Forms of order: A comparative look at police and mental health services development in twentieth-century America.

Abstract

Every society requires a framework for order. There must be structures, rules, and other cultural ways to order psychological experience, social interactions, and institutional processes. Among the forms of order which American society has developed, those which show themselves through the mental health and police institutions are especially instructive for two reasons. First, they have an ambivalent relationship in that they share common clients under very similar circumstances but supposedly with different ends. Second, they not only reflect a form of order, they also perpetuate a form of social order; they come back on themselves as it were. Between about 1910 to 1970 these two institutions underwent a major growth and transformation in both structure and role. Both moved from essentially private to public financing, both developed complex bureaucratic structures, both designed rather elaborate systems of classification and formal decision-making procedures, and both adopted the most modern accoutrements of success. At another level, both shared in a thoroughly progressive ideology. This philosophy entailed a moral duty to intervene in individual lives for the sake of a better society (prevention), a heavy reliance on the rationality of human affairs, and an emphasis on form and procedure. In its practical application, progressivism provided a way to interconnect social psychology, political philosophy, and public policy in powerful ways. Seeing these institutions through the eyes of progressive ideology has led to cooperation and coordination of services to clients; recent examples of such activity cover both legislation and national professional policy. Yet we can also see that a preoccupation with refining the forms of order can too easily result in a suboptimization of roles. It is seductive to substitute form for content, or certainty and predictability for ambiguity and spontaneity, in human affairs. An underst and ing of how the forms of institutional ordering take shape can mitigate this seduction.