When the social and physical structure surrounding the child is very loose, the child’s most natural tendencies and repressed tendencies and fantasies tend to be expressed. A healthy child in this environment simply pursues healthy and creative preferences. An impulsive child will act on impulse with no thought as to the consequences. An angry child can be vicious and destructive without regard to consequences. A fearful child may experience panic. In other words, when there is no structure, the Private, Hidden Person seizes the opportunity for release. An observer in such a setting will get a very good idea of what the child’s private personality is like. If the observer has also seen the child in a structured setting, a contrast can be made between the child’s Public Persona and Private Personality.

    Refer to Figure 1 below. The labels at the bottom indicate degrees of structure and the vertical columns on the left indicate a progression from Uninhibited behavior through Channeled behavior to Repressed behavior with fantasies and tension, while the diagonal line shows the effect of degrees of structure (bottom) on behavior (left). In a HI structure with strict restrictions, the Private Personality is most likely to be suppressed. The observer is unlikely to see the Private Personality and therefore will not be able to treat, correct, guide, or coach that part of the child that is most likely to cause serious problems for him or herself and for society. In the HI structure setting, youths will constantly be having intentions are that are not acceptable to the authorities and will be coerced into suppressing these intentions. After a while, some youths, those who have impulsive or rebellious tendencies, will become increasingly tense and restless and these unacceptable intentions will eventually burst chaotically and disruptively out into the controlled setting. This will result in severe control measures. An intense negative cycle escalates and the polarization and alienation increases. Inside of the youth, the rift between the Public Persona and the Private Person begins to widen.

    In the MED structure with Positive Avenues, some of the needs and natural inclinations of the youths can be channeled in constructive, programmed avenues. If there is a good match between the characteristics and readiness of the youth and the avenue for the youth’s performance in the program, and if the youth receives recognition and appreciation for his/her part, new behaviors can be learned and incorporated in a manner consistent with the natural tendencies of the Private Person and yet not inconsistent with the Public Persona. The rift between the Public and Private is reduced, tension is reduced, identifications and bonding take place, self-esteem is increased, and the youth begins to mature. Now, what are the implications of this observation for juvenile correctional institutions?

Natural Systems Perspectives

    Suppose we shift our focus away from the singular individual. One of the thoughts that comes to mind when I think of Natural Systems is that of the dissolution of the ego or the individual. From the point of view of a person, the ego or ‘I’ is a fundamental indissoluble entity. We can say ‘I am I’ and mean that we each are a separate unit that is our primary reality, value, and concern. Everyone with this point of view has an ‘ego centric’ point of view. When an outsider with this worldview looks at a person, he sees an individual. He sees an individual as a separate unit, operating based on its own inner principle that operates as though in an empty space with no history, making rational decisions and behaving rationally.

    From the Natural Systems perspective, the ego, or ‘I,' and the individual are illusions. While each living species with a brain has a similar process of inner activities, the content and rhythm of each process are different. This content and rhythm do not occur in a vacuum or empty space without a history. The process is inextricably interwoven in the tapestry of the whole with all of its structures, systems, patterns, content, and rhythms.

    The individual, then, is like the one small fragment of rough hewn, colored glass in with a multitude of others, each different, that make up a Kaleidoscope. When we focus on the individual, we only see the rough-hewn fragment and miss the beauty of the ever-changing patterns of the Kaleidoscope.

How is a complex, symmetrical beauty made possible from a heap of glass fragments? It is the structure of the Kaleidoscope that makes this possible. Using the Kaleidoscope as an analogy for a juvenile correctional institution’s program, the point is that it is the particular way the institution is structured that causes the types of behavior of its residents. Change the structure and the behavior changes. If negative behavior is being exhibited, do not try to solve the problems by trying to change each resident’s personality. Examine the structures carefully, experiment with changes in the structure, and assess the results. If you continue this approach, you will eventually find a configuration of the aspects or elements of the structure that make the difference you were seeking.

As you gain experience in identifying the relation between structure and behavior, it becomes easier to shift your orientation from changing individuals to changing structures. The next step is to try to gain an even broader perspective. Anticipating that the individual will be released from the institution to the home and community of origin, the question arises as to whether the behavior shaped in the structured institution will transfer and stick after release. If not, the benefits of restructuring would be limited to making the institutional environment more acceptable and tolerable.

There are two answers to this shortcoming. First, if the institution is aware of the structure of the home community, then we can build into the structure of the institution elements and challenges specifically designed to help the resident identify and cope with the negative pull of the home community. Second, we can develop programs for the home community that cause its residents to create structures that are more positive and therefore maintain the more positive behaviors. Since institutional staff typically is not able to have any impact on home communities, they are restricted to the first alternative.

