ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on relationships between successful claims and services designed to do something about the victims, potential victims, villains, or potential villains of social problems conditions. This is the topic of the troubled persons industry, a term for all the organizations and groups designed to do something to help or rehabilitate or punish the people in social problems formula stories. Successful social problem claims can lead to changes in objective reality. The chapter makes the same claim about consequences of work in the troubled persons industry: The workings of these places tend to create objective realities that reflect the social problems claims leading to these places. It is not possible to offer a global evaluation of the success and value of the work of the troubled persons industry. For better or for worse, the social problems formula stories constructed by claims-makers become very real in their consequences.
