 This video is about chapter 7, social problems and troubled people and thinking about social problems, and we're going to be highlighting concepts that may be on your exam. So this chapter is talking about what Lowsky calls the troubled person industry. Now, she's talked about in other chapters, we haven't gone over that as much in previous videos, about the fact that when social problems claims successfully put forth a prognostic framing, remember prognostic framing is putting forth a specific solution to a specific problem, asking what can we do about this and what should we do about this? Oftentimes, this results when it is successful in capturing the imagination of or getting the audience to own that social problem in actual organizations being formed in actual jobs where people make money in order to be able to help people and their actual institutions that are created and so forth. And so she's talking about this troubled person industry as a subset of what she calls the social problems industry. Now, this language might be a little bit difficult to understand, it seems a little awkward, but the idea behind this is that once people's livelihoods are tied to addressing these problems, you have the establishment of an organization, you have the establishment of a certain process, a certain set of policies and so forth, that can be hard to get away from sometimes. Most people don't like to work themselves out of a job. And so there is this unintended consequence of addressing these big problems of creating and establishing organizations that are ongoing and that have implications for whether or not you truly are going to fully address a problem and eliminate a problem or not. But in this video in this chapter, we're going to be talking specifically about the subset of troubled persons. So the troubled person industry is made up of a lot of different types of organizations, and these organizations can be very formal, as in, you know, they have charters and they have laws that set them up and establish them. They have rules that they have to follow and so forth, all the way to very informal, like for instance support groups that people meet anonymous groups where people meet those kinds of things. So when we are talking about a troubled person industry, we are talking about multiple levels, multiple investments of time, you know, a reliance on professionals versus a reliance on volunteers, peer groups, versus having workers who work with clients. So this can encompass quite a few organizations that are created in order to address social problems with a particular solution in mind. But the goal of any troubled person organization or industry is to change people or the way she puts it is to produce changed people. So the idea is that you have a person who is either a victim or is a villain, and this person is having some sort of intervention. And through that intervention, they are either going to be free of their victimhood, or they are going to be taught a new way to behave so that they are not the villain anymore. And this is the goal of the troubled person industry is to actually create changes in people and create this new identity, this new person, if you will, who is different than they were before the encounter with the organization occurred. So defining success is, is reliant upon some very specific ideas and essentially, if you have an organization and it is successfully addressing the social problem it is intended to address, then there is going to be a change in the type of services that are offered. And the type of people who are being served. So, let's talk about this a little bit if you are talking about constructing this as there are troubled people and these troubled people must be given particular services in order to not be troubled people anymore. These services are heavily reliant upon the formula stories that have were told in order to establish the organization. These types of services don't just appear out of nothing. They appear because of the way that the social problem claims have been constructed. They are the services are also defined by how the audience responded to the social problems claim, and then whatever policies had to be changed or whatever laws to establish these services also had an influence over it. So very often the services that are being offered are not necessarily what the claims maker had in mind when they first approached the idea of fixing a social problem. And then the types of people are either victims or villains and depending upon how they are defined in that they they are treated by these services in different ways to give you an example. You know, if the let's let's use the drug trade for a minute. We've talked about that a little bit. So the types of services. Oftentimes in the war on drugs were essentially prison right people were convicted of possession they were convicted of selling using so forth. And so they become because of these particular services in the war on drugs criminals. That's the type of people they are. And that is a very different story, a very different set of institutions a very different idea of what needs to be done. And then if you were making the claim that a person who is addicted to drugs is actually ill and needs medical treatment. So the type of services then that would be offered would be drug rehabilitation counseling, looking at maybe hospitalization for a while to help through withdrawals and so forth. And then this produces a type of people that we would call patients, right, or clients, not criminals. So you can see how the social problems claims process can shape and determine what these services are and can shape and determine how people are viewed within these services. Lowsky also gives an example that I thought was very interesting and kind of gets to the heart of part of what I want to get across from this chapter. And that is she talked about pediatric services. So pediatricians at first were dealing with childhood diseases. So when pediatrics came up as a particular form of medicine. Pediatricians generally were pre at looking