Chaos theory and the social control thesis: a post-Foucauldian analysis of mental illness and involuntary civil confinement.

Introduction

The legal and psychological communities continue to address, with some profound uncertainty, the matter of civil confinement for dangerous mentally ill citizens (Arrigo, 1996a, 1993a; Isaac and Armat, 1990; LaFond and Durham, 1992). Proponents of involuntary hospitalization contend that a temporary loss of freedom, liberty, and right to self-determination is justified in order to protect society from the unstable and potentially injurious behavior of severely disordered psychiatric persons (e.g., Scull, 1989; Chadoff, 1976; Treffert, 1985; Roth and Kroll, 1986; Arrigo, 1993a: 13-17). This decidedly conservative and medical-model perspective has dominated social, political, and economic practice since the Enlightenment (e.g., Szasz, 1987, Scheff, 1984; Sedgwick, 1982). Critical social inquiry, however, articulates a potent rejection concerning the foundations of contemporary psycho-legal theory and practice (Arrigo, 1996a). These criticisms converge on a number of arguably false, morally ensconced, and politically laden assumptions attributable to modern science:

1. That mental illness is a real difference necessitating censorship;

2. That the mentally ill present a greater identifiable threat to society than the mentally healthy; and

3. That science possesses the key to understanding and treating mental disease or defect (Arrigo, 1992: 9-12; 23-29).

One of the most influential and time-honored of criticisms is associated with Michel Foucault's social control thesis (e.g., Foucault, 1980; 1977; 1976; 1973; 1972; 1970; 1965). Foucault's critique of institutions (i.e., psychiatric, penal) viewed confinement of the noncriminal as a method of controlling (or isolating) the socially undesirable. Consistent with other justice systems, Foucault (1965, 1977) reasoned that institutionalization w as a means of policing public hygiene that is, ridding society of difference. Whether intended public policy or the likely progeny of society's faith in the prophecies of contemporary science, Foucault (1980) argued that involuntary confinement of the mentally ill and dangerous productively and inventively advanced the state's regime of power in the name of privileged scientific truth.

Given Foucault's position, a number of important issues arise that yield alarming, or at least troubling, effects. Specifically, psychiatric and legal systems of control (e.g., the hospital and prison) promote legitimate social welfare interests; however, these interests are based on questionable and, in some cases, inaccurate science (Arrigo, 1993b: 142-157; LaFond and Durham, 1992). Thus, the existential condition of diverse mentally disabled citizens is normalized, depathologized, and homogenized, difference is corrected, indeed, sacrificed at the alter of medical knowledge, and the politics of psychiatric justice prevails (Arrigo, 1996a; see also Arrigo 1997a on the concept of transcarceration and the mentally ill).

This article examines the present-day vitality and utility of Foucault's social control thesis as revealed in several enduring psycho-legal controversies. Specifically, we examine how the crossroads of clinicolegal science have produced problematic criteria for civil commitment by exhaustively focusing on the meaning of mental illness and dangerousness. We demonstrate how these criteria effectively promote and maintain the state's realm of power while substantially undermining the fight of vulnerable collectives and/or citizens to be different (Kittrie, 1971).

The intent behind our theoretical analysis of confinement and application to civil commitment practices is deliberately limited in scope and depth. We merely wish to tease out several of the more salient conceptual insights contained in Foucault's work and to strategically connect them to mental health law. This approach allows us to draw suggestive and, arguably, provocative linkages to subsequent sections of the article.

Below we comtemporize our Foucauldian theoretical analysis by relying on the new science of chaos theory.(1) Chaos or complexity theory distinguishes the presence of social disorder from order within social disorder (Young, 1992; Milovanovic, 1997). The notion of patterned regularities operating deep within the apparent randomness of dynamic systems (including the behavior of society as a macro/micro system) challenges the assumptions informing correctional, psychiatric, and/or legal practice. It draws attention away from modernist convictions of linear cause-effect inquiry, precise prediction, and rigid control, toward postmodernist notions of nonlinear causality, spontaneity, and chance that can exist simultaneously with order (Arrigo and Young, 1998; for applications to the disordered criminal defendant, see Arrigo, 1994). We conclude our investigation by returning to the criteria of involuntary civil commitment. We demonstrate how the application of selected chaos theory principles represents a much-needed post-Foucauldian assessment on the matter of confinement for the mentally ill. To situate our study, however, we begin with a review of Foucault's social control thesis.

Foucault and the Social Control Thesis

[W]hen you look closely at the penal code...danger has never constituted an offense. To be dangerous is not an offense. To be dangerous is not an illness. It is not a symptom. And yet we have come...to use the notion of danger, by a perpetual movement backwards and forwards between the penal [legal] and the medical [psychiatric].

- Michel Foucault, Confinement, Psychiatry, and Prison

The historically informed social theory of Michel Foucault was instrumental in developing a critique of the psychiatric institution, medical justice, and the means by which society disciplines difference (Foucault, 1965; 1977). A Foucauldian analysis of legally endorsed, involuntary civil commitment can be regarded as an exemplar of state-sanctioned social control. Foucault, both explicitly and implicitly, addresses the issue of confinement in considerable detail.

Foucault's purpose in Madness and Civilization (1965) and Discipline and Punish (1977) is to provide an account of the various, yet similar, roles institutions assume in society. In doing so, he systematically traces the development of social control, as linked to science or scientific truths, to demonstrate the expanse of disciplinary practices in contemporary society. The function of law, psychiatry, and confinement, as differing modes of societal surveillance, is to attain the same penultimate goal: control (Foucault, 1977; 1990; Garland, 1990).

Though Madness and Civilization is primarily concerned with psychiatry and the mentally ill and Discipline and Punish with penology and the criminal element, there is considerable promise for a social control thesis at their intersection. Indeed, their substantial overlap and interrelatedness contribute to an overall understanding of the social policing of difference. In the following sections, we elaborate on the constituents of Foucault's social control thesis. As we contend, this model, as a critique, forms the basis of how justice is rendered today at the crossroads of law and psychiatry, criminal justice and mental health.

Psychiatry and the Hospital

Foucault's (1973, 1976, 1977) assault on the psychiatric institution described psychiatrists as "functionaries of social order." Thus, the practice of psychiatry was to police social hygiene and public health. In describing the evolution of this science into law, Foucault (1990: 134) states: "if psychiatry became so important in the nineteenth century, it was not simply because it applied a new medical rationality to mental or behavioral disorders, it was also because it functioned as a sort of public hygiene." This bridge between the medical function of psychiatry and the management function of police enabled a new form of repression, namely, cleansing public morality.

One example of this repressive function arose with the advent of a different nomenclature for psychiatric institutions. Formerly referred to as "asylums" and subsequently termed "hospitals," public perception concerning the utility of these facilities was dramatically altered. Psychiatry drew attention to the "medical" role of the discipline, that is, to the reparative possibilities of an emerging science that could "make good" the mass of social problems afflicting everyday citizens (e.g., disorder in the street, at work, and in the family) (Foucault, 1990: 180). Thus, the "true vocation of psychiatry" became a function of public hygiene (Ibid.).

Foucault also drew attention to the practices of reflexology, popular in Soviet psychiatry after 1945. This treatment method interjected public immorality and irrationalisms (e.g., homosexuality, criminality) into the disciplinary equation by exposing one to photographs while subjecting the individual to sickness-inducing injections. This Pavlovian approach was designed to fashion aversions to the foci of irrationality and immorality. Arguably, the medicalized psychiatric and the clinicolegal apparatuses could "cure" and/or "correct" such maladaptations with simple therapeutic techniques. Similar positivism was observable in the United States with the invention of the lobotomy: a psychiatric intervention to fix problems of social hygiene. Here, too, the psychopathic hospital was the locus for corrective treatment.

The "Dangerous" Individual

Legal justice today has as much to do with criminals as crimes.... [F]or a long time, the criminal had been no more than the person to whom a crime could be attributed and one who could therefore be punished; today, the crime tends to be no more than the event which signals the existence of a dangerous element...in the social body.

