Making Life Work: Freedom and Disability in a Community Group Home

9. Goal Plans and Individual Conduct

At Driggs House, “goal plans” are the technologies at the core of the group home’s individual work with residents. Lipsky (15) writes that in “people-processing,” work goals in the general sense have “an idealized dimension that make them difficult to achieve and confusing and complicated to approach.” Goal plans formalize what conduct can be seen and known, and how it should be acted on, as clinically warrantable conduct, by translating the “needs” of individual residents into practical matters of clinical work. In specified techniques of assessment and intervention, “preferences, capabilities and capacities ” become “what residents are working on.” For this reason, goals furnish a way of examining how residents and counselors are, to use Hacking’s phrase (1986, 1995), “made up” in and through their ongoing work. By specifying psy practices of self-knowledge and accountability , goal plans are technologies of government that at Driggs House shape the practical “conditions of personhood” (Hacking 1986, 225). It’s not that goals determine conduct in any simple sense; like all formulated plans, they provide little explanation about how they are implemented, because no plan can ever account fully for the situated character of action (Suchman). My point is that this analysis could be considered an analysis of “kinds,” in Hacking’s sense, because I treat goal plans as instructable resources, practical everyday instructions in how to be group home persons. My interest is not in whether they are followed “correctly” but in how the clinical vocabulary and techniques that goal plans make available organize the possible relationships that counselors and residents can have to each other and to themselves as certain kinds of group home persons. 189 9 GOAL PLANS AND INDIVIDUAL CONDUCT Goals as Documentary and Clinical Technologies A resident’s goal plans are filed in the “Progress” section of his or her treatment book. A copy is also filed in the service coordinator’s book as documentary support for the individual service plan (ISP). There is also a “goal book” for each resident, a binder that contains the current plans and any related documentary technologies. Though each counselor is responsible for monthly reports on the goal work of the residents on their caseload, all staff contribute to the daily gathering of data on all residents. The technologies for recording the goal work of every resident are assembled together in a single binder, the “data book.” There is a practical reason for this: it simplifies the task of documenting the progress of all the residents at the end of each shift for the counselor who happens to be “doing the data.” As clinical technologies, goal plans translate a resident’s “needs” into actual work on specific features of conduct. Like all technologies of government, goal plans are based on ostensibly expert knowledge about the nature and needs of the governed. Behavioral psychology furnishes both the outcomes and the techniques of goal plans, locating problems in the sphere of overt conduct even when overt conduct is seen as a sign of something “deeper.” The ideals of 3IP are realized in the techniques for achieving the specified outcomes for self-improvement, maximization, and growth: to “lessen dependence or minimize loss of functioning or adaptive capacity” (14 N.Y.C.R.R. § 633.2). “Behavior plans,” which have the same format as goal plans, are designed to act on negative, disruptive, and even dangerous conduct. There is little practical distinction between behavior and goal plans. Both are referred to as “goals” or “plans,” and both attempt to cultivate the capacities of individuals to conduct themselves more independently. Even behavior plans intended to reduce or eliminate target behaviors such as verbal and physical aggression aim to enhance a resident’s capacity for self-management. All plans specify techniques of conduct that are meant to shape the resident’s relationship to his or her own conduct in new ways, as something that can and therefore should be managed . James Franklin’s goal plan, described in chapter 8, is one example. Ruby’s Problem with Self-Assertion When one form of conduct is acted on as a clinical problem, it can frame the way others are understood and addressed. According to 190 goal plans and individual conduct Driggs House staff, Ruby had difficulty asserting and advocating for herself. This was an ongoing problem she “needs to work on” and, thus, the outcome of a goal plan. She also had room cleaning and toothbrushing...