at pre adolescent and younger children, and they were primarily concerned with what are called childhood diseases. So this is before smallpox vaccination before polio vaccination before measles and so forth. And a lot of pediatricians up until the 1960s and 70s when these vaccines became more available. And these diseases were much more widespread. They spent the majority of their time dealing with and helping people get through helping kids get through these childhood diseases. Well, most of these diseases have been considerably reduced. And you might say that they were a success story right the pediatricians work together they got the vaccines. They distributed the vaccines so they didn't like pick up their tent and go home and pat themselves in the back because they had eradicated childhood diseases. Instead, they began to change their domain and change their type of services and also change and expand the type of people that they would serve. So you have pediatricians now. Most people see their pediatrician until they are 18 and sometimes as old as 21 before they go to a regular family position instead of a pediatrician. Because pediatricians began to expand their services to deal with puberty to deal with teenage development to deal with all kinds of issues that they originally didn't do because they want to stay in business they want to have patients they want to serve patients. So this type of service and you know when people first started arguing for a need of a special doctor who would pay attention to and help children survive childhood diseases had no vision in mind at that time that a pediatrician would someday deal with puberty would someday deal with ADHD and mental illness questions that kids have through development, all of these other kinds of things. And of course, as these types of services change they also change the way a pediatrician viewed who was the appropriate pediatric patient. So we talked a lot in these videos about formula stories. And of course, if we're going to talk about troubled persons. We have defined who these troubled people are usually through very simplistic formula stories. And most formula stories as we've reiterated before are too narrow and too focused for what real life is like. Right, so they basically create a situation where the solution may not be accounting for all of the complexities, and then they have a tendency sometimes to rely so much on typifications that their construction of people becomes very not true to life. Right, that these are not real people but they are seen by the worker within the troubled person industry within a particular narrow view of who they are. I'm going to come back to an example about this but I want to go over over the next two slides about what is how the workers relate within the troubled persons industry and how clients relate. So you have these two players, if you will, in this industry and these players are very much affected by the formula stories that have set up the need for this organization and the services that this organization, a particular organization offers to particular types of troubled people. So let's talk about workers, workers who work within trouble person industry have particular powers. One of the things that they have is the power to enforce their categorizations. When you encounter a troubled person organization and whether you are considered a victim or a villain, you pretty much have to fit into their ideas and to the workers idea of who you are in that organization. So they are going to put an identity on you no matter how you feel, no matter who you are in real life within that organization you are in that category. And you allow them to categorize you because they're the ones with the resources. So if you want to get help, if you want to get out of trouble, then you have to, I don't want to say obey but you have to listen to and meet the requirements of the organization and requirements that the worker in front of you in this one to one encounter is telling you that you have to do because they're the ones who can get you to whatever resources that you are seeking. They also have the power to punish. If you don't do it right, if you get labeled somebody who has cheated the system, if you get labeled as somebody who didn't follow the rules, it's the worker, the troubled person worker who can decide that you need to be punished. So again, you feel a certain pressure to keep them happy. And they have the power to control the interactions. You have to make an appointment. You have to call them. You have to be available. You know, I mean this is a typical doctor's office thing. The doctor will give you all kinds of grief if you're quote unquote late to an appointment. But if the doctor is late, you know, you have to put up with it because the doctor is the one who controls the access to the medications you need. The doctor is the one who can categorize you as compliant or uncompliant. The doctor is the one who decides when the doctor will interact with you. And this is true of a number of organizations anytime that you deal with, you know, a welfare office, the unemployment office, school, even you are dealing with what a lot of people call street level bureaucrats who have this particular power over your life. And if you want to access the resources that they have power over, you find yourself having to follow the rules that they set out and behave in the way that they are wanting you to behave. So the client also has a part of this in this relationship. And generally that part is, you know, to lose things. You lose power by being a client. Once you get defined as being a client, you have to follow specific rules in order to keep that client relationship going. You may lose power if you are categorized as a villain. If you are the troubled person because you are doing bad things, like for instance, a criminal. This starts shaping your identity. I mean, once you've been in jail, once you've been a prisoner, you are sort of labeled that for a long time to come. And that label affects whether or not you can get a