Michel Foucault, The Dangerous Individual

According to Foucault (1990), the arrival of psychiatry into criminality provided a new direction for the examination of mental illness and crime. The attention could be focused on the individual, that is, the criminal, as opposed to the crime itself. The notion of "danger" would establish for itself a permanent role in social analyses. Foucault (1990: 128) refers to this movement as the "psychiatrization of criminal danger." A series of motiveless, heinous offenses in the 18th and 19th centuries begged for an alternative explanation for these crimes (Foucault, 1975). More broadly, the question was why someone would engage in such horrid acts and inflict such deplorable suffering upon society without any manifest logic. The answer was linked to psychiatry. More specifically, the answer was insanity, that is, the unreason or irrationality of the minds of "crazy" people (Foucault, 1965; see also Szasz, 1987).

This insanity, writes Foucault (1990: 132), is "hidden"; it represents a danger in that it is beyond the actor's responsibility - beyond his control because he is frequently unaware of it. Nineteenth-century psychiatry "invented an entirely fictitious entity, a crime which is insanity, a crime which is nothing but insanity..." (Ibid.). Thus, psychiatric intervention into the causal explanation of criminality "created" a new crime. The unpredictable and latent danger of the insane constituted a crime in itself; it was uncontrollable and the potential danger to society was justification for its control. "Crazy" people could be regarded as criminal because of what they represented (Morse, 1978; Arrigo, 1997a). It was the intervention of psychiatry into law that sanctioned, produced, and legitimized this causal link between insanity and crime.

In the wake of psychiatry's engagement with law, the notion of "dangerousness" was born. Foucault (1990:188) notes that psychiatrists regarded themselves as "civil servants concerned with public hygiene.... [T]heir job was to supervise whatever was in a state of disorder, whatever presented a danger." In the end, this notion of dangerousness found itself in legislation. People were being confined because they had been dangerous, not necessarily because of an overt act of criminality. In fact, Foucault (1965, 1977) informs us that Soviet legislation reached a point where being perceived as dangerous constituted an offense in the penal code! Though falling short of this extreme in U.S. legislation, the concept of dangerousness still governs the way society addresses mental illness. Indeed, "[the] police [and] psychiatry are institutions intended to react to danger" (Foucault, 1990:188). When it cannot be proved that an individual is dangerous to others, the concept of dangerous to self is introduced. Thus, any form of danger becomes justification for involuntary (criminal/civil) confinement. Accordingly, psychiatry becomes a "social police."

The Social Police: Controlling Difference

Foucault (1965, 1977, 1990) was uniquely concerned with the prominence that the characteristics of dangerousness assumed in contemporary society. Legal confinement of individuals thought to be dangerous - those who were potentially a threat to society - provided a device for neutralizing difference and for policing what was socially undesirable. Interestingly, the dangerous individual often did not commit an offense. If this criterion was met, the person was otherwise confined under penal law. For Foucault (1976, 1977), the condition of (civil) confinement, in the absence of legal harm, left unresolved the question of why society was so inclined to deprive dangerous, noncriminal citizens of liberty.

Foucault's (1980) later work concerned itself with the relationship between power and knowledge/truth (for applications to law and mental illness, see Arrigo, 1993a: 45-51; 135-140). He describes "apparatuses" of power-knowledge as "structure[d]...heterogeneous elements such as discourses, laws, institutions" (Sarup, 1993: 65). These apparatuses contained strategies for discipline and domination through the use of new technologies. As Foucault (1980: 93) argues, power as power-knowledge/truth is monolithic "not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere." In Foucault's sense, psychiatry became an all-encompassing expression of knowledge/truth, that is, a legitimated form of disciplinary control through the instrumentality of scientific discoveries and medical breakthroughs. Our understanding of mental illness and its relationship to crimes of insanity was inventively transformed into clinical and psychopharmacological strategies of social control. This is what Sarup (1993: 66) refers to as "weapons of attack and defense in the relations of power and knowledge." The more knowledgeable and powerful our "weapon of attack" (i.e., psychiatry) became, the more legitimate our justification for the deprivation of individual liberties became. As Sarup (1993: 67) notes of Foucault:

Whereas we might normally regard knowledge as providing us with the power to do things that we could not do without it, Foucault argues that knowledge is a power over others, the power to define others. In his view knowledge ceases to be a liberation and becomes a mode of surveillance, regulation, and discipline.

Thus, following Foucault, psychiatry in all its evolution, does not liberate or help the mentally ill; rather, it regulates such citizens and their difference. Indeed, as Arrigo (1993a, 1996a) contends in his assessment of involuntary hospitalization for the civilly committed and incarceration for the criminally insane, Foucault demonstrates how clinicolegal science "speaks a [certain] truth, exercises power accordingly..., and produces a disciplinary society in which people are normalized and depathologized" (Arrigo, 1993a: 49, 135).

This theme of fostering a disciplinary society is pronounced elsewhere in Foucault's work. For example, in Discipline and Punish (1977), Foucault examines the prison as a generating milieu for modes of productive surveillance and inventive control. Clearly, this is a position consistent with his conception of psychiatric institutions as well. Similar to Castel, Castel, and Lovell's (1982) analysis of psychiatry's embeddedness in society, Foucault (1976) maintains that the expansion of disciplinary powers enabled the psychiatric control of the underclass (see also Sullivan, 1996). No work better illustrates this notion than Bentham's (1962: 420) assessment of the prison and jail. He notes that when the jail is used for custodial purposes, it "is not a punishment...." Thus, if an inmate has yet to be convicted of a crime by our justice system, he should not be punished (Sullivan, 1996: 455).

In relation to the institutionalization of potentially dangerous individuals, imprisonment is not justified unless a crime has been committed. According to Foucault (1976, 1977), the reformation of the psychiatric institution and its assumed "therapeutic" value was an attempt to justify the deprivation of one's liberty (technically, the imposition of a punishment). Although prisons and hospitals may not be construed as equally depriving of fundamental freedoms, involuntary civil commitment of the mentally ill is, nonetheless, a confinement analogous to the deprivation of liberty notable in the penal environment (Arrigo, 1996a). For example, while the committee, similar to the jailee, may be thought to have engaged in a potential wrong (or actual wrong in the case of the latter), the committee is psychiatrically detained in the absence of legal proof of social harm. In these instances, the state's exercise of control in the form of confinement is justified on the basis of its police and parens patriae powers (Arrigo, 1993b: 135-147).

According to Foucault (1980), the disciplinary power of the prison (and the psychiatric institution) is in its application of technical knowledge (e.g., epidemiology, forensic psychiatry) to penal and medical justice where the aims of scientific truth are extolled in the form of objectification, classification, and quantification (Arrigo, 1992: 23-29). All coercive (corrective) institutions discipline society in an effort to restore individuals to socially appropriate (acceptable or normal) patterns of thought and behavior. This normalization, through the imposition of scientific standards, is oppressive in every aspect. It is a dehumanizing method of domination (Garland, 1990: 169-170). The institutionalization of the mentally ill, then, becomes a means of restoring, cleansing, and/or sanitizing one's pathologized cognitive processes, one's existential difference, in accordance with societal norms. We see this activity of depathologizing the person in, inter alia, police and mentally ill citizen encounters (Patch and Arrigo, 1998), the organization of prisons (Arrigo and Williams, 1998), and in the behavior of those confined (Arrigo, 1997a; Thomas, 1988). Indeed, in correctional facilities, micro powers invade the soul of the individual rather than merely the body. As Sullivan (1996: 450) notes:

By means of quiet punishments, mild but repeated, privately enacted, increasingly solitary, and systematically applied over prolonged periods, the state gradually gains access to the soul...and eventually gains control.

Although the word "punishment" may be a somewhat inappropriate term regarding the institutionalized mentally ill, the same systematic, thought-invading, and control-induced measures are undertaken to "correct" the psychiatric individual. In this instance, the clinicolegal apparatus, through productive power and in the name of scientific truth, endeavors to elevate the disordered individual to society's standards of wellness (Arrigo, 1996a; 1996b). If the techniques of medicine do not work, the individual is simply confined for a protracted period of time (Arrigo, 1997a; 1996c; 1996d).

