Total Institutions

Types of Total Institutions

Goffman identified five types of total institutions. One type consists of organizations designed to care for people who are harmless but unable to care for themselves; this type includes or has included residences for the elderly and orphaned children. A second type are places such as mental hospitals, which are established to care for persons felt to be both incapable of looking after themselves and an unintended threat to the community. Organizations whose task is to protect the community against perceived intentional dangers to it constitute a third type. These organizations do not have the welfare of the inmates as their first concern. This third type includes jails, prisoner-of-war camps, and concentration camps. A fourth type consists of organizations designed to permit individuals to pursue full-time work; they include military barracks, boarding schools, or (from the point of view of the live-in servants) large mansions. Fifth are organizations that are retreats from the world, such as monasteries and convents.

Central Feature of Total Institutions

The typical individual in the modern industrialized world sleeps, plays, and works in different places, with different coparticipants, under different authorities, and without an overall rational plan. The central feature of total institutions can be described as a breakdown of the barriers that ordinarily separate these three spheres of life. In total institutions, all aspects of life are conducted in the same place and under the same single authority.

[Page 1383]Total institutions conduct each phase of the inmate's daily activity in the presence of a large number of other individuals, usually other inmates and supervisory staff. These organizations typically treat all inmates alike and require them to engage in the same activities together. Inmates in total institutions find that activities usually conducted in private in the outside world are routinely required as public activities. For example, inmates may eat, bathe, and dress in front of others. The supervisory staff also has access to information about inmates that in the outside world would be kept private.

In total institutions, all phases of the inmates' daily activities are tightly scheduled, with one activity leading at a prearranged time into the next and the staff determining the whole sequence of activities. Rigid, formal rules predominate. This degree of regimentation signals that the inmates of some total institutions, unlike people in the outside world, may lack adult self-determination, autonomy, or freedom of action. The various activities are coordinated into a rational plan designed to fulfill the official aims of the institution.

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