75
TOTAL INSTITUTIONS
a conceptual approach1
Maurice Punch.
The sociological perspective on total institutions has
been dominated by the work of Erving Goffman. His paper 'On
the Characteristics of Total Institutions' 2 has been the
starting-point for generations of students who wished to
investigate the social world of closed institutions. In ef­
fect, Goffman's paradigm has become almost a taken for gran­
ted part of sociological knowledge. And yet, surprisingly,
there has been a notable lack of intellectual heirs. Few
people have set out to build on his seminal work so that it
remains one of the very few explicit treatments of the con­
cept of totality. 3
Although his fieldwork was based on an end-of-the-line mental
hospital, with seven thousand patients, and although some of
his observations have been overtaken by innovations in treat­
ment that have led to a reduction in the overt means of in­
carceration ,4 his insights remain fresh and have somehow cap­
tured the quintessence of institutional life for many inmates
in varying environments. Those insights have been employed,
sometimes somewhat uncritically,5 in other studies but few
sociologists have turned their focus on the nature and struc­
ture of totality itself. This paper will examine what Goffman
has to say and will then attempt a conceptual clarification
of his typology of total institutions, while recognizing that
we are all indebted to Goffman for his penetrating insight in­
to how institutions handle and process the everyday lives of
blocks of individuals.
76
A total institution is defined broadly by Goffman as a
place of residence and work where a large number of like
situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for
an appreciable period of time, lead an enclosed, formally
administered round of life. 6 Furthermore, he classified them
into five groups, as follows:
(I)
for the incapable and harmless (old people's home,
homes for the blind)
(II)
for the incapable who pose an unintended threat (T.B
sanataria, mental hospitals, and leprosaria)
(III) for the protection of the community with the welfare
of the inmates not of prime importance (jails, P.O.W. camps,
concentration camps)
(IV)
institutions with instrumental ends designed to achieve
some work-like purpose (armybarracks, ships, boarding schools,
work camps, colonial compounds)
(V)
retreats from the world, even while serving as trai­
ning establishments for the religious (abbeys, monasteries,
convents).7
Having erected this typology, however, Goffman does not real­
ly offer any rationale for the classification and he does not
really spell out what follows from it. For instance, he admits
that his classification is not 'neat, exhaustive, nor of im­
mediate analytical use. ' 8
This failure to capitalize on his
own theoretical deliberations must remain the major weakness
of Goffman's paper.
In fact, his basic theoretical contribution on the struc­
ture of total institutions comes in the first dozen pages.
Briefly he states that total institutions are characterised
by a breakdown in the barriers separating sleep, play and
work; the split between staff and inmates is maintained by so­
cial distance, frequently formally prescribed, and there is
little mutual interpretation; they are incompatible with the
basic work payment structure of our society and with the fa­
mily; and each is a natural experiment, typically harsh, on
what can be done to the self.9
But does there seem to be any central concept or variable
binding or separating Goffman's typology? It would appear to
the writer that crucial to categories one, two, three and five
is the institution's function for, and relations with, the wi­
der society. In the first three groups, for example, the inma­
tes have been removed from society because, with varying de­
grees of culpability, they are defined as deviants who cannot
function fully in it while, in the fifth, incarceration is
voluntarily sought in order to escape society. In other words
77
the total structure of the institution is a deliberately
sought means of regulating the inmates inter-action with the
outside world. The fourth subgroup, however, seems to be ba­
sed on a different criterion because, while instrumental in­
stitutions obviously serve functions for society, the latter
does not impose totality as a structure form them nor is any
stigma attached to inmates. In effect the total nature of
their environment is contingent rather than necessary to
their main utilitarian goal whereas in the others totality
is a means and/or end specifically sought.
Having said that, however, it is clear that we are all
dependent on Goffraan for his classic description of the social
world of the closed institution as experienced by the inmate.