Thus, Foucault (1965, 1977, 1990) concludes that it is not so much the actual danger that the individual represents, as much as his/her embodied difference. The state attempts to regulate this difference through sustained intervention practices (e.g., drug therapy) during confinement. These practices are deemed appropriate given existing medical knowledge. Consequently, according to society, this episteme, as an expression of power embracing certain truths, is just. After all, the best medical evidence suggests that the psychiatric interventions are therapeutic. By definition, that which is therapeutic must, then, be in the best interests of the mentally ill. In this knowledge equation, the civil confinement of dangerous, noncriminal citizens serves the interests of everyone. This is how Foucault's social control thesis functions in psychiatry and in institutional decision-making. Medical science is the avatar of psychiatric justice (Arrigo, 1996a), the self-appointed police of public hygiene. In particular, psychiatry claims to possess privileged knowledge and, thus, to exert legitimate control. For these reasons, courts rely on the medical community to define the concepts of "mental illness" and "dangerousness" and, further, to predict the probability of noncriminal harm (Arrigo, 1993b: 142-147). Even though questions remain about psychiatry's efficacy in such matters (LaFond and Durham, 1992; Isaac and Armat, 1990), it nonetheless is presumed to have privileged knowledge and, thus, is granted the power to control.

Social Control in the Context of Contemporary Society

The usefulness of Foucault's critique for contemporary society in part rests on the conviction that "mental illness" is not historically situated; rather, it is an enormously fluid concept (Scheff, 1984). What is time-honored, however, is the activity of policing that the state employs. Though evolving through various regulatory means (Morrissey and Goldman, 1984; 1986), the end remains the same: controlling that difference socially and legally designating it as psychiatric disease (Arrigo, 1992: 4; 9-12). The clinicolegal landscape of today deliberates upon this difference in its search for exacting definitions for the constructs "mental illness" and "dangerousness." The preciseness and clarity of these definitions are perhaps nowhere more significant than in the context of civil commitment determinations. Indeed, psycho-legal questions related to the efficacy of involuntary hospitalization have become one of the foremost controversies within the mental health law community (Arrigo, 1993a, 1996a; Holstein, 1993).

Foucault's social control thesis obtains to the extent that the state employs social order functionaries to maintain the status quo. The question, of course, is how the state achieves this end. Put differently, to what degree does the state, through the operation of law, separate the mentally ill from the mentally healthy for purposes of protecting society's interest in homogeneity, while, at the same time, tacitly supporting the psychiatric citizen's fundamental freedoms? As Arrigo (1992: 12) asserts:

On the one hand, individual liberty interests are contextualized as the liberty interests of disease-ridden, deviant-minded, and dangerous-prone outsiders. On the other hand, relevant state interests are contextualized as the relevant interests of impartial, orderly, rational, and impersonal state agents.

What once was effected through such devices as communal ostracism and banishment (Foucault, 1965) is now achieved through the instrumentality of clinicolegal science, that is, regulation inventively realized based on the (conspiratorial) collaboration of psychiatry and law (Arrigo, 1996a). In the following sections, we examine more closely how contemporary psycho-legal practices exemplify Foucault's social control thesis. To advance this argument, we investigate the concepts of mental illness and dangerousness in the context of current civil commitment law.

The Criterion of Mental Illness

The first substantive criterion for civil commitment is the presence of a mental impairment. Most jurisdictions delineate this as the existence of mental illness or a showing that the individual is suffering from a mental disorder (Reisner and Slobogin, 1990). Consistent with basic due process, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that an individual who is not mentally ill cannot be involuntarily committed for civil purposes (see, e.g., Foucha v. Louisiana, 1992). Given that the existence of mental illness is a necessary prerequisite for civil confinement, the primary issue is in accurately defining it.

The psychological community has generally used the term "mental illness" for purposes of diagnosis and treatment (Winick, 1995). The legal construct, however, assumes a slightly different nature. Beyond facilitating appropriate civil commitment determinations, the meaning of mental illness is relevant in law to insanity defense verdicts as well as to competency to stand trial, refuse treatment, manage property, or be executed (Ibid.: 554). Given the variety of legal contexts in which definitions of mental illness assume dispositive value, the need for accuracy in clinical diagnoses becomes much more pronounced. Regrettably, the legal meaning of mental illness has ominously and demonstrably established for itself anything but the embodiment of precision and clarity.

The Legal Meaning of Mental Illness

The abolitionist reformers of the 1970s vehemently argued that mental illness was a bankrupt and easily manipulated term (e.g., Melton et al., 1987: 217; Holstein, 1993: 3-4; Arrigo, 1993a: 19-23; 1996a: 43-45). Indeed, legislative attempts to define and operationalize the term offered mostly vague and circular interpretations (Levy and Rubenstein, 1996). Over the years, the law has imposed only minimal limitations on the mental illness construct, often using broad and general definitions (e.g., Winick, 1995: 554; Comment, 1983; Arrigo, 1996a; see also Dusky v. United States, 1960). Melton et al. (1987: 221) cite one of the most specific of legislative initiatives to define mental illness:

"Mental illness" means a substantial disorder of thought, mood, perception, orientation, or memory, any of which grossly impairs judgment, behavior, capacity to recognize reality, or ability to meet the ordinary demands of life, but shall not include mental retardation.

This proposal is far more explicit than the tautological observation: "a mentally ill person means a person whose mental health is substantially impaired" (Ibid.); however, the former definition lingers in ambivalence, relying on equally vague terms such as "substantial," "grossly impaired," and "ordinary demands of life."

The legislature's obvious imprecisions and operational failures with defining mental illness, in effect, gave the courts the role of "fashion[ing] a definition for the words 'mentally ill'...thereby fill[ing] the void in the statutory hospital law" (Arrigo, 1992: 142; see also Dodd v. Hughes, 1965: 542). The capacity of the courts to assign meaning to this construct, however, is tempered, in part, by the limits imposed on governmental state power to commit involuntarily (Arrigo, 1996a; Winick, 1995). The Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment protections establishing freedom from restraint, freedom of movement, and freedom from unwanted invasions of body and mind prohibit the state from arbitrary confinement decisions, thereby heightening the burden of justification (e.g., Winick, 1995: 500; Arrigo, 1992: 143). Infringement upon these liberty interests requires "reasonably clear guidelines" (Smith v. Goguen, 1974: 572-573; see also Youngberg v. Romeo, 1982).

Given that many state legislatures have effectively abdicated to the courts their responsibility to define precisely and clearly the meaning of mental illness, judicial tribunals (especially appellate courts and administrative decision brokers) have uncomfortably assumed the task of ascertaining the (non)existence of mental illness in relation to a particular plaintiff or petitioner in a given case (Arrigo, 1993a: 23-25). To assist in this process, most courts have deferred to the professional judgment of mental health "experts" (e.g., Arrigo, 1996a; Reisner and Slobogin, 1990; Warren, 1982; Bonnie, 1993; Holstein, 1993; Melton et al., 1987). Typically, this includes the clinical wisdom of psychiatrists and psychologists. This dependence on the medical establishment in the decision-making process persists, despite substantial research documenting the lack of consensus among professionals in matters of diagnosis (Monahan and Wexler, 1978; LaFond and Durham, 1992). The lack of consensus among mental health professionals is, in part, a function of medicine's ineffective pursuit of a precise description for mental illness (Shell, 1980: 6).

Perhaps most disturbing about the deference courts exhibit in matters psychiatric is their overreliance on medical diagnoses. Indeed, expert forensic testimony is viewed as integral to civil commitment determinations. As others have shown, however, the medical community, when confronted with clinical uncertainty, favors a "presumption of illness" (Scheff, 1984: 6-30, 91; Arrigo, 1996a: 38, 118). Thus, it is not unreasonable to surmise that borderline cases are all too frequently identified as instances of persons experiencing mental illness for legal (i.e., involuntary commitment) purposes.

