ABSTRACT
A major objection to environments composed largely or entirely of deviant populations is their great capacity to socialize to their prevailing behavior and norms. Jails and prisons commonly are more adept at teaching delinquency than law observance, and bizarre behavior of hospital inmates has a contagious quality. In short, the jail is no place for the delinquent, and the residential treatment center is no place for the emotionally disturbed child if modeling and rewards for generally (i.e., outside the institution) acceptable behavior are posited as the major determinants of change. Instead we must search out tolerant yet powerful, healthy environments. The foster family is often employed to this end. In principle this should work. Homer Folks (1896) and many others after him have reasoned why it should. Families, even foster families, unlike institutions, are in and of the community; so troubled children who live in them are constantly exposed to normal behavior and the expectations that they will conform. Given understanding, support, and professional help, they should improve. Unfortunately the wish and hope did not father reality as many families proved neither tolerant enough to live with marked deviance nor powerful enough to contain it. As DeFries et al. (1964) in one of the veiy few serious studies of this issue have shown, the arrangement tends to fail.
346 The choice, then, with the disturbed child seems to lie between two undesirable alternatives: the institution, which confirms his illness and enhances it with its own expectations, or the family, which can neither accept difficult behavior nor control it. Like Hobbs ( Chap. 17 ), Feuerstein and Krasilowsky attempt to cope with this dilemma, but they come up with a different solution. Since in Israel group care of normal, healthy adolescents is commonplace, the environment of youth villages, boarding schools, and similar facilities can be used to treat disturbed children on the basis of maximal osmosis from the healthy to the ill.