His essay is a brilliant, colourful, penetrating account of
the harsh, negative privations inflicted on inmates in custo­
dial institutions. He notes that typically the recruit 'upon
entrance ... (the recruit) begins a series of abasements, degredations, humiliations, and profanations of self.'10 While
Goffman asserts that he is employing the method of ideal ty­
pes, the very title of the work 'Asylums: Essays on the Social
Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates' and the pre­
dominance of examples from mental hospitals indicate that the
custodial mental hospital was taken as the paradigm of a total
institution. Clearly, there are therapeutic mental hospitals
that bear little relation to this model, and it would be more
accurate to picture mental hospitals on a continuum.11 But, in
essence, the Goffmanesque total institution is harsh, negative,
and custodial and exerts an adverse effect on inmates.
However, if we try to build on Goffman's framework then
it is possible to outline tentatively two additional styles
of closed institutional life which Goffman relatively negLects.
This gives three basic types which might be called the'negative-custodial*, the 'utilitarian', and the 'positive-custo­
dial '. It is hoped to show that these three types can be seen
to display variations both in social structures and in the be­
haviour of inmates. The dimensions used in separating the
three types are frequently used in conventional organizatio­
nal analysis, e.g. recruitment, selectively, social control,
socialization, etc. 12
(I) The Negative Custodial Type
If, in fact, we formalise the structural variables dormant
in Goffman's essay we find that his total institutions are
78
characterized to a large degree by the following: rigid, dis­
tant, at times hostile, effectively neutral, if not negative,
formally prescribed staff-inmate relations; largely ascribed
formal status; low internal mobility; low formal socialisa­
tion (perhaps even desocialisation)l3 ;low voluntariness of en­
try on the part of inmates; low selectively of inmates on the
part of the organisation; universalistic orientation of the
formal system to inmates; negative social control and high
alienation.
This type of 'negative' total institution would be exem­
plified by prisons, custodial mental hospitals, forced labour
camps, concentration camps, prisoner-of-war camps, and appro­
ved schools. In common, they frequently have very high insti­
tutional control such as numerous formal prescriptions (on
movement, dress, behaviour, physical restrictions, uniform and
personal possessions), and a general low regard for the wel­
fare of the inmate that leads to considerable deprivation. In
many of them the closed nature of the total institution is em­
ployed in varying degrees as a punitive environment which ma­
kes life unpleasant for the inmates. This is likely to be true
even where the stated goal is rehabilitative for the real goal
often resolves into a custodial one in the face of inmate in­
transigence or deviance. An example would be an approved school
which aimed at returning a 'cured' product to take his place
once more in society but which fell back on a traditional cus­
todial role when inmates subverted rehabilitative attempts by
either closing ranks what they perceived as a threat to inmate
cohesion and norms or else by ’working the system' for their
own illegitimate ends, thus modifying formal goals.14In such institutions many of Coffman's contentions hold
true. Staff-inmate relations are distant, even hostile, and
this distance is maintained by antagonistic stereotypes. Be­
cause internal mobility is low it is difficult to achieve for­
mal status which is largely ascribed. The ascribed status of
many inmates in 'negative' total institutions is a source of
hurt in itself, and it is a societal definition of deviance
which is not restricted solely to the institutional environ­
ment but often clings after release. Staff are likely to be
taught to have a formally prescribed, universalistic orienta­
tion to inmates - that is, they will be discouraged from be­
coming too friendly with inmates who should preferably not be
treated as individuals for fear of undermining authority. Be­
cause organisational or order goals15 predominate thereis li­
kely to be low formal socialisation, while desocialisation
may either be incidental or even deliberate - perhaps as an
intended, if not always achieved, prelude to resocialisation.
The inmate himself will have little or no choice in entering
one of this type of institution while the institution itself
is likely to have inmates allocated to it by an external agen-
79
cy. In one sense, some institutions, say a maximum security
prison, are highly selective from the point of view of the
criminality of the inmates as a whole but most’negative' total
institutions accept entrants on criteria which they do not set
themselves. And in the interests of preserving its continuity
over time such an institution will exhibit high negative so­
cial control - formal prescriptions, physical restrictions,
coercive punishments with material and normative deprivation.
A consequence of this may well be high alienation among the
inmates from the formal goals and values which will be largely
explicit.
