Grinding rogues honestBy RODNEY CROOMEFive minutes into, "Brat Camp", the ABC's new reality TV series on taming troubled teens, and I was ready to switch off the show in utter disgust. Like many students of Tasmanian history I'm intimately acquainted with all the techniques to used to control and reform the young people concerned, and just as keenly aware of where all that kind of psychological manipulation leads. That knowledge comes from studying the nineteenth century British penal system. Just like the English kids in Brat Camp, English convicts were wrenched from familiar surroundings, transported to an inhospitable place far away from which they couldn't escape, stripped of even the tiniest symbol of their former identity, dressed in anonymous uniforms, denied even the simplest pleasures, forced to work in teams, encouraged to engage in some kind of personal reflection, inculcated with new "socially responsible" values, punished with deprivation of personal freedoms, ostracism and other forms of psychological torture for the slightest infraction of a hundred and one different rules, and rewarded with food, kudos and status if they conformed. The age bracket may have changed (it's much harder to impose this on adults any more). Wilderness may have replaced hard labour as the medium of redemption. Psychologists may have replaced preachers as its agents. But the goal is still the same: break down the recalcitrant's personality and re-build it in a shape approved of by society. Tasmania's greatest convict administrator, George Arthur, called it being "harsh but just". Dr Phil calls it "tough love". I call it pointless, destructive suffering. What the British tried to hide, and what I'm sure the do-good Americans who run Brat Camp also don't crow about, are the people who can't or don't reform, the immense suffering they endure, and the scars they are left with. What both did/do boast about are the success-stories they try to convince us they were/are responsible for. "Here's an example of a prosperous law-abiding colonial citizen who started life as a child convict", the colonial office might have skited about one or two businessmen in Hobart and Sydney. "And all because we sent them to the ends of the earth, showed them some discipline, taught them to read, gave them a trade and showed them the value of hard work." Amazingly many people still believe this hollow propaganda. But the fact is that convicts made good despite their suffering in Australia's gulags, not because of it. The best we can say for the majority of convicts, and I suspect for the majority of "brats", is that they were permanently subdued by their experience, perhaps even cowered. Foucault would simply say "controlled". And here-in lies the greatest tragedy of all. The reforming philosophies of the nineteenth century, and their successors, the therapeutic systems of the twentieth, have been identified by people like Foucault as typifying modernity. In stark contrast, Foucault's followers tell us, lies the post-modern - a kind of awakening from the nightmare of discipline, surveillance, psychological punishment and strict conformity that began with the industrial and democratic revolutions 250 years ago. If "Brat Camp" says anything it's that the post-modern is a chimera. The machine that is modernity is still, to borrow from George Arthur again, "grinding rogues honest".
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