Institutionalization and the wire

HBO broadcast the season 4 finale of The Wire last night. You can't come away from watching this series without a profound appreciation for the power of institutions and institutionalization. Without going into too much detail (inorder to avoid spoilers), the Wire develops several intertwined plot-lines. Beginning with the West Baltimore Maryland drug trade, we meet several players (ranging from school kids who are just starting to sort themselves into the corner-boy network, to soldiers who are active in the trade, the middle managers who run a crew and are responsible for a package, to the upper managers who battle for marketshare and turf.

We also see agents embedded in the agencies and institutions that interact with these people. The foil to the drug enterprise is the Baltimore Police department generally, and the Homicide, Narcotics, and Major Crimes units within it particularly, as well as several characters who are line agents in the Western District. The show introduces characters at every level of the bureaucracy. One of the most effective things about this show is that the respective bureaucracies also function as characters. For instance, the major crimes unit is up on a wire tap on a drug crew, but are forced to end their investigation because of an administratively defined deadline and changing priorities from the top. We see homicide detectives knowingly accept a questionable confession because they need the clearance for their monthly stats.

This season the show also introduced the Baltimore Public School system as an institutional actor, where two former police officers have become teachers. This dimension of the plot development shows us how one institution is really embedded in a network of others. The teachers are forced to adjust their lesson plans to teach a standardized test that appears to bear little relevance in their students' lives. But without the test scores, the district loses state funding.

The finale powerfully illustrated the limitations of human agency in an institutional world by focusing on 4 kids from the school. We see a detective frantically trying to prevent a 13 year-old boy, who is labeled a snitch by his peers, from being placed in a group home (where he likely to be beaten or worse); three others are drawn to the streets (for different reasons) despite aptitude and the best efforts of adults seeking to make a difference in their lives. Perhaps the most heartbreaking of the three is a boy who was socially promoted to the 9th grade and decides to work on a corner crew than leave his friends (and protectors) in the 8th.

Mary Douglas wrote some twenty years ago about "how institutions think." The Wire may be one of the clearest examples of this principle on display in contemporary entertainment. The writers finished this season with a clear open plotline to the next and I look forward to seeing where they go with this in a year's time.