job, whether or not you can vote, whether or not you can interact in society and so forth. But you also lose power by being a victim. So you are not often allowed to sort of be the authority on your own life. If you come and ask for help as a victim, you often are told you have to do A, B, and C in order to be able to survive and overcome this victimhood. So generally, I mean, Loski says that she doesn't want to overstate this, but generally in the worker-client relationship, it is the worker who has power and the client who does not. And it is also very specifically the worker who determines a lot about the identity of the client. And that goes back to, I want to return back to the formula stories at this point, because the simplification of the formula story is part of what limits you as a human being when you get categorized as a client. And she gives a perfect example in this chapter that's actually based upon extensive work by her in observing at women's shelters, her battered women for women who are trying to escape domestic abuse. And it basically, this example kind of shows you how this power plays out in everyday life. So most of us have relationship issues and even people who end up in battered situations and abusive relationships. It's not nice and neat. Okay. So a woman who decides finally to leave and goes into a shelter. The first thing that has to happen in that shelter in order to protect all the other women who are in that shelter is they have to get a restraining order. And in order to get a restraining order, you have to go through the court, right? And when you go before the court, the court is going to be looking for evidence that you are unsafe and that you deserve to be protected. So what happens in the first day that you show up in a women's shelter is that you meet an intake counselor. And this intake counselor spends time with you hearing your story. They want to know how often the abuse happens. How, you know, the last incident of abuse happens. So most clients who come in who have not been put through the system before, you know, the first time going to a shelter, when they begin to describe what happened, they describe a very complex picture. So we were having dinner and I said something that he didn't like. And he said something and started yelling at me. So I yelled back and I told him he was a jerk. And then the next thing I know he was hitting me. So what they just described was a fight in which the per the woman was involved in part in creating that situation. This will not go well in court. When you go to court, you have to make it that you are a victim who was powerless in this situation. So you don't talk about how you yelled at him. You don't talk about how you egged him on. You don't talk about how you brought up something that was a sore spot with him before. You don't talk about any of that. You just go in and say we were having dinner and he hit me. And then he beat me up. So it has to be this very pared down story in which the villain, a man, the abuser was totally in the wrong. And the victim, the woman, the person who was being abused was totally in the right. Now I'm not saying that any woman deserves to be hit and neither is low ski in this. But what we're saying is that the story that has to be told to the court is a formula story. And it has to go well because if you can't get that protection, if you can't get that restraining order, you can't go to the shelter and live. Because every woman in that shelter has to have a restraining order so that if one of the abuser shows up and starts creating problems, they can have him arrested. So this is very important. And of course it isn't the counselor, the worker who is doing the intake. They don't do this because of their rules. They do this because of the court's rules. So if judges were more interested in hearing the truth and hearing the kind of sloppy story, then and would give restraining orders, even though it's a sloppy story and not a clear cut story, they wouldn't have to do this but judges generally want to hear a very clear cut story. So again, you know, the victim loses a little bit of herself in this, right? She's not going to be able to talk about how she feels, whether she feels responsible or not, that she feels guilty. All of these emotions are part of what will be in her counseling. But when she goes to court, she is a blameless victim who has been hurt by an evil villain. And this loses a lot of the everyday life and the humanity of the situation. So how, you know, what resources are available to workers to categorize these potential clients? Well, they're very similar to some of the things that we've talked about in social construction before. But the first thing that Lowsky talks about is that oftentimes when a worker encounters a client, they've been there a long time, they've encountered a lot of other people. So they base some of their judgment on their previous experiences, their practical experience of being in that organization. They have some knowledge of what works and what doesn't work in terms of getting resources, in terms of, you know, making their bosses happy, keeping their policies going. So oftentimes the categorization is based upon the history of the other people who have walked in the office and asked for help. Being human beings who live in a society and within a culture, they very often use popular wisdom to determine whether or not the person in front of them deserves help or not, deserves to be a client or not. So this can include pretty much everything that we just all know, right? So they are going to rely upon typifications. They're going to rely upon sometimes very stereotypical typifications. They're going to rely upon other things in the culture that define who a person is. And they're going to use that in determining whether or not somebody is worthy or not worthy. They also are going to use cultural themes, right? So is this person a family person? Is this person properly humble about their experience? Is this person seeking help or not? And if a person comes in and they're angry