A student argues: 'Boot camp can change behavior, but not who you really are inside.' Goffman's analysis of total institutions most directly challenges this claim by showing that:
AMilitary training is too intense to be resisted even psychologically
BIdentity is not a fixed inner property but is socially produced through practices, roles, and institutional supports
CSoldiers forget their prior civilian identity permanently after training
DIdentity change only occurs in psychiatric institutions, not military settings
The student's intuition assumes identity is an internal, stable core that institutions might shape externally but cannot reach. Goffman's analysis inverts this: identity is not inside you waiting to be discovered — it is continuously produced through social interaction, role occupation, possessions, and the ways others address you. Total institutions reveal this by systematically removing all of those supports (mortification of self) and showing that the sense of self does not simply persist independently. What the student calls 'who you really are' is itself a social construction maintained by the very supports the institution dismantles.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
What does Goffman mean by 'mortification of the self' in total institutions?
AThe psychological depression and grief inmates experience upon losing their freedom
BThe systematic stripping of prior identity supports through admission procedures, role dispossession, and degradation ceremonies
CThe physical punishment used to enforce compliance with institutional rules
DThe gradual forgetting of life before the institution over long periods of confinement
Mortification is a specific process, not a mood state. It refers to the admission phase: stripping of personal clothing and possessions, issuing a uniform and number, suspending prior social roles (parent, professional, community member), forced sharing of intimate spaces, loss of privacy, and deference rituals that mark subordinate status. The combined effect is not punishment but identity de-anchoring — loosening the inmate's grip on their prior self to render them available for institutional reconstruction. Goffman's insight is that all of these procedures work because identity depends on exactly these supports.
Question 3 True / False
Goffman found that inmates in total institutions are mostly passive and have no capacity for resistance — the institution fully absorbs their identity.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
Goffman explicitly documented 'secondary adjustments' — the small acts through which inmates preserve a backstage self not fully absorbed by the institutional role. Making coffee from illicit ingredients, personalizing a cell with allowed items, maintaining humor, participating in informal economies: these micro-resistances matter because they preserve a sense of agency and selfhood. This is consistent with Goffman's broader dramaturgical framework: there is always some distinction between front-stage performances required by the institution and a backstage self the institution cannot fully control. Total institutions are powerful but not omnipotent.
Question 4 True / False
The broader sociological lesson of total institutions applies beyond prisons and asylums: ordinary identity in everyday life also requires continuous social support and is maintained through ongoing institutional practices.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
This is Goffman's larger theoretical point. Total institutions are valuable not because prisons are unique but because they make visible — through intensity and coercion — processes of identity maintenance that normally operate invisibly in daily life. Your sense of who you are is continuously maintained by the way people address you, the roles you occupy, the possessions that anchor your self-presentation, your freedom to choose activities and associations. Every institution — school, workplace, family — is in the business of producing certain kinds of subjects. Total institutions just do it transparently enough that we can see the machinery.
Question 5 Short Answer
What do Goffman's 'secondary adjustments' reveal about the limits of total institutions' power over identity, and what does this tell us about identity more broadly?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: Secondary adjustments show that inmates preserve a backstage self that is not fully absorbed by the institutional role — they maintain agency in small ways even under comprehensive control. This reveals that identity cannot be completely externally imposed; people actively participate in constructing and maintaining a self. More broadly, this confirms that identity is not simply determined by institutions but is always jointly produced through the interaction between institutional demands and individual agency.
The concept does double theoretical work. First, it limits Goffman's own claim about total institutional power — if inmates could be fully processed, there would be no secondary adjustments to document. Second, it complicates any purely deterministic account of socialization: people are not empty vessels filled by institutions. The tension between institutional processing and secondary adjustments is the same tension present in all socialization — schools produce students, but students also resist, appropriate, and transform what schools offer. Total institutions just expose this dialectic in sharp relief.