The Revolving Door: A Functional Interpretation

Abstract

Anatole France has said: “The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the street, to steal bread.” To this we may add: it also forbids the rich as well as the poor to be drunk in a public place. The distinction between a private and a public place is an old and an honourable one in our legal tradition. The institution of privacy, sanctified in law, has given us historically considerable freedom from coercion when under our own roofs. However, when, in keeping with this tradition, the law has defined certain acts, such as getting too drunk to walk properly, as legitimate if done in private but illegal if done in public, it has loaded the dice against the lower classes. Social class and access to private places are closely related, particularly access to enough private places to cover most of one’s social life.¹ And when the law has made imprisonment a penalty for the offence, it has in some measure helped to increase the initial vulnerability by making it more difficult for the offender to keep a job, a residence, a family relationship, and other ties to private places. It is the end result of such a process that we are concerned with in this article: the chronic drunkenness offender, or what has become known as the revolving door problem.

This is a revised version of a paper delivered to the Canadian Conference on Alcoholism, Toronto, March, 1966.