(II) The Utilitarian Type
But there would appear to be at least two other analytic
discrete subtypes of total institution which occur on the continua of variables used to categorise the 'negative' custodial
type and which deserve consideration. In our second type, some
utilitarian organisations may incidentally exhibit the struc­
tural components and effects of totality but will adhere to so­
cietal values such as the basic economic reward system of our
society. They will not be characterised by extremes in the
structural variables aiming at high moral involvement on the
one hand or on the mortification processes of desocialisation
associated with custodial goals on the other hand, as found in
the other two types. Examples would include merchant ships,
isolated building sites, some army barracks, lighthouses, wea­
ther stations, oil rigs, research and exploration groups,etc.
In these instances the primary stated goal is a utilitarian
one and the physical totality is not a means or an end towards
achieving its goal. In effect the physical isolation may pro­
duce some of the normative components of totality but these
are incidental to the main purpose and may even hinder the main
goal, e.g. if employees react against burdensome restrictions,
or if unintended privations promote alienation among employees.
With varying degrees of implicitness total institutions set out
to change people in some way but this cam hardly be said to ihis
sub-group which may set institutional or occupational norms to
which inmates have to conform, but this would be so whether they
were isolated or not and little attempt to change the partici­
pants is made.
Furthermore when Goffman remarks that 'there is an incom­
patibility between total institutions and the basic work pay­
ment structure of our s o c i e t y ' t h i s remains true of the 'ne­
gative' and 'positive' subtypes but hardly of the intermediate
utilitarian subtype. In forced labour camps continual senseless
work promising no reward or satisfaction can be destructive of
personality while S y k e s ' ! 6 laments that work in the prison he
80
studied was not linked to promotion. But positive utilitarian
rewards in return for effort are a normal practice in ships,
building sites, lighthouses, Arctic camps, etc. Furthermore,
there may even be added incentive in such institutions which
will have value in direct relation to achieved status in the
outside world, e.g. financial, work experience, promotion, and
so on. Indeed, regular 'leave' away from the institution is
structured into the contractual relationship to make the unin­
tended privations more acceptable and, in this sense, many of
this group are not fully 'total', i.e. they may have the phy­
sical components of totality but often attempt to reduce the
normative aspects by making the living quarters homely, by al­
lowing a good deal of autonomy, by regular channels of communi­
cation, etc.
(ill) The Positive Custodial Type
The third type is virtually the polar antithesis of the
Goffmanesque model which takes society's standards as the cul­
tural given by which inmates of total institutions tend to be
classed as deviants from whom society must be protected. Indeed
it reverses the concept of 'custodial' to include those institu­
tions designed to protect inmates from the outside world, such
as monasteries and other religious cloisters, military academies
to a certain extent, and boarding schools.17 These are highly
normative institutions employing expressive^ means to gain high
involvement and embodying:-high selectivity, high voluntariness,
and high internal mobility; the opportunity to achieve status;
the possibility of affective staffinmate relations; the inter­
penetration of the formal and informal systems; positive social
control; and low alienation and a deep internalisation of the
formal values.
The positive-custodial institution tends to be a peoplechanging one and therefore has a high socialization function.
The English boarding school was traditionally an instrument for
imposing common norms and values on the potential elite;19 the
military academy seeks to reject the inmates former status in
order to inculcate a deep internalization of the norms of the
officer caste;20 and the monastery uses introspective isolation
to protect the individual from the temptations of the outside
world in order to prepare him or her for a life of contempla­
tion.21 They are three widely different social organisms in
terms of their ends and means but they do share, to a greater
or lesser degree, the wish to keep the wider society at bay to
enhance socialization and to protect their inmates.
What is sociologically interesting about this sub-type is
that it often displays some of the physical characteristics of
totality - often favouring, for instance, a rural environment -
81
but that it relies on the internalization of values by inmates
to avoid the need for overt measures of control. And, because
the positive sub-type induces commitment and cohesion, it can
rely on physic boundaries rather than physical barriers to in­
sulate it from the potentially corrupting influences of the
outside world. Anti-authoritarian communes, for example, would
object to physical restrictions on their members' movements
but, for a number of reasons - their rejection of conventional
society, their emphasis on togetherness and intimacy, and their
fear of the wider society's hostility to them, they tend to con­
tain themselves to their communal environment.22 This may have
unintended consequences as Bettelheim so brilliantly analyzed
for the kibbutz where the original revolutionary ideals, ega­
litarian and democratic, have given rise to group conformity
and collective cohesion among the second generation.23 These
sort of subtle dualities and complex ambiguities are theoreti­
cally interesting but are absent from Goffman's treatment.