The major concern with the first alternative is that we may ten to create structures designed to elicit positive behaviors around the clock as in the HI structure in Figure 1. In effect we would be maintaining a positive Public Persona and disregarding the Private Person. In this environment, the residents never encounter situations similar to the home community. How can the residents be inoculated against negative home situations if they never arise? One compelling solution is to talk to them, teach them, about the home community: how to identify the negative pulls, view them differently, and cope with them differently. The problem with this solution is that people rarely transfer purely conceptual knowledge to application in the immediate, real life situation. This would be particularly true if we have promoted a large discrepancy between the Public and Private aspects of the self, what institutions call ‘fronting.’ Therefore, although the behavior changed in the institutional setting, it does not transfer to the home community. Although they have gained a conceptual knowledge designed to prevent relapse, they still relapse.

The answer may be to build into the institutional structure the possibility for negative situations that are very similar to negative situations in the home community to arise naturally in the institutional environment. The institutional structure, ironically, must be designed so that it does not universally call for positive behavior. The one characteristic about the home community that tends to promote negative situations and negative behavior to varying degrees of extremity is its lack of structure. It is in environments with minimal structure that we see uninhibited behavior and the idiosyncrasies and pathology of each single individual. Therefore, if we build into the institutional program some unstructured time and a way for such home community situations to naturally arise, staff can be especially trained to help the residents understand their idiosyncratic reactions, learn new ways to respond, and practice in subsequent, similar occasions. With this format of inducing Channeled behavior, the structure is building new, more mature, higher levels of behavior and, with the occasional reduced structure bringing out the Uninhibited behavior and the Private Person, we are, at the same time, creating the opportunity for inoculating against the unstructured home community. We are also creating conditions under which the Public and Private mature together in an integrated fashion.

Now if the institution is able to accomplish the above mentioned approach and, in addition, to somehow intervene in the structure of the home and home community in some significant ways, we would expect the chances for relapse to go way down. Bringing family and mentors from the community into the institutional program is a partial way to accomplish this. Developing community programs would be even better.

To get back to our initial question about how the Natural Systems approach reorients us from the emphasis on the individual psyche to external structures, we can now say that the traditional perspective has been turned on its head. As long as we were looking solely at the individual, we kept losing the battle. We continued to tamper with methods of diagnosing, prescribing, and treating the individual only to have them return to a faulty structure and have all this effort undone. We have been so myopic that, while we have accumulated a huge amount of information on tests and treatments, we have very rudimentary knowledge about structures, how structures affect people, and which structures can be changed in what ways to cause the desired changes. If we decide to launch in this direction, it is like landing on a new, totally unknown continent. A whole New World lies in waiting to be discovered.

THE EFFECTS OF DEGREES OF STRUCTURE ON
THE DEGREE AND TYPE OF FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION

 Figure 1

Click on this hyperlink "DEGREES OF STRUCTURE" to see the related slide presentation.

CREATING THE CONDITIONS FOR A ‘NATURAL SYSTEMS’ APPROACH

The third major consideration is that the residents are also brought into this process. They learn the organization and learn roles, rules, skills, values, and techniques related to the program. As they do so, they begin to mature in their perspective, to bond with staff, to take ownership of the program. They also develop a new positive identity, confidence, and sense of self worth. Their sense of alienation is broken down. They learn a new kind of positive loyalty that involves an effort to keep each other out of trouble and invest in mutual facilitation of positive growth. They learn that they can have a hand in creating a safe, fair and just community that recognizes and rewards constructive effort.

These three major considerations must work together. Finally, a fourth and most important consideration is that, for involved staff and residents alike, this approach must be perpetual. Once this approach is started, the cardinal ingredient is continuous meeting to collaboratively examine and upgrade the program. Each new influx of staff and residents must enter this ongoing dialogue and collaboration in maintaining and upgrading the program. Each new influx must claim ownership of the program and process for themselves.

In an environment, or community, like the one just described, there is no need for diagnosis and tests because the interest of this natural environment is to provide the conditions for optimization of each individual’s growth as a part of the integrated community. We are not interested in what a person is or was but in what, being true to themselves and when they are ready, they can become. If someone is not functioning, maturing, or growing in the community, the question to ask is: What do we need to change, improve, delete, or add to the program so that we create the conditions for this new person to mature and thrive as a part of the community. Whatever the problem the community discovers along the way, the question is always the same: What is it about the structure that the community needs to be address? We are not looking for diagnostic labels or types of problems. We are not asking, 'What is wrong with you?' We are not looking for a static description of the individuals. We are looking for a way to create a dynamic, wholesome, mutually facilitating community.