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Written by Bruce Bibee, MTP, LPC

Social services, as bureaucracies, have no incentive to “fix” the problems they deal with. What if we all refused to be victims? What if we could organize our lives so we could not be victimized? Regardless of how much a pipedream this is, for now imagine a world in which victimization just didn’t happen to you or to your family, friends, neighbors, and community. Assault, rape, burglary, and the like had become obsolete. Instead, our social service system (schools, churches, police, juvenile probation, treatment centers, after-school programs, and so on) trained each of us to live together in peace and harmony.

This vision may be unrealistic, but the information is available to achieve this world. It would require an individual commitement of refusing to be victims of any crime, along with the support of society and its institutions to give folks the training to actually pull it off. In achieving this goal, collateral issues do need addressing. Perhaps the most insidious problem is this: if we did live in a society without vicitmization, how many people will have lost their jobs?

Police, judges, lawyers, corrections, probation, social workers, and all their support staff – these folks and more would be unemployed. Solving social problems is not a growth industry. Effective social programs reduce the need for social programs. Good psychotherapists theoretically work themselves out of a job. Indeed, it’s one of the paradoxes of their education. They go into these fields with the ideal outcome of needing a new career.

From a bureaucratic point-of-view, then, effective social policy is suicide. Social services, as bureaucracies, have no incentive to “fix” the problems they deal with. Unlike all other industries – construction, manufacturing, and the service industries – where solving problems is how business is built, solving the social ills of society would put social services out of business. The “teen problem” is yet another symptom of this institutionalized inefficiency. We continue to “study” the problem, as if we haven’t been studying it since man began walking upright. Teens need to be apprenticed to adults to learn adult skills. They do not do well corralled together with their peer groups.

To be blunt, the social service system – the bureaucracies we have – is broken beyond repair, because it’s agenda is counter-productive to the counselor goal of working oneself out of a job. Bureaucracies, by definition, want to expand, and are, therefore, at total cross-purposes with the counselors each bureaucracy employs.

For example, what does the Office of Children Services do that the police couldn’t do better? What does divorce court do that mediation couldn’t do better? And why is it we operate with a pathology rather than a wellness model? The pathology focus dictates that we can only charge insurance companies if there is a diagnosable problem. We cannot charge them for preventing those problems. Furthermore, once there is a diagnosable problem, we have a long-term problem rather than a short-term one. Paradoxically, though, insurance companies want everything dealt with in short-term counseling. It’s crazy.
Consequently, we need to scrap social services as it’s currently constructed and build an infrastructure grounded in prevention and backed up with rehabilitation. How this program would look is not too hard to determine. Researchers have long known works in preparing a human being for adulthood. We just aren’t doing it in an integrated way.

Well, we’re half doing it. The folks down in the trenches – the police, judges, correction officers, probation officers, social workers, teachers and counselors – are following the logic of working themselves out of a job. They clear their caseloads and make sure, as best they can, those clients never come back because their lives are now working. Bureaucrats, however, are always looking for ways to keep clients coming back, and it’s that disconnect between the bureaucrats and the field workers that is the problem.

I asked a friend of mine to detail how her work-day went. She answered in this way:
When I was working at a treatment center], it was assessment to counseling to group to family group to massive paperwork documenting per all the federal, state, and Medicaid standards. I didn’t sleep in after an 11 hour day at work. I was in at 8:45 a.m. and home at 7:30 p.m. and a single parent to 4 kids.

At DJJ [Division of Juvenile Justice, as a juvenile probation office], I carried a caseload of 60 formal and roughly 20+ informal clients (the Policy and Procedure standard was 12 cases—period.) All were on-going cases that required work—whether paperwork, telephonic, field or in-office supervision, agency supervisions, in-court or court paperwork, meetings, treatment team meetings, presentations, et al. It was hit the floor running and don’t stop until the day was over. Each morning presented new challenges because we never knew what we were walking in on. Careful scheduling means nothing when 5 kids are arrested overnight and must all have petitions written, parents, victims, witnesses, court and attorneys notified, and all the other related footwork done within 24 hours for mandatory arraignments. The other work doesn’t go away. Taking time off was great until you had to return to work. The job didn’t ever stop if you weren’t there.

I’m quoting her to make it clear I’m not upset with the folks down in the trenches – the juvenile probation officers, police, judges, magistrates, social workers, and so on. They are, for the most part, doing a terrific job under the most adverse of circumstances. I have a problem with the agencies they work for, particularly the government agencies. As I said above, these agencies are designed to fail at the counselor ideal – work oneself out of a job. And it’s not conscious; they are merely doing what bureaucrats do – maintain their bureaucracies. But what they do constitues a failure of vision of what social services could be. Once we correct this failure, we will have the foundation for a victim-free world.

©Copyright 2007 Bruce Bibee, MTP, LPC
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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Cultural & Social Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.