Evidently totality implies a physical and/or a normative
component. The physical characteristics are often required or
utilised to produce the normative involvement or orientation
but these may be elicited without the physical variables. For
example, the progressive boarding school minimises formal res­
trictions on movement, behaviour, dress, etc., and yet may
elicit a rigidly enforced normative consensus that helps main­
tain internal order and can create a secular dependence upon
the progressive world by a l u m n i . 2^ Similarly a long-term pri­
soner has described his wish not to go to an open prison be­
cause, despite the lack of overt confinement, he would still
consciously feel like a prisoner with an invisible barrier be­
tween him and the wider society.25
Consequently, by totality will be meant 'a social system
exercising complete control over its inmates' value orienta­
tions and/or behaviour by providing for their basic needs with­
in that system.c-v Here one must differentiate between acciden­
tally closed systems - say a ship at sea, a remote Welsh mining
v i l l a g e , 27 isolated building or research sites, etc., - and
consciously articulated closed systems. In the latter case some
value orientation is implied which sets totality as a conscious
goal or means whereas, in the former case, totality is inciden­
tal to other predominant goals.
A crucial element in defining institutions will be their
82
relations to parasystems, to other institutions in the same
class, to lay and government control boards, and to the wider
society in general. Thus all the institutions of our first and
third types have a specificity of ends that utilised physical
or normative containment as a basis for their relationship to
society - whether it be to protect inmates from societal in­
fluences seen as potentially corrosive, the third ’p o s i t i v e 1
type, i.e. monasteries, kibbutzim, military academies, and
boarding schools, or to protect society from inmates as with
the first 'negative' type, i.e. mental hospitals, leprosaria,
concentration camps, prisons, and so on.
In this paper Goffman's trail-blazing essay on total insti­
tutions has been seen to concentrate mostly on an extreme type
of custodial total institution in which the inmate is likely
to suffer considerably from deprivation and mortification pro­
cesses. This protrait neglects consideration of a less extreme
utilitarian subtype where the totality is incidental, and is
not purposely accompanied by a change in the inmates 'persona­
lity, as well as the 'negative custodial types' antithesis the 'positive' custodial subtype. The latter differs crucially
from the Goffmanesque model by using positive social control
to elicit high moral involvement on the part of inmates. F i­
nally, it has not been the purpose here to attempt a definitive
placing of concrete institutions in the three sub-types. Rather
it is hoped that this paper merely commences a conceptual cla­
rification of Goffman's seminal and classic work on total in­
stitutions. As Goffman himself states, 'we now have a sizeable
literature on these establishment and should be in a position
to supplant mere suggestions with a solid framework bearing on
the anatomy and functioning of this kind of social a n i m a l . '28
83
NOTES
1.
This paper was first presented at a seminar of the King's
College Research, Cambridge, and has since g r e a t l y bene­
fited from discussions with Royston Lambert, Spencer
Millham, Roger Bullock, Geoffrey Hawthorn, Dennis Marsden, Derek Phillips, and Peter Bramham.
2.
E. Goffman, 'Asylums', New York, Anchor, 1961.
3.
But see A. Etzioni, 'The Organizational Structure of 'Clo­
sed' Educational Institutions in Israel', Harvard Educa­
tional Review, Vol. 27, No.2, 1957» Also R. Lambert, R.
Bullock, and S. Millham, 'Manual to the Sociology of the
School', London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970.
4.
Notably through bio-chemical advances and through broade­
ning interest in the concept of the therapeutic communi­
ty; c.f. M.Jones 'The Therapeutic Community', New York,
Basic Books, 1953»
5.
J. Wakeford, 'The Cloistered Elite', London, Macmillan,
1969, uses the concept of totality in relation to the
English Public School but simply applies Goffman's analy­
sis without critical discussion.
6.
E. Goffman, op. cit., p.xiii.
7.
Ibid, pp. 4-5.
8.
Ibid, p.5
9.
The phrase 'typically harsh' appears in Goffman's paper
in A. Etzioni (ed.) 'Complex Organisations'. New York,
Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1961, p.3 1 6 , but is omitted
from 'Asylums'.