The Criterion of Dangerousness

The concept of dangerousness is pivotal to civil confinement matters. During the 1970s, in response to the inadequacies of the threshold finding of mental illness, many legislatures and courts began implementing dangerousness provisions (see O'Connor v. Donaldson, 1975). This added substantive criterion requires a showing that the individual poses a threat of serious harm to self and/or others. Although initially touted as a well-intended and much-needed psycholegal reform measure, the dangerousness criterion has spawned a host of controversies in mental health law, challenging the overall legitimacy of state-sponsored civil commitment. Difficulties with defining dangerousness in a legal context, problems with the accuracy and reliability of dangerous predictions, and erosions of presumed unfettered civil liberties have generated much of this debate. These issues are briefly examined in the proceeding sections.

The Meaning of Dangerousness

The more rigid standards for civil confinement that developed out of the 1970's reform movement required that, in addition to a mental disability, an individual must pose a substantial threat of serious harm to oneself or others (Levy and Rubenstein, 1996). Generally, this provision was interpreted to imply a real and present threat of harm (see, e.g., Lessard v. Schmidt, 1972) and a clear and convincing proof of dangerousness (Addington v. Texas, 1979). The meaning of dangerousness refers not only to violence to oneself or others, but also to severe neglect, where one is unable to survive in the community, that is, where one is "gravely disabled" (Comment, 1983: 674-677; Levy and Rubenstein, 1996; O'Connor v. Donaldson, 1974).

The concept of dangerousness has been referred to as one of the most elusive doctrines in mental disability law (Levy and Rubenstein, 1996). Durham and LaFond (1985) describe agreed-upon standards for dangerousness as "woefully lacking" (as cited in Arrigo, 1996a: 55). Indeed, Shah (1975, 1977) and Wettstein (1984) regard the concept as malleable and clouded by incoherence.

Similar to mental illness, statutory construction of dangerousness is essentially minimal and, thus, convincingly vague (see, e.g., Simpson, 1984; Arrigo, 1996a), leaving the responsibility to define and operationalize the construct with the courts (Melton et al., 1987). This endeavor is confounded by their reliance on the mental health profession to "fill in the details" (Levy and Rubenstein, 1996: 29). Curiously, all available evidence suggests that the psychiatric community is itself vastly uncertain, purporting several contestable definitions of their own.

For example, Brooks (1974), in his analysis of the term "dangerousness," isolated four components worthy of consideration: (1) the severity or magnitude of predicted harm; (2) the probability that the harm will occur; (3) the frequency with which the harm may occur; and (4) the imminence or how soon the harm will occur. By weighing each of these factors, Brooks argued a conclusion (judgment) could be reached regarding the dangerousness of an individual. Thus, a trivial and unlikely harm such as tossing rocks at automobiles would constitute less danger than a serious and likely harm such as a drug-related murder that would constitute more danger (Levy and Rubenstein, 1996; Melton et al., 1987).

The concept of harm has been further assessed by most states (Melton et al., 1987) and their respective courts (see, e.g., State v. Krol, 1975; Matter of Harry M., 1983) as a threat of physical injury. Further, a number of states allow for the commitment of individuals predicted to represent an emotional harm to others (Melton, et al., 1987). Generally speaking, though, predictions of dangerousness to self or others can be regarded as the possibility of wrongfully doing physical harm to self or (an)other human being(s).

Though typically vague in nature, statutory definitions of dangerousness range from "mentally ill and likely to injure himself or others" (Alaska Stat. 1984), to requirements of recent "overt acts" suggesting that the individual is dangerous. Pennsylvania (1984), for example, requires a clear and present danger component as demonstrated by conduct occurring within the past 30 days. This overt act requirement represents an issue where the courts are divided (Arrigo, 1996a: 124-127). Here the question is whether civil commitment is justified by a "mere prediction of future harm, without evidence of an actual act, attempt, or threat of dangerous behavior" (Levy and Rubenstein, 1996: 31). According to some commentators, the overt act requirement is regarded as a remedy for the arbitrary and unreliable predictions of dangerousness made by mental health professionals (Ibid.: 32).

Proponents have received some support from courts on the overt act issue. Several courts have ruled that without an overt act requirement, a given state's commitment statutes would be "overly broad or unconstitutionally vague" (Ibid.; see also Lessard v. Schmidt, 1972; Lynch v. Baxley, 1974; Doremus v. Farrell, 1975). More recently, however, courts have generally failed to require such evidence (e.g., Project Release v. Provost, 1983), and despite the reform efforts, overt conduct is typically not a prerequisite for a finding of dangerousness (Melton et al., 1987: 223).

Predicting Dangerousness

The controversy surrounding the addition of "dangerousness" as a criterion for civil commitment is acutely problematic. Empirical research repeatedly demonstrates that mental health professionals remain unable to predict accurately the dangerousness of any one individual (e.g., Monahan, 1996; Arrigo, 1996a: 66-68; see also Barefoot v. Estelle, 1983). Referring to Brooks' (1974) four considerations related to dangerousness, an assessment of the factors associated with a probability of adverse consequences is distinctly contingent upon whether psychiatry and/or psychology is sufficiently advanced in these diagnoses. As Arrigo (1993b: 144) notes, the practical results of such efforts have not been promising. Indeed, as one established expert in predictions of future violent behavior concludes, "when it comes to predicting violence, our crystal balls are terribly cloudy" (Monahan, 1996: 107).

Despite the medical establishment's inability to predict dangerousness with any degree of accuracy, the testimony of expert witnesses remains a pivotal factor in civil commitment proceedings (Reisner and Slobogin, 1990). Further, states continue to sustain police power authority in issues of civil commitment (Arrigo, 1992). Interestingly, most courts have yet to implement additional due process safeguards to defend against unwarranted commitments, instead accepting "remarkably low levels of predictive accuracy" to justify involuntary confinement (Levy and Rubenstein, 1996: 31). Rather than raising legal safeguards, courts have considered the psychiatric community's fallibility in predicting future dangerousness as justification for lowering due process protections (Ibid.: 31).

Dangerousness and Civil Liberties

One example of how inaccurate predictions of future dangerousness changed the legal landscape for the mentally ill is the case of Addington v. Texas (1979). In Addington, the court rejected the "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" standard for civil commitment, noting that "there is serious question as to whether the state could ever prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an individual was both mentally ill and likely to be dangerous" (p. 422). Consequently, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the clear-and-convincing standard in commitment cases. Some critics have vehemently argued that applying the clear-and-convincing or any of the other currently utilized standards of proof to predictions of future dangerousness is nothing short of "futile" (Cocozza, 1976: 1101). Given that the accuracy of psychiatric predictions is considerably lower than the minimally required 51% standard (i.e., preponderance of the evidence), applying a more stringent test would, at least, seem to be questionable clinicolegal practice.

A significant body of criticism converges on the mental health field's propensity for over-inclusivity. The "better safe than sorry" climate of the medical community is responsible for ceaseless numbers of perfectly harmless individuals routinely being diagnosed as "dangerous" and consequently subjected to involuntary confinement (see, e.g., Ennis and Litwack, 1974). Livermore et al. (1968: 84) elucidate psychiatry's over-prediction as follows:

Assume that one person out of a thousand will kill. Assume that an exceptionally accurate test is created which differentiates with 95 percent effectiveness those who will kill from those who will not. If 100,000 people were tested, out of the 100 who would kill, 95 would be isolated. Unfortunately, out of the 99,900 who would not kill, 4,995 people would also be isolated as potential killers. In these circumstances, it is clear that we could not justify incarcerating all 5,090 people. If, in the criminal law, it is better that ten guilty men go free than that one innocent man suffer, how can we say in the civil commitment area that it is better that 54 harmless people be incarcerated lest one dangerous man be free?

Livermore's analysis not only embodies the inherent contradiction in the civil versus criminal confinement process, but also represents the further erosion of constitutional safeguards for disordered citizens. In matters of civil commitment, the "better safe than sorry" approach directly opposes the "better sorry than safe" sentiment of the criminal justice system (Arrigo, 1996a: 75-79). Clearly, on this matter, the liberty rights of the mentally ill do not equate with the liberty rights of the criminally accused.

The controversy surrounding the dangerousness criterion for civil commitment in most states is conspicuously discernible. Predictions of dangerousness used by courts relying on the mental health field are as unreliable as the meaning of dangerousness is vague. As it stands, the process of predicting one's likelihood for engaging in future harm is responsible for the unnecessary confinement of innocent and harmless individuals (Morse, 1982). Further, it is responsible for a failure to confine several who are truly a danger to social welfare (Morse, 1988).