and they're demanding that they be helped, that because of cultural themes can seem like an ungrateful, uncooperative, not a compliant person. And so because of these cultural themes that everybody draws upon within the culture, they can determine that a client or a potential client doesn't seem worthy of services. You've seen this in hospitals sometimes in emergency rooms where people are very upset and they may be screaming, they may even be cussing because they're in a lot of pain and they're scared and so forth. And there will be nurses who can handle that and can calm a patient down, but there are also nurses who will kick them out, who will say, I don't deserve this abuse and if you're not less abusive, I'm not going to give you services. So, you know, there's a lot that people bring, workers bring to this encounter that helps them go beyond just the paper or what's written down as to who should and should not be helped. And they bring all of their prejudices and all of their world views to the situation. And every organization, you know, because really what we're talking about is establishing these bureaucratic organizations have their own local culture. And because of that, if it's a place that prides itself in compassion, then they may be more tolerant of belligerent clients. If it is a local culture that says we got to get people in, fix them and get them out the door in some sort of efficient way, then that will affect who they will take in and who they won't. So, these organizations and their local cultures can also create resources that workers draw upon to determine and categorize people who walk in the door and ask for help as a work. So, clients as well as workers have work to do in Lowsky's, you know, concept of what is work and that is that you're in a relationship and you have to do certain behaviors in order to move the interaction along. And most of the work that clients do are changes in their identity. You have to become a particular kind of person, at least present a particular kind of self in order to receive help from organizations. So, one of the things you want to make sure you do is demonstrate that you are eligible. If you are not eligible, then you will, you know, not get the help that you need. So, clients can be very savvy about this. They know not to tell some things and to emphasize other things. They shape their story and their presentation of their situation based upon the organization's idea of who is eligible and who is not eligible in order to receive help. They also very often, after they are receiving help, begin to talk about themselves in a different way. They change their personal identity. So, going back to women in abusive relationships, they very often come in thinking of themselves as a failure, thinking of themselves as somebody who is guilty, who made this happen, who made poor choices, who created their own situation. And in the course of what she calls transforming through talk, which is what a lot of these services are about is counseling, is education, talking to people about what is and is not true. They can present a very different self through these services. So, they go from saying, hey, I'm guilty and this was all my fault to this was the fault of the abuser. He made choices to abuse me. This is not my fault. This is the person who decided to hit me's fault. So, you begin to change how you think about yourself. We talked about this earlier about this idea of victim versus survivor. So, very often that's the transformation that changes that as a client does the work within the troubled person organization. They begin to see themselves as surviving something, a person who is having strengths in order to grow and not just a victim. Also, there is amount of client resistance that goes on. And that can be part of the identity work. And some might even argue that at some point this resistance is an indication that the work is done that the person has been helped. But, you know, if you are in this situation where you have come to a troubled person industry because you're being defined as a villain, rather than a victim, you may very much not want to be helped. You very much may not want to be where you're at. And so there are all sorts of ways in which clients can undermine this process and resist this process. And that certainly is part of the struggle in working with people within troubled persons industries. And it also can help shape and change the work that is done. And, you know, if a worker within a troubled person industry runs into a lot of resistance, it changes their behavior and how they deal with people. You see this in teaching a lot, you know, a lot of K through 12 teachers very often are very idealistic when they start work when they're fresh out of college. And then they get into the classroom and they have children who don't want to learn, who don't want to be there, who stir up trouble within the classroom, who resist the education that's being brought to them. And then you have, you know, teachers who would be the workers in this situation, who, you know, no matter how much they said when they were in college, I'm going to be kind, I'm going to be compassionate. They find themselves, you know, putting kids in time out and giving yelling at kids and giving strict instructions to them or calling parents in and telling them how bad their kids are and that kind of thing. And this is part of why you might have teacher burnout because they weren't prepared in their understanding of their work with students for the resistance that they might encounter. Now, the last thing that I want to talk about is this idea that Lowsky has of what she called reproducing social problems. And this is, this points to some of the problems of how institutionalizing solutions can create more problems than they solve. And this is, you know, we talked a little bit at the beginning of this video about how social problems industries come with an unintended consequence. And that is that once people's jobs are connected to addressing these social problems, there's an incentive to not