Page 59 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Homeostatopia

accepted, had come up with a curious plan. Schools, hospitals and
prisons have more in common than competing for public financing.
They possess, to greater or lesser extent, in sociological parlance, the
qualities of total institutions; that is, they mandate long- or short-term
attendance in a facility away from home. Prisoners, patients and
students, during their tenure in these spatially segregated worlds,
suffer suspension of a citizen’s normal rights and responsibilities,
while their behavior is monitored and controlled by trained
personnel. If one examines their modes of living it becomes evident
that all three groups receive, to varying degrees, accommodation,
medical care, training and a secured perimeter of movement.
Therefore, proposed Peña, it would serve the public interest in
times of decreasing revenue and increasing numbers of children,
criminals and sick people to combine these facilities. The benefits
would extend beyond efficiencies of scale and elimination of
redundancy: prisoners could be taught academic subjects and treated
medically; students could see for themselves the wages of sin and get
vaccinated against contagious diseases and screened for genetic
conditions; and hospital patients of all backgrounds could be cheered
by the presence of children and serve as examples of the importance
of maintaining health and the consequences of not doing so, for both
the immature and the lawbreaking. All in all, socially salutary as well
as economically rational. The city fathers, once it was explained to
them with flip charts and the estimated savings were calculated, loved
it. Some even wanted to wrap the police academy into the system.
Peña’s name became known to the public, jump-starting his
reputation as a pragmatic seer. It was a wonderful plan, practical and
revolutionary at the same time, its logic, once stated, almost
irresistible. Hal was hailed as a hero, a futurist with his feet planted
firmly in the present realities on the ground. He collected his fee and
started gearing up to take advantage of his celebrity. Then the whole
intricate structure of functional convergence collapsed, its props
knocked out by the people it was meant to serve. If two-thirds of the
support staff of prisons, schools and hospitals were eliminated, then
they—and their dependents—would ultimately, as a result of their
job loss, largely end up clients of their former places of employment;
that is, they would become ill, commit crimes or seek retraining. The
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