Total Institution

Erving Goffman defined total institutions in 1961 as places of residence and work where individuals lead together an enclosed, formally administered life cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time. Total institutions are a departure from basic modern social arrangements where members sleep, play, and work in different places and with different people, under different authorities and without a unified rational plan. Unlike traditional social institutions, total institutions are distinct in four ways: (1) all aspects of life are conducted under the control and regulation of a single authority; (2) individuals are in the company of similarly situated people; (3) individuals are under a rigid schedule; and (4) all activities are designed to satisfy the goals of the institution. Prisons and mental hospitals are the most frequently explored examples of total institutions, but the concept may also apply to military bases, boarding schools, religious institutions, and concentration camps.

Goffman's concept of the total institution represented the evolution of his early work on the construction of identity and concept of self as a product of social interaction, shaped by the roles and relationships accorded an individual by the social order. His consideration of the concept of total institutions represented an extension of this early work, in that he went on to study the constraining aspects of this construction. He examined the effects of institutionalization on an individual's construction of social, personal, and ego identities, such that it becomes difficult for individuals to forge definitions of self distinct from the definitions imposed on them by the structure, authority, and goals of the institution itself.

Goffman's interest in the total institution reflects his interest in how institutions place enormous constraints on identity construction such that they strip an individual from any existing conceptions and impose a new self that is reflective of the institution. He refers to the stripping of identity as the mortification of self or “civil death” and suggests that it occurs through several stages. Individuals come to total institutions with a concept of self previously established through interaction with the social world. Upon entrance into the institution, the recruit is stripped of any social support and is subject to what Goffman called the “abasements, degradations, humiliations, and profanations of self.” Locked doors, high walls, and barbed wire provide physical and symbolic barriers to the outside world and isolate the inmate from the social interaction and support that previously allowed for the construction and maintenance of one's identity. Further stripping identity are admission procedures and “programming” designed to shape an inmate into an object assimilated into the routine operations of the institution. The loss of personal clothes, control over one's own appearance, and any trappings associated with the inmates' “identity kits” further accomplishes what Goffman refers to as “role dispossession.”

Inmates must also share space and interact with others in a way that further abases and challenges the preexisting self-concept. Here Goffman speaks of contaminative exposure: in the social world, individuals have control over the physical space, circumstances, and social relationships that expose them to foreign and contaminating things. In a total institution, however, inmates lose control over any boundaries between themselves and such contamination; they must participate in indignities incompatible with their conception of self.

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