Johnson-Ch-13:14-Chapter-13 4/26/2008 10:21 AM Page 103

This excerpt has been taken from Johnson, J., DeSouza, C., (2008) Understanding Health and Social
Care: An Introductory Reader, published by Sage in association with The Open University and forms
part of The Open University course K101: An introduction to health and social care (http://www3.
open.ac.uk/courses/k101-podcastcourse). Reproduced here with permission for use in OpenLearn unit
K101_1: Understanding the past (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=4488).

Chapter 13
Total institutions
Kathleen Jones and A. J. Fowles

[Erving] Goffman introduced the term ‘total institution’ and defined it more carefully than
many of his imitators have done. A ‘total institution’ is ‘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, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life’
(Goffman, 1961: xiii).
Not all institutions are total institutions, though ‘every institution has encompassing
tendencies’; but some institutions, such as homes for the blind or the aged, mental hospitals,
prisons, concentration camps, army barracks, boarding schools and monasteries or convents,
are ‘encompassing to a degree discontinuously greater than the ones next in line’.
Goffman’s concept of the ‘total institution’ can be represented as follows: there is a con-
tinuum from open to closed institutions, but there is a break towards the closed end,
separating off a group of closed, or nearly closed, institutions which can be described as
‘total’.
In fact, both the completely open institution and the completely closed institution are
abstractions. No institution is ever completely open: if it were, it would have no distin-
guishing characteristics at all. No institution is ever completely closed. If it were, it would
die off. Open systems theory has taught us that all human systems are dependent to some
extent on their immediate environment, and that they cannot survive without it. A mental
hospital or prison imports staff, inmates, policy, material supplies and public reactions from
the outside world; it exports staff on completion of contract, inmates on completion of
stay or sentence, empirical material which may affect policy, the product of work
programmes (mailbags, assembled electric switches, carpentry, scrubbing brushes, fancy
paper hats, those curious toys which are made in occupational therapy, and so on), garbage,
and stories of strike, threat and crisis which form the basis of public reactions. All sorts of
people cross the boundary: inspectors, professional superiors, inmates’ visitors, research
workers, workmen, students, policemen, magistrates and others. But these considerations
do not invalidate Goffman’s argument about the relatively closed or ‘total’ institution. His
contention is that this group of institutions has features in common: he qualifies it by

From K. Jones and A. J. Fowles (1984) ‘Goffman: the radical’, in Ideas on Institutions. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, pp. 12–16.
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104 Kathleen Jones and A. J. Fowles

adding that none of these features is specific to them, and that not all of the features may be
found in any one of them. What he proposes is not a list of features to be identified in all
cases, but a constellation of features which tend to occur in most cases, and which have
some relation to each other. He is embarking on a sort of verbal cluster analysis. What he
describes as a ‘total institution’ will probably not fit any real-life institution exactly. It is a
Weberian ideal type against which the practices of real-life institutions may be measured.
It is important to clarify this definition, because the term ‘total institution’ has become
something of a catch-phrase, and is often applied unthinkingly to particular prisons or
mental hospitals. Goffman is much more scholarly than some of his imitators, and his
frame of reference is precisely defined.
‘Total institutions’ have four main characteristics: batch living, binary management, the
inmate role, and the institutional perspective.
‘Batch living’ describes a situation where ‘each phase of the member’s daily activity is car-
ried on in the immediate company of a large batch of others, all of whom are treated alike,
and required to do the same thing together’. It is the antithesis of individual living, where
there are large areas of life which may be pursued on a basis of personal choice. It is char-
acterized by a bureaucratic form of management, a system of formal rules and regulations,
and a tight schedule which allows little or no free time. It allows the inmate no freedom of
movement between different social groups, and no choice of companions: he lives with
the same group of people, elected and defined by outside authority, 24 hours a day, without
variety or respite. This is contrasted with ‘a basic arrangement in modern society. … the indi-
vidual tends to sleep, play and work in different places, with different co-participants, under
different authorities, and without an overall rational plan’ (Goffman, 1961: 5–6). In the insti-
tutional situation, individuals are not merely constrained by, but are violently attacked by, the
system. They live under surveillance, and any infraction of the rules ‘is likely to stand out in
relief against the visible, constantly examined compliance of the others’.
Goffman is not clear which came first, the ‘large blocks of managed people’ or the staff
who manage them; but ‘each is made for the other’. ‘Total institutions’ typically consist of
these two groups of people, the managers and the managed – staff and patients, prison offi-
cers and prisoners, teachers and pupils.
This is ‘binary management’: ‘Two different social and cultural worlds develop, jogging
alongside each other with points of official contact, but little mutual penetration’ (ibid.: 9).
The managers have power, and social distance is their weapon. They exercise this most
tellingly in withholding information, so that the managed exist in ‘blind dependency’,
unable to control their own destinies. The very fact of being an inmate is degrading: ‘Staff
tend to feel superior, and righteous. Inmates tend … to feel inferior, weak, unworthy and
guilty’ (ibid.: 7). Because the two groups do not and cannot know each other as individu-
als, they set up antagonistic stereotypes. Staff tend to see all patients or prisoners or pupils
as being alike – ‘bitter, secretive and untrustworthy’. The managed draw similar hostile
pictures of the managers. The two groups may use a special tone of voice in talking to each
other, and informal conversation and social mixing may be frowned upon by both sides.
How do ordinary people, with their own way of life and personal networks and round
of activities, become inmates? Goffman thinks that this is not a process of ‘acculturation’,
which involves moving from one culture to another, but of ‘disculturation’ or ‘role-
stripping’ so powerful that the individual who is subjected to it may be rendered incapable
of normal living when he returns to the community. He has been reduced from a person
with many roles to a cipher with one: the ‘inmate role’.
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Total institutions 105