The criticisms of dangerousness as vague in connotation and inaccurate in prediction are equaled only by charges that mental illness definitions are arbitrary, imprecise, and unclear. Consistent with Foucault's social control thesis, the application of his critique to contemporary civil commitment practices seems evident: involuntary confinement of the dangerous, noncriminal mentally ill person is a sustained effort to discipline difference.(2) Indeed, the mental illness and dangerousness criteria, as the imperfect and incomplete constituents of civil commitment determinations, function as clinicolegal justifications for policing public hygiene - for correcting, sanitizing, and depathologizing one's unique, though nonhomogenous, subjectivity. To be sure, current civil commitment practices, informed by the knowledge of medical science and, thus, operating as an inventive mode of surveillance, police non-normalizing thought-behavior and productively contain it (e.g., through drug therapy) to advance the truth of psychiatric justice. This is a truth that discounts those differences constitutive of the divergent and embodied realities experienced by various mentally ill citizens (e.g., Arrigo, 1996b; 1996c; 1996d).

Chaos Theory and the Social Control Thesis

However cogent Foucault's thesis is in and of itself, more recent insights into social behavior provide a logical and necessary extension. It is our contention that Foucault's social control argument, as applied to contemporary psycho-legal practice, leaves room for advancement. Though the utility and vitality of Foucault's critique, as employed thus far, resonates quite distinctly, the inroads provided by chaos theory and/or nonlinear dynamics move the critique still further. We contend that the emerging paradigm of chaos/complexity theory contributes to an enhanced understanding of the social control thesis and its consequent implications for medical justice in society. Similar to our initial analysis on Foucault and civil commitment, we begin with an overview of the relevant theoretical points and then provide a sustained application.

The Chaos Paradigm: Modernity Versus Postmodernity

Chaos theory provides a template from which to understand the complex and turbulent behaviors embodied within disorderly phenomena (e.g., Abraham, Abraham, and Shaw, 1992; Hayles, 1990; Porter and Gleick, 1990; Prigogine and Stengers, 1984; Briggs and Peat, 1989). The "noise" in systems traditionally disregarded by modern science in the pursuit of prediction and control is the source of considerable analysis by postmodern science (for applications to law and criminology, see Arrigo, 1995). Indeed, what was once regarded as irrelevant in the quest for knowledge is now an object of declaration itself. The modernist pursuit of cause and effect explanatory rationales and its accompanying linear method of social inquiry are supplanted by the new "orderly disorder" equations of chaos theory.

Nonlinear dynamics (chaology) challenges orthodox propositions regarding the search for universal laws and/or global Truths. It recognizes the innate characteristics of change, variation, unpredictability, and difference in the behavior of physical and social systems. As a model of discovery, chaos theory portends an epistemological break from the modern scientific world. Chance, randomness, inconsistency, and flux are key components to how systems (including the clinicolegal apparatus) behave. Thus, while Foucault's genealogy takes issue with the operation of psychiatry/psychology, the role of the institution, and medical justice, chaos theory moves beyond mere critique. It not only further explains why socially policing public hygiene is the product of the modern episteme, but also suggests how society might function under different circumstances, that is, behave without the stifling control imposed by coercive clinicolegal regimes of disciplinary surveillance.

The behavior of natural and social systems is demonstrably nonlinear. In contrast to modern conceptions, nonlinearity in human affairs is not processed as irrational, imperfect, or deviant; rather, it is viewed as the inherent consequence of social relations (e.g., Young, 1991a; 1991b). The assumptions of modern inquiry - that the world is an orderly whole, capable of systematic reduction revealing functional parts, each causing a discernible, logical, and predictable behavior - are subject to many extraneous, anomalous interferences (Arrigo and Young, 1998). Though certainly logical and intuitive, the notion that the world is akin to a "machine" cannot account for the seemingly random disorder existing within it. Nonlinear analysis relieves modern science of its futile search for precise order or explanatory formulae (Milovanovic, 1997).

Goerner (1994), for example, alludes to the classical (modern) view of linearity and order as the baseline of society, with nonlinearity and disorder representing deviation. He argues that this model is being displaced by the postmodern notion that disorder is in fact the baseline, and order is deviation. Linking this sentiment to Foucault's thesis as applied to civil commitment, a change in clinicolegal perspective would follow: efforts to impose productive order would be replaced with technologies of disorder. We contend that this is the junction where Foucault's thesis is considerably advanced by the contributions of chaos theory.

Chaos in Social Systems: A Necessary Transition

Chaos theory informs us that no one state can be regarded as a normal, natural, inevitable pattern of social life toward which all individuals or systems converge (Young, 1992; 1997a; 1997b). Contrarily, society and its constituent segments must be examined in light of the disorderly, divergent, and nonlinear dynamics that define it. Chaos theory claims that these dynamics are propelled by changes in key parameters that can incite a stable, linearly progressing system into a state of chaos (i.e., orderly disorder). These diverse social parameters consume the society around us. Consuming variables such as economic inequalities, political privileges, power relations, and other social forces are all critical factors that, under severe conditions, become catalysts for the chaotic dynamics inherent in all systems. Controlling these parameters has traditionally been regarded as integral to the containment of unpredictability - a condition viewed mostly in modern science as unacceptable. Repressing the presence of disorder (e.g., through the disciplinary power of medicine and law) neutralizes the prospects for society to assume its potentially chaotic nature. As Foucault (1965, 1977, 1990) reminds us, this clinicolegal endeavor has historical significance. Indeed, our critical examination of contemporary civil confinement practices reveals just how profound the repression of chaos can be.

Society consciously manages those parameters considered excesses of order (e.g., redistribution of wealth, increases or decreases in the assault on crime, institutionalization for dangerous, noncriminal mentally ill). Society, through its systems of regulation (e.g., hospitals, courts, schools), keeps these excesses within predefined boundaries (Young, 1991a; 1997b). The chaos principle of negative feedback loops demonstrates this management function at work.

As Young (1997b: 77-84) asserts, negative feedback loops "defeat flexibility and change; thus end[ing] in death for society, which uses them as logic for social control." The "death" of society that Young refers to results from a lack of growth or the reproduction of only equilibrium conditions. Chaologists believe that "healthy" systems need chaos (e.g., Pool, 1989; Van Eenwyk, 1991). Adaptation to changing social conditions requires a flexibility that, in turn, depends on choices. Homeostatic or equilibrium conditions achieved by way of social control negate choices and, thus, the possibility of growth through adaptation.

Chaos theory's idea of order out of chaos describes a new, more complex state that emerges from chaotic conditions. It is a spontaneous self-organization into a more adaptive order. It necessarily fills the role of compelling an orderly, but antiquated, system into a reconstituted (dis)order critical for accommodation in an evolving social system (e.g., Butz, 1997; 1992; see also Kauffman, 1991, on anti-chaos and the necessary transitory stage of chaos between periods of order). Thus, nonlinear dynamics maintains that disorder and periods of chaos are necessary in all social systems (for applications to the clinicolegal system, see Arrigo, 1996a: 192-200; 1994).

Returning to Foucault's thesis, we note the means by which historical suppression (physical) and repression (psychical) of this necessary disorder within the clinicolegal apparatus have muted the possibility for any liberating social transitions (i.e., self organization) to occur. The disciplines of psychology and psychiatry, as regimes of knowledge/power, have forcibly neutralized and sanitized this natural growth process. As a result, society has endorsed a certain truth reflected in its time-honored position, namely, to police disorderly and disorganized noncriminal, though potentially dangerous, behavior on the basis of medical (i.e., psychiatric) justice (Arrigo, 1996a).(3) This containment of self-organizing potential is observable on an even more invidious level in the form of psychotropic medication. Psychoactive drugs, dispensed for purposes of appropriate "corrective" therapy, normalize thought and depathologize behavior. They also suppress the potential for natural growth and development.

