In the cognitive models of one another that people carry in their minds, even strong evidence of intractable human nature is tempered by hope. Commissioners who are charged with the realization of that hope despite evidence of patent intractability live in a fragile professional existence. They try to change people who have been referred to them because the people have uniformly resisted all prior attempts to change them. They must keep some hope of reformation alive in the face of frequent frustration. As Gary Miller and Ira Iscoe point out, on the mental health commissioner, the reinforcement of the hope is intermittent. A few successes appear-not regularly or predictably, but they do appear. As psychologists know well, such intermittent reinforcement eventually establishes a behavior that is hard to extinguish once it takes hold. "Commissioners of the intractable" experience these intermittent successes and so persist in attempting to change the intractable. Most important, however, once the pattern is established, the commissioner will continue in the face of failures for a very long time.
This dedication, this persistent effort, bolsters the public hope that the intractable can be changed, that learning never stops, and that no person is completely and forever intractable. That hope must be kept alive despite the sober reality that many criminals are unable to give up a life of crime; that many welfare dependents cannot even imagine self-sufficiency and ridicule any honest effort as foolish and naive; and that some schizophrenics are unable to stop acting crazy. While attributing patently uncontrollable, internal, permanent causes to the plight of such clients, the public also keeps alive a very human hope of tractability. The hope backs and fills, but it does not die.
That hope, however, is frustrated by another social force. Processes as well as clients can be intractable. In Fritz Byers's words, "Litigation over prison conditions is almost by definition intractable". Further, Laurence Lynn, Jr., in his speech on welfare, argues that the community and the welfare client are engaged in a kind of "prisoner's dilemma." Both community and client would be better off if the community ensured ready access to benefits and the clients represented their eligibility honestly. The dilemma lies in the fact that deceit by the client yields greater returns to the client. For the community, demanding rigorous proof of eligibility is necessary to avoid fraudulent claims, but that rigor makes benefits less accessible. The community, then, believes it must make access very difficult, and the client believes he or she must make dishonest claims. Both lose.
Commissioners charged with serving such clients often find themselves constrained to custodial or other kinds of dependency-maintaining care. Moreover, they are often vulnerable to charges that the custodial care itself is intractable because it trains the clients to be less self-sufficient, more irresponsible, and increasingly an illegitimate burden to society. Indeed, the custody may reinforce the belief in internal, stable, uncontrollable causes, controllable by neither the client nor the commissioner's custody. The commissioners are vulnerable to sanction if they serve their clients conscientiously and thereby take limited public funds from more deserving clients; they are equally vulnerable if they serve their clients poorly and make them more burdensome to society than before.
On a broader scale, American society is in an intractable double-bind about commissions that serve these clients. Because the possibility of eliminating or mitigating the problems seems so remote and unlikely, citizens are reluctant to spend or be taxed for great sums of money to put toward such service. Yet the concerned and involved citizens rail at inadequate custodial programs that seem to encourage the clients to persist in what is regarded as irresponsible behavior. Schemes of reform are almost always afoot, but in due time, they run into the stone wall of public skepticism about the possibility of making any improvement.
In summary, clients whose plight is perceived to be caused by their own internal, stable flaws, controllable but not controlled, are fitted to a cognitive model of irresponsible, over-dependent people, to whom redistribution of society's resources is a wasteful burden to responsible citizens. Commissioners who serve such clients are damned if they serve their clients well and waste society's resources and damned if they serve their clients poorly and return them to society more irresponsible than they were before they were "served." If the cause of the clients' plight is attributed to internal, stable, uncontrollable causes, the clients are intractable. The existence of hope provides a guiding, altruistic goal and sustains the constituencies over long periods of frustration. The job becomes impossible when intractable clients are served by intractable processes, maintained by intermittent successes but doomed to failure in the long run.
In impossible jobs, commissioners are vulnerable to sanction when they are sustained by a weak myth that gives unstable guidance to controversial services and causes sharp swings in policy.