Much of this process is achieved through admission procedures, which Goffman sees as
‘a series of abasements, degradations, humiliations and profanations of self’ – a mortifi-
cation process. Institutions are ‘the forcing houses for changing persons’. To become an
inmate involves a total break with the past, symbolized by the acquisition of a new name
or number, uniform clothing, and the restriction or confiscation of personal possessions.
All this may be done in a highly ritualised admission procedure in which the inmate may
be forced to recite his life history, take a bath, possibly without privacy, and submit to
weighing, fingerprinting, intrusive medical examination and head-shaving. The overt
reason for these activities is administrative necessity: the real purpose is role disposses-
sion. The bath, in particular, is a highly symbolic ritual, involving physical nakedness as
the midpoint of a process of abandoning one life for another. ‘The new arrival allows him-
self to be shaped and coded into an object that can be fed into the administrative machinery
of the establishment, to be worked on smoothly by routine operation’ (ibid.: 16). The new
clothes are likely to be standard issue, the property of the establishment. Combined with a
loss of ‘personal maintenance equipment’ such as combs, shaving sets or cosmetics, they
create a new and humiliating appearance. The process is one of personal defacement.
As the stay is prolonged, so the loss of personal identity becomes more marked. There
may be systematic violation of privacy through the practice of group or individual
confession. The inmate’s defences may be repeatedly collapsed by a process called ‘loop-
ing’ where the mere fact of defence is taken as proof of guilt (ibid.: 35–37). There may be
‘indignities of speech or action’ – inmates are forced to beg humbly for a glass of water or
a light for a cigarette, to move or speak in a markedly deferential way indicating their
lowly status. They may be beaten, or subjected to electric shock treatment, or physically
contaminated – there are some particularly nasty examples drawn from concentration
camps and political prisons.
Control may be kept by means of a system or rewards and punishments, petty by out-
side standards, but assuming Pavlovian dimensions in a situation of deprivation. Rules may
not be made fully explicit. The inmate cannot appeal to them for protection, and may break
them unwittingly, and be punished for it. Like Kafka’s K., he exists in a half-world of guilt
and apprehension. He has no privacy, no rights, and no dignity.
How does the inmate survive these attacks on his personality? Goffman suggests four
types of ‘secondary adjustment’ (ibid.: 61–64):

1 The inmate may withdraw, cutting himself off from contact.

2 He may become intransigent, and fight the system.
3 He may, in a vivid phrase, become ‘colonised’, paying lip-service to the system like
the inhabitant of some African or Asian country awaiting the day of independence.
4 He may become converted, genuinely accepting the institution’s view of himself,
and what is acceptable behaviour.

The last of these is not really survival, but a kind of personal extinction. Curiously, and on
the face of it illogically, it is the only adjustment acceptable to the authorities of the institu-
tion. Any attempt by the inmate to immunize himself against the destructive forces focused
on him will be seen as non-co-operation, and may be used as an excuse to detain him longer.
He may develop a ‘line’, a sort of edited account of how he came to be an inmate,
repeated to his fellows and to anyone else who will listen with increasing self-pity. He may
have a sense of ‘dead and heavy-hanging time’ – of life wasted, and the months or years
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106 Kathleen Jones and A. J. Fowles

ticking away without gain or satisfaction. Against these reactions, the authorities offer ‘the
institutional perspective’: a view of life which denies his individual perspective and vali-
dates the institution’s existence. It is promoted by such means as the house magazine, the
annual party, the institutional theatrical, the open day and the sports day, which create an
artificial sense of community. These formal events offer certain minor possibilities of role
release for the inmate – recognized and routinized liberties, forbidden in normal circum-
stances, may be allowable; but the total effect is to reinforce the power of the institution,
and the ‘assault on the self’: ‘These ceremonial practices are well suited to a Durkheimian
analysis: a society dangerously split into inmates and staff can through these ceremonies
hold itself together’ (ibid.: 109).

Reference
Goffman, E. (1961) Asylums. New York: Doubleday/Anchor.