The Medical Justice System: From Linear to Nonlinear Management 

As Foucault's (1965, 1976) discourse on mental illness and psychiatry reveals and as our contemporary assessment of civil commitment practices discloses, disordered psychiatric citizens are socially policed and hygienically managed to further the episteme of medical justice. In addition, the deference availed to the mental health community by the legal system in matters psychiatric establishes a new instrument of control. Behaviors that were formerly governed by the criminal justice apparatus are diverted to the medical justice system. What was once difference in the form of deviance is now difference in the form of disease. This alternative articulation of disorder is subject to treatment rather than punishment. With continued neuropsychological and psychopharmacological discoveries, crimes of alterity are less criminal and more medical (i.e., more effectively addressed by controlling the soul, not just the body). Thus, the psychiatrization or medicalization of crime assumes a political dynamic (Sedgwick, 1982; Guattari, 1984). It entails disciplining those disease-ridden and dangerous-prone segments in society (Arrigo, 1992: 9-12) in the most humane of fashions (see, e.g., Szasz, 1974, on the myth of mental illness).

The preceding observations describe a linear model of management. Chaos theory argues that the way to regulate any phenomena in society is through nonlinear control (Milovanovic, 1997). Thus, it follows that the method by which mental illness ought to be approached is through (dis)order. Again, according to chaos theory, absolute, tight, rigid control is detrimental to the growth of any social system. Mental illness can no longer be regarded as a crime or a disease; rather, it must be viewed as a corollary to the "illness" of society in general. Indeed, mental illness is not a necessarily controlled critical parameter inducing chaos; instead, it is a reaction to the existing perturbations of larger key parameters (e.g., the economic and social inadequacies of deinstitutionalization, the absence of affordable, decent, and safe housing, the devastation of poverty, the spiraling costs of health care, and the victimization that comes with crime). Nonlinear management does not promote a radical absence of control; rather, it is a dialectic in which freedom and control are extolled.

If, as chaos theory claims, social dynamics are inherently nonlinear, then they cannot be regulated (as currently practiced) through linear methods (i.e., negative feedback loops). Changes in key parameters can "push" society beyond the brink of stability or equilibrium conditions. Given society's inability to control significantly these parameters through its sundry systems (e.g., criminal justice, medical, social welfare), continued linear management, on its own, will be futile. We maintain that the prevailing condition of society is beyond the scope of linear organization. Society as a chaotic system (i.e., as a system of [dis]order), where key parameters remain unstable, requires a different set of guiding principles. In such a system, we recognize that only chaos can cope with chaos (Young, 1992; 1997a; 1997b). Thus, a requisite degree of nonlinearity in management is needed.

In the remaining two sections, we examine more closely how such nonlinearity would affect the issue of civil commitment and the behavior of the clinicolegal system. Two principles of chaos theory help illuminate this project. These include the notion of attractors and fractal space. Although we recognize that chaos theory is replete with many other principles (Arrigo and Young, 1998; Milovanovic, 1997), it is our position that these two concepts are uniquely suited to further our post-Foucauldian analysis on involuntary confinement of the mentally ill.

Attractors: The Strange Route to Social Difference

Attractors are patterns of stability that a system settles into over time (Goerner, 1994: 39). The trajectories of nonlinear systems tend to converge or situate themselves into one of four patterns (Abraham, Abraham, and Shaw, 1992). Thus, attractors in nonlinear systems are analogous to a magnet, pulling the system toward it (Briggs and Peat, 1989: 36). They function to produce an orderly behavior in dynamical systems. The quality of order, however, is paramount.

One type of attractor that chaos theory identifies is the point attractor. It is also termed the fixed-point or single-point attractor. The point attractor encourages a system to approach a stable end state (Davies, 1989). It functions to maintain a systemic state of equilibrium. Butz (1997: 27) refers to the point attractor as depicting a system whose "dynamics represent a...movement toward rest." If all natural and social systems are chaotic (constituted by [dis]order), how, then, do fixed-point attractors function in practice?

The diversity of a system, notwithstanding its natural inclination toward disorder, is attracted to a point of stasis, that is, a convergence of trajectories that produces a stable, homogenous end state. Consider, for example, the manner in which victim offender mediation (VOM) sessions move to resolution (Arrigo and Schehr, 1998), or the manner in which administrative psychiatric tribunals adjudicate a petitioner's request for release from institutional confinement (Arrigo, 1996b; 1996c). There are many perspectives, bits of information, interpretive meanings, expressions of sentiment, etc., that could inform these different sessions/hearings. Instead, however, the discourse is monitored, controlled, and cleansed, producing a homeostatic outcome: restitution or release respectively. Without such point attractors, the VOM session is termed a failure and the civil commitment proceeding ends in continued institutional confinement.

We note, though, that the more natural, spontaneous, fluid activity of these two systems (i.e., the VOM hearing and mental health law tribunal as ancillary justice apparatuses), embodied by its actors and agents, is quashed by the point attractor. Behavior that would otherwise symbolize the diversity and heterogeneity of the social is displaced by the fixed attractor. The fixed attractor harnesses diversity into a single categorical representation, endeavoring to create homogeneity with inherently heterogeneous groups.

This same notion can be loosely traced to Foucault's (1965) archeology of madness. Foucault's critique of the modern institution accentuates the role of the mental hospital in confining difference until such difference is "healed" and one is able to rejoin society. Extending this observation to present-day confinement practices, the civil commitment of the mentally ill and dangerous signifies a disciplinary effort to normalize such individuals. Thus, the point attractor employs psychiatric confinement both to draw all difference to it and, subsequently, to channel all difference into a healthier end state. As a result, the depathologized citizen is reinstated; s/he returns to the homogeneity of the whole.

The mechanism of social control functions to ensure the magnetic effect of the point attractor. It aspires to limit human (social) interaction to a given attractor (i.e., a specific "way of being" or a particular "socially appropriate" behavior). The apparatus of control attempts to identify the system's key parameters, that is, those pivotal disturbances presumably causing chaos (irregularity, disorder) in society, and endeavors to keep them "in check." Thus, the parameter of social behavior is attracted, through coercive means, to a specified, predetermined, and morally motivated end state: psychological normalcy, wellness, health. Any deviation from this end state quickly subjects the system (and persons within it) to control inputs such as withdrawal or stabilization. In medical justice, this is accomplished through involuntary commitment (a withdrawal input designed to fix the anomaly) and/or involuntary medication (a stabilization input designed to arrest the disorder). Thus, we see that stifling difference (i.e., psychiatric disorder) precludes systemic transitions to more natural periods of chaos. Healthy mental functioning is the point attractor through which social-psychological control is sustained.

Beyond our contention that eliminating difference is toxic to societal growth, we recognize that other factors undermine the logic of the point attractor in medical and psychological control. There are extraneous variables that often encumber mental health compliance, perhaps rendering it altogether impossible. As Young (1997a: 85) notes: "It's no good telling people to behave one way if critical variables make it difficult to comply." Thus, exercising control over social behavior by regulating mental health, that is, by defining and coercing psychological normalcy, wellness, and health, yields conformity with defined norms provided individuals have some conscious and/or meaningful control over their own emotional well-being. To demand such adherence would necessitate the elimination of many unpredictable and uncontrollable influences (key parameters) on individual mental functioning (e.g., poverty, crime, divorce, unemployment, death, and other "crises"). When medical and psychological control mechanisms are active, the individual is punished for reacting naturally to external and uncontrollable stimuli. Indeed, the system proceeds to reprimand humans for simply being human!

Chaos theory advances Foucault's social control thesis by explaining how and why the medical justice system behaves as it does in relation to the civilly committed, given the concept of the point attractor. However, there is another attractor within nonlinear dynamics that represents the potential for liberating growth and change. This is the strange attractor. The strange attractor offers a vision of what society could be without the repressive limits imposed by the fixed attractor (i.e., strict control of difference). The notion of the strange attractor, then, allows us to move beyond a mere critique of the point attractor and disciplinary practices toward a more emancipatory, orderly disorder dynamic governing social affairs and civic life. Below we sketch the operation of the strange attractor and link it to our post-Foucauldian analysis of involuntary hospitalization for the mentally ill.

