زمان انجام کار ، زمان پر کردن : تشریفات دیوان سالاری (بوروکراتیک) به عنوان یک مانع سیستمیک به هنگام ورود دوباره جوانان

This paper contributes to knowledge about the challenges of youth reentry by examining how transitional services can function as a barrier to – instead of a support for – healthy reintegration of youth. Using participant observation conducted in 2003–2004 at a juvenile aftercare program in Philadelphia, we explore a pervasive problem that Merton (1940) termed “bureaucratic ritualism.” Case workers and administrators became beholden to daily demands related to billing, paperwork, and meeting minimum standards, supplanting the larger goal of individualized care for young people returning from placements. Outputs, not outcomes, became the measure of success. We identify a number of reintegration activities that were ritualistic in nature and explore the features of the system that encouraged ritualistic responses by aftercare workers. Finally, we identify a group of aftercare workers, which we call “proactive caregivers” who resisted the organizational pressures to become bureaucratic ritualists.

Although an impressive literature has developed around adult prisoner reentry, youth returning from confinement have received comparatively little attention. Depending on how broadly the concepts of “youth” and “confinement” are measured, between 81,000 and 200,000 young people are released into communities annually (Mears and Travis, 2004 and Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2012). Scholars who have studied the issue point out that the reentry process is unique for adolescents, who must undergo a “dual transition” from facility to community and from adolescence into young adulthood (Altschuler & Brash, 2004). Young people encounter some of the same challenges as their adult counterparts, such as finding employment and redefining their role within their families and households upon their return (Petersilia, 2005). Others, such as being reintegrated into schools or negotiating relationships with delinquent peers are specific to youth. The educational deficiencies faced by these incarcerated youth are particularly striking. Summarizing their earlier work (Osgood, Foster, Flanagan, & Ruth, 2005) Osgood, Foster, and Courtney (2010) report that fewer than 20% of young adults incarcerated as juveniles or adults have diplomas or GEDs. As with adults, the likelihood of failure is high. Within five years of release, as many as 85% youth are re-arrested (Trulson, Marquart, Mullings, & Caeti, 2005). Aftercare programs and post-release supervision are designed to facilitate a smooth transition from facility to community during a period of time in which young people are particularly likely to encounter problems that place them at risk for re-offending (Altschuler, 1984, Altschuler and Armstrong, 1994 and Gies, 2003). In preparation for this reintegration phase, aftercare workers and/or juvenile probation officers help youths become re-enrolled in school, work with the young person's family to ensure that there is a stable home environment, connect youths to employment opportunities, and locate other community-based services that fit their clients' individual needs. In addition to these support services, supervisory services require young people to meet conditions of their release, such as paying restitution, participating in community service activities, and passing regular drug screens. Juvenile aftercare programs come in many forms and have varying levels of success. Because of the wide range of programs and the lack of fidelity to program models in some jurisdictions, it is difficult to generalize about the overall effectiveness of aftercare services. However, despite the lack of widespread agreement, many have argued convincingly that high-quality transitional support services for youth offer them the best chances for success on the outside (Mears et al., 2008, Mears and Travis, 2004, Spencer and Jones-Walker, 2004 and Young, 2004). Research in other areas of the criminal justice system and in organizational theory more broadly suggests that staff are a particularly important component because they interpret and apply organizational policy (Cicourel, 1968, Schneider, 1987 and Wise, 2004). As with any street level bureaucracy (Lipsky, 1980), service delivery workers have a great deal of discretion in how to carry out their jobs (e.g. Brodkin, 1997, Halliday et al., 2009, Lowe et al., 2008, Maupin, 1993, Meyers et al., 1998 and Sandfort, 1999). As a result, we argue that both workers and the larger systemic context in which reentry organizations operate are important, but largely overlooked, aspects of youth reentry. In this article, we examine the obstacles to successful reentry from the perspectives of juvenile aftercare workers as they responded to the organizational dilemmas and constraints posed by the juvenile justice system in one large jurisdiction. Our findings suggest that a pervasive problem in the system of aftercare services is what Merton (1940) termed “bureaucratic ritualism,” where the goals of the organization or system are replaced by rigid adherence to rules. Workers and administrators become beholden to daily demands related to billing, paperwork, and meeting minimum standards, losing sight of the larger picture of providing individualized care to vulnerable young people returning home from residential placements. We identify a number of reintegration activities that are ritualistic in nature and explore the features of the system that encourage ritualistic responses by aftercare workers. We describe a group of aftercare workers, which we call “proactive caregivers” who resist the organizational pressures to become bureaucratic ritualists. Finally, we discuss the promising role of such workers in improving the quality and effectiveness of aftercare services.