10.
E. Goffman, op. cit., p.14.
11.
R.N. Rapaport, 'Community as Doctor', London, Tavistock,
1960; A. Straus, et.al., 'Psychiatric Ideologies and In­
stitutions', Glencoe, 111., Free Press, 1964; E.Stotland
And A*L. Kobler, 'Life and Death of a Mental Hospital',
Seattle, Universitu of Washington Press, 1965; and H.D.
Passwell and E. Rubinstein, 'The Sharing of Power in a
Psychiatric Hospital', New Haven, Yale University, Press,
1966 .
12.
c.f. A. Etzioni, 'A Comparative Analysis of Complex Orga­
nizations', New York, The Free Press, 1961, and P.Blau
and W.R. Scott, 'Formal Organizations', London, Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1963«
13.
For an extreme example of desocialisation and its effect
on personality in Nazi concentration camps see B. Bettelheim, 'The Informed 'Heart', London, Thames and Hudson,
1960.
84
14.
For a definition of organisation's goals see A. Etzioni,
'A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organisations', New
York, Free Press, 1961, pp. 71-73. Closed rehabilitative
organizations may have cycles of liberalization and re­
pression when aggressive behaviour subverts their rehabi­
litative goals and forces them to give more precedence to
the custodial goal, e.g. in England a loosening of prison
discipline in the mid-sixties was reversed sharply follo­
wing the escape of the Soviet spy, George Blake, from
Wormwood Scrubs Prison (c.f. Mountbatten Report of the
'Inquiry into Prison Escapes and Security', H.M.S.O. Omnd.
3175» 1966) See also E. Stotland and A.L.Kobler, op.cit.
passim for the confusion caused in a therapeutic mental
hospital by a sudden increase in socio-pathic patients.
15.
R. Lambert et al, op.cit., p.5 6 .
16.
G. Sykes, 'Society of Captives' Princeton, Princeton Uni­
versity Press, 1958. For the undermining effect of sense­
less work see B.Bettelheim, op.cit.
17.
c.f. Kathryn Hulme 'The Nun's Story', London,Muller,1957
and G.Morrhouse, 'Against All Reason', London, Wiedenfeld
and Nicolson, 1969» (especially chap.2, 'The Tradition'):
Sanford M. Dornbusch 'The Military Academy as an Assimi­
lating Institution' Social Forces XXXIII (1955): and R.
Lambert, 'Boarding Education': A Sociological Study', Lon­
don, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, forthcoming Spring 1974.
18.
R. Lambert, at al, op.cit., p.42. See also S.Millham, R.
Bullock, and P.Cherrett, 'Social Control in Organizations',
British Journal of Sociology, Vol. XXIII, No. 4, 1972.
19.
I. Weinberg, 'The English Public Schools: The Sociology
of Elite Education', New York, Atherton, 1967»
20.
S.M. Dornburch, op.cit.,and M.Janowitz, 'The Professional
Soldier', Glencoe,111., Free Press, i960 .
21.
P. Monica Baldwin, '1 Leap Over the Wall', New York, Sig­
net, 1 9 5 7 , for an account of a reaction to the cloister.
22.
L. Yablansky 'Hippy Trip', New York, Pegasus,196 8; Ron E.
Roberts, 'The New Communes' Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,Pren­
tice Hall, 1971j and Rosabeth M.Kaster 'Commitment and Com­
munity: Utopias in Sociological Perspective', Cambridge,
Mass., Harvard University Press, 1972.
23.
B.Bettleheim, 'Children of the Dream', London, Thames and
Hudson, 1969.
24.
M. Punch, 'Dartington Hall School', unpublished Ph.d. The­
sis,Univ. of Essex,1972,analyzes both the social world of
the progressive school and contains data on the adult lifes
of the former pupils of this well-known progressive school.
25.
Zeno, 'Life', London, Pan Books, 1970.
85
26.
R. Lambert, et al, op.cit.,p,kk.
27.
R. Williams' novel 'Border Country', Harmondsworth, Pen­
guin Books Ltd.,19 6 0 , offers an excellent treatment of
a partially closed traditional community in a Welsh mining
valley before the war.
28.
E. Goffman, op.cit., p.123.