Total Institutions and Resocialization

Core Idea

Total institutions like prisons, military barracks, and asylums maintain comprehensive control over residents' daily lives and deliberately restructure individual identity. Goffman described the mortification of self—a systematic stripping of prior identity and reconstruction according to institutional demands. These settings reveal how identity is not fixed but socially constructed and maintained through institutional practices.

Explainer

Your study of deviance and social control established that societies define and enforce norms, and that deviation from those norms triggers responses ranging from informal disapproval to formal legal sanction. Total institutions are a specific and extreme case of formal social control: settings where a large group of people lives under the authority of a small supervisory staff, conducting all aspects of daily life in the same place and under the same set of rules. Erving Goffman's *Asylums* (1961) identified prisons, psychiatric hospitals, military barracks, convents, and boarding schools as instances of this type. What they share is not just physical enclosure but a comprehensive claim over time, space, and identity.

What makes total institutions analytically important is the extreme visibility they give to processes of identity formation that normally happen invisibly and gradually in ordinary social life. When you enter a total institution, Goffman observed, you are systematically stripped of the supports that ordinarily maintain your sense of self. This mortification of the self takes several forms: admission procedures (stripped of clothes, possessions, and name — issued a uniform and a number), role dispossession (your prior roles as parent, professional, neighbor are temporarily or permanently suspended), contaminating exposure (forced sharing of intimate spaces, loss of control over personal information and body), and degradation ceremonies (deference rituals that mark your subordinate status). The combined effect is to loosen your grip on your prior identity and render you available for reconstruction.

The reconstruction phase — resocialization — involves the systematic inculcation of a new identity appropriate to the institutional role. In a military boot camp, this is explicit and intense: recruits are stripped of civilian identity and rebuilt as soldiers, with a shared vocabulary, physical discipline, unit loyalty, and a redefined sense of honor and duty. In a prison, the institutional identity of "inmate" is imposed, with its own hierarchies, codes, and survival demands. The sociological insight is that neither the stripping nor the reconstruction is simply psychological — they are accomplished through social practices: routines, interactions, rewards, punishments, rituals, and the responses of other institutional members. Identity is not inside you; it is continuously produced in interaction.

Goffman was careful to document that inmates are not passive recipients of institutional processing. He documented a variety of secondary adjustments — ways that inmates carve out spaces of autonomy and self-expression within the institution's demands. Making a cup of coffee from illicit ingredients, personalizing a cell, creating informal economies, maintaining humor — these small rebellions matter because they preserve a sense of agency and a self that is not fully absorbed by the institutional role. The institution may control the visible performance, but inmates maintain backstage territories. This is consistent with Goffman's broader dramaturgical view: people always preserve some distinction between front-stage performances and backstage selves.

The broader sociological lesson is about the social construction and fragility of ordinary identity. In daily life, your sense of who you are is maintained by a continuous stream of social supports — the way people address you, the roles you occupy, the possessions that anchor your self-presentation, the freedom to choose your activities and associations. Total institutions reveal this by systematically removing all of it and showing what happens: the self does not simply persist independently of its social supports; it requires continuous social work to maintain. This insight applies well beyond total institutions. Every institution — school, workplace, family — is in the business of producing certain kinds of subjects. Total institutions just do it transparently, efficiently, and coercively enough that we can see the machinery clearly.