Bureaucratic ritualism was built into the very structure of aftercare in Philadelphia. Young people were cut off from needed services due to time and funding limits; clients who were ineligible for working papers were required by aftercare workers to search for employment; youth without mandated community service hours were brought to the city's animal shelter to mop floors; and young people were mandated to attend educational programs after finishing their GEDs or diplomas. Attempted service delivery counted equally as completed service delivery, with paperwork above all as the measure of worker competency and client progress. Participation in activities was, for both workers and clients, emphasized with little regard to their value. The guiding philosophy became “any service is better than no service.” As a result of the “any service” orientation, aftercare workers had little confidence in the value of the services they provided and often offered them half-heartedly. In addition, young people returning from juvenile facilities received the message that they must go through the motions in order to get credit for participating in the program. The “system,” then, became a hurdle they must manage, instead of an integrated web of supports designed to buffer them throughout a high-risk period of time after being released from juvenile facilities. Thompkins (2010) has recently written about the large and growing adult Prisoner Reentry Industry (PRI), a mix of public and private organizations charged with providing services to individuals returning from prison. He finds that many parole officers and program providers prevent parolees from accepting employment – the holy grail of positive reentry outcomes – when they require them to attend the program instead. He concludes that the goal of providing assistance to returning offenders is secondary to job security of reentry professionals and continued organizational funding. The PRI, Thompkins provocatively argues, is designed to fail because succeeding would mean putting reentry programs and professionals out of business. His findings – along with the organizational studies of street level bureaucracy in the criminal justice system – suggest that Powelton Aftercare is not simply a singular example of a poorly-run program, but part of a larger system of both public and private organizations that support bureaucratic ritualism (Lipsky, 1980). In addition to discovering some overlap in the scholarly treatment of adult reentry and juvenile aftercare services, our findings may help explain why theoretically sound programs such as the IAP have not produced the expected positive results. Although the lack of consistent findings across IAP sites is often explained in terms of implementation problems, we point out that all inconsistencies in implementation are a likely result of workers who bring different orientations toward their work and different abilities to respond to bureaucratic pressures. The present study found an impressive number of proactive caregivers who resisted organizational structures that, in other workers, encouraged ritualistic working styles. Improving services to youth returning from residential facilities, then, depends on locating workers who are predisposed to proactive caregiving and providing them with a nurturing environment to help them sustain their orientation. The literature on workers in criminal justice settings is replete with typologies of work orientations and adaptations to features of the organizational environment that are related to, but conceptually distinct from bureaucratic ritualists and proactive caregivers. Studies of correctional officers, for example, have found a tension between custodial versus treatment orientations (Grusky, 1959) or distinctions between “rule enforcers” and “hard liners” versus “people workers” and those who drew upon a synthesis of these orientations (Farkas, 2000). Another typology of British prison officers includes: “true carers,” “limited carers,” “old school,” “conflicted”, and “damaged” workers (Tait, 2011). Similarly, juvenile probation officers have been classified by their clients as either “focused on punishment” or “genuinely caring” (Holloway, Brown, Suman, & Aalsma, 2012) and by researchers as either cynical or idealistic (Curtis & Reese, 1990). Proactive caregiving may be an intrinsic quality of workers, similar to what those in public policy call “public service motivation” or PSM. As defined by Perry and Wise (1990), PSM is, “an individual's predisposition to respond to motives grounded primarily or uniquely in public institutions and organizations” (p. 368). Powelton's proactive caregivers engaged in the “spontaneous, innovative behaviors on behalf of the organization” that