Chaos theory insists that strange attractors are more conducive to the presence of social well-being (e.g., Arrigo and Young, 1998; Milovanovic, 1997). The strange attractor, most often depicted as the butterfly attractor, governs the chaotic, far-from-equilibrium conditions of complex, adaptive systems. The system's movements or tendencies never completely repeat themselves, never totally trace the same path twice. This is particularly apparent at the microinteractional or situational level where a great deal of unpredictability prevails (for applications to psychiatrically disordered criminal defendants, see Arrigo, 1994). Over time, however, with repeated behavior something of a macro-interactional or global explanatory pattern emerges. As Arrigo (1996a: 199) describes in his assessment of chaos theory and the criminally insane:

The ostensibly unintegrated ramblings of a serial killer include the repetition of dissociative themes. The horrifically inspired activities of a pedophile include a series of iterative rituals. The seemingly crazed thoughts of a cannibal include recurring images consistent with his/her desire to digest human flesh.

The significance of the strange attractor is in its capacity to embrace fully nonlinear and apparently uncoordinated local behavior, while, at the same time, to plot out the parameters or boundaries toward which the system tends more globally. Thus, the strange attractor essentially permits endless and undefined movement within the naturally emerging limits of a given system.

As our previous investigation demonstrated, linear control of the mentally ill by the system of medical justice denies not only the more inherent nonlinear dynamics governing a disordered person's behavior, but also fails to acknowledge the key social parameters beyond the control of the individual that tend toward chaos. Both impede societal growth. The organic presence of unpredictability and unmanageability necessitates the emergence of strange, less-defined parameters for social functioning. Social behavior must not be limited to a precisely demarcated notion of appropriateness; rather, it must "accept variations around a theme" (Young, 1992: 448-460).

When applying the strange attractor phenomenon to civil confinement, several observations are worth noting. The point attractor, as operating under psycholegal mechanisms of direct control, draws social behavior to a stated theme (involuntary commitment as an outcome). The native tendencies of disorder (difference) in society, however, tend more toward a strange attraction. We are not identical to one another; at best we are only similar. At the same time, the strange attractor in the medical justice system draws, by way of natural tendency, human behavior around a macro-interactional theme (e.g., mental health and wellness). This local variation, coupled with global organization, is what is meant by chaos in the form of the strange attractor.

Consider the notion of dangerousness. In some jurisdictions it is represented by the threat of overt action. Although these perilous expressions of dangerousness may be similar, there is always some degree of differentiation between any two individuals or circumstances. At the local and everyday level, mental health law experts regard this degree of variation as clear grounds for insisting upon more precision in defining and predicting future possible harm. Instruments of psycholegal control, as represented by a point attractor, disregard traces of difference. Indeed, in the face of medical uncertainty psychiatrists find mental illness and tend to make over-inclusive determinations of dangerousness. Thus, civil commitment obtains. We contend that the meaning of such diverse threats, over time and with careful plotting of behavior, could produce a strange attractor effect. In actuality, the threats are variations around a theme of dangerousness, signifying different realities for diverse individuals. Some threats are likely to produce harm and others are not. The "strange" form of social control would allow difference to be difference within a self-ordered social system. Arguably, as a result, fewer noncriminal and presumed dangerous mentally ill citizens would be wrongfully subjected to institutionalization.

The Fractal Geometry of Social Control

Foucault's (1965, 1976, 1990) genealogy also confronts, although sometimes implicitly, the structural component of the psycho-legal system. In other words, there is an enduring tendency to regard social and individual phenomena as organized around binary oppositions such as good-evil, reason-unreason, mentally healthy-mentally ill. These oppositions are particularly relevant to a critique of the very meaning of mental illness and dangerousness in relation to civil confinement determinations. Thus, as Foucault (1965, 1976) systematically demonstrates, the very identification of persons as mentally ill or dangerous provides us with considerable room to engage in critical reflexive analysis.

Geometry and chaos theory describe fractals as irregular forms (Wegner and Tyler, 1993: 16; Series, 1992: 139), infinitely detailed and undifferentiated. A fractal is confined to a finite area, yet upon closer evaluation, the area becomes increasingly vast and immeasurable as a result of the complexity of its form. In other words, they are bounded by definite size, yet they can be infinitely complex (Butz, 1997: 94). Consequently, the application of fractals to social systems permits an endless possibility of movement and measurement within the given system.

Let us consider the clinicolegal apparatus and its civil commitment decisionmaking processes in relation to the concept of dangerousness. The system is bounded by certain forms; that is, it functions to produce definable meanings. Persons can be found: (1) dangerous and mentally ill, requiring involuntary confinement, (2) dangerous and non-mentally ill, requiring possible criminal incapacitation, (3) nondangerous and mentally ill, requiring no hospitalization, and (4) nondangerous and non-mentally ill, again requiring no civil confinement. The potential forms associated with that element of the system (here defining dangerousness in relation to civil commitment matters) are useful only insofar as the structured, defined forms allow. Thus, there is absolutely no room for meaningful interpretation of dangerousness outside those forms that the clinicolegal system permits.

However, if the system were constrained by alternative fractal forms (e.g., different non-clinicolegal meanings for the construct dangerousness), the complexity of the form would yield greater possibility for diverse understanding. These different forms would provide opportunity to find meaning outside of that which the established fractals deem permissible. Essentially, a more inclusive realm of possible meaning would materialize. Indeed, given similar events concerning a question of dangerousness, more than one social reality would exist; more than one perspective would be heard. For the construct of dangerousness to be imbued with greater relevant meaning, boundaries of social definition must be loose and open to varying interpretations.

Chaos theory asserts that the value of any truth has a fractal nature. Instead of labeling a behavior or meaning as right-wrong, just-unjust, normal-aberrant, the fractal quality of any thought or behavior requires its disposition to be a matter of degree (Arrigo, 1997b: 185). The socially condoned categorization of realities into absolutes dismisses the more logical assumption that reason, truth, health, normality, and the like are the product of intersubjective and interpretive practices (Holstein, 1993). Arrigo (1997b: 185-186) also alludes to this indeterminacy in stating that in many situations, "a more honest and complete reading of the circumstances suggests that interpreting reality is about shades of meaning, degrees of accountability." No two people respond identically to changes in personal or social parameters.

For example, if we observed only the outcome (i.e., different, non-normal behavior) and not the fractal realm of diverse possibility that exists within individuality (i.e., multiple ways of being), it would be easy to identify the end state as requiring the social policing of public hygiene. If, however, we perceived the differently abled individual as only one of many citizens whose difference (i.e., mental illness) was of no more consequence than any other distinguishing characteristic, our stance might change. We might then focus on the larger social parameters or conditions that give rise to the realities we observe. Further, we might then comprehend how chance, randomness, variety, and the nonlinear progression of small differences in situational misfortunes produce certain results for everyone (Young, 1991a). The personal effect is a matter of degree. Some will live out these conditions psychotically, anti-socially, depressively; some will experience these parameters less problematically and still others will not be significantly affected at all.

Thus, the value of any reality assumes a fractal nature. The system of law and psychiatry must be prepared to embrace this fractal, as opposed to linear and binary, logic. With no clear distinction between conditions that give rise to mental illness and/or dangerousness and those that do not, the medical justice system's interests in socially policing public hygiene, through the instrumental activity of civil commitment determinations, cannot justifiably assign a binary label (i.e., mentally ill versus mentally well) to individuals.

Chaos theory, then, consistent with Foucault's social control thesis, suggests a more nonlinear, nonconfining approach to regulating difference. Where Foucault's archeology of madness accounts for the proliferation of productive disciplinary regimes based on scientific knowledge, the orderly disorder notion of fractals explains how society could effectively manage the nonlinearity of human existence (including why it should do so). We regard these observations as an important extension of Foucault's enduring social philosophy.

According to chaology, fractal forms of management and control are essential. This approach assumes a more open nature, one that allows for a certain amount of diversity and individuality within a specified domain of inquiry. Thus, chaos theory would require a more widely constructed interpretive schema for defining "mental illness" and/or "dangerousness" than what presently exists. In fractal forms, both order and disorder are found.

Thus, it logically follows that tighter, more rigid control is not necessary for an overall sense of order. The system of social control can accommodate nonlinearity (i.e., individuality, diversity, difference), yet maintain some degree of regulation. Again, the constituency subject to control (i.e., the noncriminal, though potentially dangerous, mentally ill citizen) is not manageable by confined forms; variation must be considered to be a response to the difference that society and its members embody.

