectively. Erving Goffman’s insight into the relationship of client responsibility to absolving explanations, developed in his study of prisons, mental hospitals, and other “total” institutions, has generally wider applicability. … Inmates must be caused to self-direct themselves in a manageable way, and, for this to be promoted, both desired and undesired conduct must be defined as springing fi’om the personal will and character of the individual inmate himself, and defined as something he himself can do something about. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1135
Categorization
- XREF: Connects directly to Goffman’s Asylums and to the reader’s interest in how institutional discretion reproduces ideology faster than culture changes. — connects to: Prisoner work-based self-organization could overpower formal carceral authority completely. — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 155; Moral responsibility presupposes that people have self-influence over their actions. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 65; Personal trust requires actions be perceived as personally determined rather than institutionally fated — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 191
- QUESTION: If determinism toward inmates is institutionally unaffordable, what happens when institutions try to adopt it anyway?
Broader Connections
- Moral responsibility presupposes that people have self-influence over their actions.
#corroborates(0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 65 - Personal trust requires actions be perceived as personally determined rather than institutionally fated
#complicates(0.75) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 191