Abstract
Organizational Change Through Individual Empowerment: Applying Social Psychology in Prisons and Policing is a short book that encapsulates the highlights and insights of a long, distinguished career. Hans Toch, professor emeritus at State University of New York (SUNY) Albany, has worked at the intersection of social psychology and criminal justice for more than half a century, publishing his first book in 1965. His emphasis has been on “doing” psychology—on the real-world application of organizational principles within prisons and police work. The book tells the story of the reforms he has sought and the warnings he has sounded. As the pendulum has swung back and forth with regard to public support for rehabilitation and reform, he has seen some promising programs, built on science he supported, be defunded, and some concerning programs, built on science he considered misapplied, be extended. Whether you are new to his work or have followed it across the decades, this intellectual history is versatile—with the potential to serve as an introductory overview or a capstone.
A theme of the first two chapters of the book, which are devoted to his formative years, is selective perception. When Toch entered the doctoral program at Princeton in 1952, Hadley Cantril was chair of the department. A social psychologist, Cantril was interested in social movements, yet at the time he was intrigued with the work of Adelbert Ames, the ophthalmologist who had created the Ames room to study optical illusions. Although strictly relegated to the field of visual perception today, Toch reminds us that during the 1950s, Ames’s work had captured the imagination of a broad range of intellectuals, including John Dewey. Ames’s clever demonstrations showed that when presented with unfamiliar shapes and objects, we, unconsciously, out of all the possible interpretations available, perceive familiar things—underlining, in a dramatic fashion at the time, the way in which past experience shapes interpretation of the present and future. Based on this foundational principle, Toch developed a life-long professional conviction: Perception is a creative act, and to understand individuals under study, it is important to reconstruct their past and view the world as they experienced it.
As discussed in the third and fourth chapters of the book, during the 1960s and the war on poverty, Toch partnered on more than one occasion with Doug Grant, psychologist and chief of research at the California Department of Corrections. Grant directed a federally funded prison program called the “New Careers Development Project” (1964-1966), which was designed to train offenders for job opportunities in the human services industry. The premise of the program was that the ex-offender’s past would serve him well as he used it in the service of better understanding and helping others. Building on this premise, Toch trained current offenders to serve as paraprofessionals, assisting him and other research professionals to gather data and perform data analysis on the effectiveness of the program. Some new careerist ex-offenders went on to become quite successful (one source reports that two of them earned their doctorates and became university professors), whereas others fell victim to various forms of resistance—both internal and external. But the program itself did not exist long enough to grow roots; the funding dried up as more conservative politicians were elected (e.g., Ronald Reagan became governor of California in 1966) and the war on poverty lost its momentum.
In keeping with the premise of the new careers movement, Toch went on to design and implement other programs that relied on an individual’s past experiences to help solve current related problems in the world of criminal justice. For example, when the Oakland, California’s chief of police identified a group of officers who were stirring up problems on the street, Toch worked with him to establish a Violence Prevention Unit with funding from the National Institute of Mental Health. His approach was to include the officers who had firsthand experience with what we refer to today as “police brutality,” in exploring the problem and generating possible solutions for it; instead of excluding them, their experience was considered vital and integral to the design of effective response and training. This ultimately led to the famed Oakland Peer Review Panel, an idea that was proposed by a violence-experienced officer who had participated in the Violence Prevention Unit and wanted to encourage his peers to think about their own behavioral patterns and develop the habit of self-critique. The Review Panel was established in this non-punitive and collaborative manner and served the department well for many years, contributing to the overall reduction of police-citizen confrontations, until it was discontinued as part of sweeping budget cuts.
During the 1970s, Toch turned from research projects focused on the west coast, to work that kept him closer to home (SUNY Albany). As discussed in Chapter 7, the New York City detention system had been averaging a suicide a month. In the wake of the Attica riot in 1971, the political climate shifted and there was more support for intervention and treatment of inmate breakdowns. Toch and his research team interviewed hundreds of distressed inmates who had engaged in self-injuries, self-mutilations, and in some cases suicide attempts. They then organized a 2-day workshop devoted to the problem of inmate breakdowns, to which the state of New York sent several delegates from the Department of Correctional Services. One important finding that emerged from the workshop was that correctional officers felt excluded on a daily basis from serious involvement with mentally bereft prisoners. This work was often left exclusively to social workers and medical staff. There, the correctional officers were on the frontlines but not empowered to be responsive when there was a clear need for responsiveness on a day-to-day basis. One of the several proposals coming out of the 1973 workshop was that correctional officers were to serve as key figures in crisis intervention teams. It was also recommended that inmates be incorporated into crisis prevention models (with guidance and support), as suicide prevention aides. About a decade later, in 1984, the head of New York City’s Department of Corrections awarded a Certificate of Merit to the department’s suicide prevention program, which had been described as “the best in the nation.” Commendations also went to two New York City correctional officers who had been serving as program coordinators.
For those readers interested in international trends and approaches to incarceration, a significant portion of the middle of Organizational Change (Chapters 8-11) is devoted to the work Toch did overseas during the 1990s, in Scottish prisons. There, he was involved with experiments in participatory governance, where both staff and prisoners were enlisted in efforts to address the suspiciousness that existed between them and to encourage each group to make strides toward taking the other’s perspective. For example, at Penninghame, four task forces were created, one made up of corrections officers and three made up of prisoners. The officers were asked, “What do we do that they can and should do for themselves?” and the prisoners were asked, “What do they do that we can and should do for ourselves?” Three out of the four groups did not get very far, but one group of prisoners came up with reasonable and constructive ideas that were worth pursuing, such as a monthly meeting between a prisoner group and a town committee, to try to improve town-prisoner relations and the quality of job and volunteer placements. Other thought-provoking attempts at shared governance abound within this section of the book.
Toch chose to conclude Organizational Change with a thoughtful acknowledgment of how Skinnerian forms of behaviorism are often misapplied within prisons, sometimes in indefensible or unconscionable ways. What follows is a stark and, likely for some, disturbing account of a visit Toch made, by invitation of the Wisconsin Department of Justice, to the state’s new SuperMax Correctional Institution during December of 2000. There, he witnessed gross misapplication of Skinnerian principles of punishment within a prison designed for solitary confinement, where offenders at “level one” of the behavioral program were locked into a “small, sealed, sarcophagus-like space with nothing to do” (p. 144) for sometimes up to 30 days. To be released from Level 1, inmates had to follow a very specific set of procedures. Following these procedures correctly was beyond some of the prisoners placed there, particularly those who were mentally ill, so there they remained. Not surprisingly, accusations of cruel and unusual punishment led to federal litigation, which led to settlements and to the end of the most psychologically disturbing features of the program.
Hans Toch has announced that this book will be his last. He was not moved to write a memoir because his private life has been “conventional” and his inner life “overwhelmingly pedestrian.” Instead, he has written a “retrospective,” with a modest hope that some of what he has accomplished over the years “could be worth resuscitating” (p. xvii). It is not just the substance of his work that is worth reviving, some of which is directly relevant to today’s most pressing issues, such as how to handle police brutality. It is also worth revisiting a central point that Toch makes in his Preface: “How we go about assisting people may be of greater consequence in the long run than the substance of the assistance we provide” (p. xvii). The respect that Toch has brought to his work with police and correctional officers, prisoners and other prison staff, and students and academic colleagues permeates the book. This seems to be the most meaningful legacy of his career: the importance of treating humans as humans.