Conclusion

In principle, the goal of any democratic society is to maximize the quality of life for all, while limiting the extent to which its constituents are subjected to social control measures. Foucault (1965, 1976, 1990) provides extensive historical evidence that psychiatry/psychology, the role of the institution, and medical justice are the very antithesis of this goal. We have argued that this realization forms the basis for his social control thesis. In addressing the origins of marginalization and demarcation of psychiatric difference, Foucault's analysis highlights a compelling need to reconstitute the current system of confinement. Not only are the mentally ill regarded as different, they are also socially policed and hygienically regulated based on what medical science purports to know about mental disease or defect. As Foucault reminds us, it is this disease, as difference, that is systematically normalized, depathologized, and homogenized in the pursuit of scientific (power and) knowledge.

Our analysis led us to consider how the social control thesis operates in the arena of mental health law, especially given contemporary civil confinement practices. Defining mental illness and dangerousness were pivotal to this assessment. Despite various neuropsychological and psychopharmacological discoveries, a host of conceptual, definitional, and predictive problems clearly plague the clinicolegal system. Notwithstanding these dilemmas, the courts continue to rely on the best available medical evidence - evidence that is, by all accounts, imprecise, incomplete, and unclear. Thus, we concluded that not only is difference regulated and cleansed, it is also managed and sanitized in the furtherance of psychiatric justice.

Admittedly, our presentation of Foucault's thesis and its relevance for contemporary mental health law was limited. This choice, however, was calculated. We also considered whether Foucault's critique could be advanced in light of the new science of chaos theory. Thus, we were more interested in exploring several possible linkages between Foucault's archeology of madness and principles of chaos. Chaos theory or nonlinear dynamics claims that a mixture of both order and disorder is more consistent with how natural and/or social systems function. Further, chaos theory argues that so-called anomalous occurrences, "noise" in the system, or other unexplained irregularities are not insignificant for mapping out the organization of phenomena. We conceptually suggested how both principles represent a dramatic break from modern science and its commitment to order, predictability, control. Although we recognized that Foucault's thesis was somewhat consistent with these notions, nonlinear dynamics clearly represented an important ideological backdrop from which to articulate a post-Foucauldian analysis of contemporary civil commitment practices.

To advance this assessment, we broadly addressed how chaos naturally operates in social systems. We examined how nonlinear dynamics exists among phenomena, thereby more organically promoting flexibility, adaptability, and the possibility for heightened societal growth. We also identified the shift in processes needed to move easily from linear to nonlinear modes of managing behavior in complex social systems.

This exposition was significant for applying two central chaos theory principles to the problem of civil commitment for the noncriminal, though potentially dangerous, mentally ill citizen. These key concepts included the notion of attractors and fractal space. In particular, we demonstrated how the strange attractor and fractal forms challenge the social control model of medical justice.

As a general statement, chaos theory asserts that individual differences must be allowed to exist; that is, tolerance for individual, nonlinear behavior does not dispose a social system to unmanageable disorder. Indeed, the fractal nature of human existence tends toward a strange attractor: a naturally occurring order within the disorder of a system. Excessive regulation at the personal or local level does not ensure stability at the societal or global levels. We concluded by suggesting that concern must be directed toward those key parameters that are loosely and unstably constructed, giving rise to the presence of mental illness. In the context of civil commitment criteria and the clinicolegal system responsible for the adjudication of such matters, efforts to arrive at precise definitions and exacting science will necessarily be compromised given the unpredictability that is the human condition. This is not to suggest that it is impossible to manage chaos. Indeed, it is possible. However, it is not possible to control chaos by means that defeat variation, change, and flux. In short, it is not possible to manage chaos by rigidly policing difference. We recognized that these observations were broadly consistent with Foucault's thesis; however, we argued that they charted a new and worthwhile direction by which to extend his critique.

NOTES

1. The link between Foucault's functional analysis of social control with nonlinear dynamics may appear somewhat contrived. After all, Foucault presents a thesis in which resistance to regimes of power (i.e., law and psychiatry) is nearly impossible. However, resistance, flux, adaptability, and change are cornerstones of chaos theory. Thus, the linkage described is ostensibly an artificial or forced fit. Although we rely on Foucault's earlier writings to identify the ingredients of the social control phenomenon, his later works (Foucault, 1980; 1990) emphasize forms of micrological resistance. We allude to these works throughout the article and they represent an important backdrop from which to delineate a post-Foucauldian analysis informed by chaos theory principles.

2. There are certainly multiple, competing forces parlaying for various and unrelated reasons to have their definitions of the civil commitment situation considered as essential. These other vested groups may have little specific interest in disciplining difference. Examples include social control through medicalization (Conrad and Schneider, 1992), state regulation (Jessop, 1990), and hegemonic power groups defining deviance (mental illness) consistent with the demands of those presently in power (Gramsci, 1971). The point, however, is that the likeliest explanation for the policing of public hygiene, given the conceptual and practical dilemmas of defining mental illness and dangerousness, is that psychiatric difference is normalized, depathologized, and homogenized in a manner consistent with Foucault's social control thesis.

3. We recognize that radical psychiatry, street advocates for the homeless mentally ill, and civil libertarians would challenge the extent to which "society" legitimately promotes the disciplining of psychiatric difference. Yet these criticisms only advance the efficacy of our argument, namely, that in the face of constituency resistance, clinicolegal science remains the avatar of justice and the source of knowledge/power concerning the behavior (and thus existence) of the mentally ill.

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CASES CITED

Addington v. Texas, 441 U.S. 418 (1979).

Barefoot v. Estelle, 103 S. Ct. 3383 (1983).

Dodd v. Hughes, 81 Nev. 43, 398 P.2d 540 (1965).

Doremus v. Farrell, 407 F. Supp. 509, 514-15 (D. Neb. 1975).

Dusky v. United States, 363 U.S. 402 (1960).

Foucha v. Louisiana, 504 U.S. 71 (1992).

Lessard v. Schmidt, 349 F. Supp. 1078 (E.D. Wis. 1972), vacated and remanded on other grounds, 421 U.S. 957 (1975).

Lynch v. Baxley, 386 F. Supp. 378, 391 (M.D. Ala. 1974).

Matter of Harry M. 468 N.Y.S.2d. 359, 364 (2d Dept. 1983).

O'Connor v. Donaldson, 422 U.S. 291 (1982).

Project Release v. Provost, 722 F.2d 960 (2d Cir. 1983).

Smith v. Goguen, 415 U.S. 566 (1974).

State v. Krol, 68 N.J. 236, 344 A.2d 289 (1975).

Youngberg v. Romeo, 457 U.S. 307 (1982).

STATE STATUTES CITED

Alaska Stat. Sect. 47.30.070(I) (1984).

Pa. Stat. Ann. tit. 50, Sect. 7301(a) (1983-84 Supp.).

BRUCE A. ARRIGO, Ph.D., is Professor of Criminology and Forensic Psychology and Director of the Institute of Psychology, Law, and Public Policy at the California School of Professional Psychology-Fresno (Fresno, CA 93727; e-mail: [e-mail]). He has been a community organizer and social activist for the homeless, the mentally ill, the working poor, the frail elderly, the decarcerated, and the chemically addicted. His areas of research include theoretical and applied topics in critical criminology, criminal justice and mental health, and the sociology of law; among the books he has authored, co-authored, or edited are The Contours of Psychiatric Justice (1996); Social Justice/Criminal Justice (1998), and, with T.R. Young, The Dictionary of Critical Social Sciences (1999). The author is the editor of Humanity and Society and the Journal of Forensic Psychology Practice.

CHRISTOPHER R. WILLIAMS (Institute of Psychology, Law and Public Policy, CSPP-Fresno, 5130 E. Clinton Way, Fresno, CA 93727) is a doctoral candidate at the California School of Professional Psychology-Fresno. His work has appeared in the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, Humanity and Society, and the New England Journal on Criminal and Civil Confinement. His research interests include theoretical topics in the study of law, crime, and justice.