are found in committed workers with high PSM (p. 371). If proactive care-giving or PSM is indeed inherent, then aftercare organizations need to recruit and retain people with high levels of PSM (Perry & Wise, 1990). We noticed, for example, that nearly half (5 of 12) of our proactive caregivers were raised in Philadelphia, often in the same neighborhoods as their clients, and had strong bonds to the community, giving them personal identification with the Powelton program and a rationale for having high PSM (Perry & Wise, 1990). These engaged workers bear strong resemblance to Maruna's (2001) “wounded healers,” ex-convicts who dedicated themselves to assisting other ex-cons reform their lives through counseling, social work and volunteer work. Recruiting and hiring from the same communities that clientele are drawn also provides a counter to the problem endemic in rural institutions, where few staff members have shared experiences with residents (Fader, 2013). If, by contrast, proactive caregiving or PSM is dynamic and changes over time (Perry & Wise, 1990) then organizations may have the power to turn their workers into ritualistic, bureaucratic pawns. According to Lipsky (1980), the power of a street level bureaucracy is so great that workers likely enter with high public service motivation, but over time the conditions of the workplace mold all workers into similar behaviors. Worse yet, these conditions can drive workers to become dissatisfied with their jobs, which leads to high rates of turnover (Mitchell et al., 2000 and Wright, 1993). Unfortunately, although many worker typologies exist, we could locate no longitudinal studies that examine whether and how these orientations shift over time, leading to burnout and/or turnover.4 Whether proactive caregivers are born or created, one important means of promoting proactive caregiving is to offer better pay for aftercare workers. Indeed, one of the major themes that arose in the course of field research focused on Powelton Aftercare workers was their responses to the exceptionally low pay ($27,000 at that time). The inability to live independently, to pay bills on time, or to replace or even properly maintain the vehicles required to make home visits forced many of them to take second jobs on evenings and weekends. Of course, this compromised their ability to make phone calls or home visits at off-peak times when parents were home from work. Aftercare workers invested much on-the-clock time searching for better-paying jobs, leading to turnover and discontinuity in service to youth. Winston, a young worker who had applied to take the probation test, noted that he felt emasculated by his low wages and fear of not meeting child support requirements. He brought the issue to his supervisor, arguing that comparable jobs in the private sector paid $32,000. In response, his supervisor told him that the job at Powelton simply wasn't worth that much. Other possible structural solutions to bureaucratic ritualism include increased cooperation and coordination among agencies responsible for reentry, technological advances designed to reduce the amount of time workers spend on paperwork, and an organizational structure emphasizing individualized services. With these organizational supports in place, workers may be better able to focus on outcomes instead of mere outputs. Our conclusions are accompanied by some limitations and implications for further research. First, Powelton Aftercare is a traditional aftercare program and, since the recognition of this model's limitations have become more widespread, it is likely that the modern landscape of aftercare programs is already changing in ways that could address the organizational features leading to bureaucratic ritualism. In fact, Philadelphia has since stopped using this traditional model and attempted to move to a more individualized and comprehensive package of services. Future research examining workers in these new forms of aftercare programs will be necessary to determine if ritualism presents the same problems as we have found in one large program using a traditional model. Unfortunately, there currently exists no systematic study of the types of aftercare programs offered across jurisdictions, so there is no easy way to determine how prevalent traditional programs are today. Finally, we have implied here that proactive caregivers provide higher quality services than their counterparts mired in bureaucratic ritualism. It is possible, however, that clients of workers who “care” do not have better outcomes than those of ritualistic workers. Only an evaluation that compared client outcomes such as recidivism for clients of workers with these two orientations could answer this question with any conclusiveness.