actually ever completely solve the problem, because you would essentially, you know, be successful in putting yourself out of a job by doing that. And there is resistance built in or disincentive, I should say, to successfully rid ourselves of the problem. And this might be why a lot of social problems don't get fixed. There are other unintended consequences that she goes over. And one of them, the first one that she talks about is the extent to which the objective reality gets reproduced by virtue of the fact that an organization is addressing the problem. So it can kind of become a feedback loop. And she didn't use this term in the book, but what it reminded me of is confirmation bias. The idea being that because you have created a typification of a particular troubled person, and you gather evidence and keep records about those particular troubled persons, because you're only looking at the ones that you have constructed as troubled, you begin to only have evidence that they are the ones who are troubled. And the example that she gives in the book is racial profiling. So at some point during looking at the war on drugs, there were efforts to be made to help police find people who are dealing drugs. And along the way, the idea of a typical drug dealer may have been a black man who is driving a very nice car. So most of the people who are black who happen to own very nice cars are not drug dealers. But police have a tendency to profile on that basis. And so they pull over every person that fits that description and checks them out. Well, not every, but more than any other type that you might, more than any other person that might be a drug dealer. So 90% of the people that they pull over, they have no indication that they're a drug dealer and they go on their merry way. But no record is kept of that encounter. So, you know, it just is recorded as they were checking them out. Not why, not who they were, not, you know, anything other, it just isn't an incident report. It's just, you know, part of the officer's day. But the ones that they did find were drug dealers gets recorded. So the record keeping reinforces the typification, the stereotype. So because you, the only people who are being recorded and the vast majority of them that are being recorded are black men who drive big cars, it reproduces that as the stereotype. Even though that might not have been the majority of black men with cars and because they were looking for black men in nice cars and not white men in nice cars are not white men who are dealing drugs and have some other kind of profile that they could be looking at. It skews the data. It creates a kind of confirmation bias. That's who they were looking for. So that's who they found. And they weren't looking for other people. So that doesn't get recorded. And then you look at the statistics and the statistics suggest in the records that this is, you know, the person that you should be looking for. What they say, okay, well, we found them this way. So let's go out and do it again. So it gets reproduced. And this, this is a pretty blatant example, but there are a lot more subtle examples than that as well. You know, when you decide this is who you're looking to help, or this is who you are looking to stop. And when you aren't paying attention to others, you can create this kind of negative feedback loop that reinforces these ideas, even though they may not be based and an objective reality. They look realistic. They have numbers. There are records that are kept. You analyze the records and so forth. And if you were to examine the assumptions that are being made, you might find that that's not really objective reality that has been skewed in a particular direction. And then the other thing she talked about, I think is probably one of the most interesting things that she brings up. And that's this idea that, especially when we're talking about constructing people who are who are villains people who are deviating from the norm. So you have somebody commits a crime, gets arrested, convicted and sent to jail. Okay, so their primary deviation may have been, you know, possession of marijuana. Right. They're not like a hardened criminal at this point. They are somebody who is having a good time and got caught. And they very well may, if they hadn't been sent to jail, may very well have said, Oh, that was really horrible. I'm not going to do that again. And they would never do it again. And that would be the end of it. But because they get put in prison, cut off from other people. So their social circle now becomes other criminals. And there is no doubt that a number of people who are arrested once, end up getting arrested more than one time and end up going into deeper and deeper trouble because of the secondary deviation. In other words, they act of trying to rehabilitate them by making them, by punishing them for six months or a year for a minor offense can create a network for this person of other criminals that they know better than anybody else because they're the ones they had to live with for a while. And the next thing you know, they're being drawn into more serious crime, being drawn deeper into criminal social circles. And of course, then you also have the stigma that comes from being arrested and the fact that a lot of people will not hire you and other problems that come after you get out of prison. So these things end up creating more criminals instead of doing what supposedly putting somebody in prison is supposed to do, and that is make them rethink their life and not go out and commit another crime. And it ends up having the opposite effect on the person's identity than is intended. What you want is to take somebody who has created a minor crime and get them to think about their life and make changes in their life and not create, do more crimes. What you get is somebody who starts seeing themselves as a criminal has social circles that are criminal and end up doing more crime that they may not have done if they hadn't been put in that circumstance where they were taught by others on how to do that.