Total institution

A total institution or residential institution is a residential facility where a great number of similarly situated people, cut off from the wider community for a considerable time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life.[1]: 44 [2]: 855 [3] Privacy and civil liberties are limited or non-existent in total institutions, as all aspects of life including sleep, play, and work, are conducted in the same place.[4] The concept is mostly associated with the work of sociologist Erving Goffman.[5]

Characteristics of total institutions usually include at least a few of the following

• Strict limitations on personal property or an outright confiscation of personal possessions with the exception of certain medical devices like eyeglasses

(most common in prisons and mental hospitals, other types of residential institutions typically allow more personal property)

• Uniforms and\or dress codes (especially in prisons, boarding schools and military bases)

• A certain degree of dehumanization

• Scheduling covering and organizing every minute of the day

• Ridged authoritarian hierarchy

• Stringent rules

• Cell or barracks\dorm type housing where multiple people sleep in each bedroom (in boarding schools, ships, remote work camps\outposts, military bases and some prisons)

• Communal meals in dining halls, recreation, etc

Etymology

The term is sometimes credited as having been coined and defined by Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman in his paper "On the Characteristics of Total Institutions", presented in April 1957 at the Walter Reed Institute's Symposium on Preventive and Social Psychiatry.[5]: 1  An expanded version appeared in Donald Cressey's collection, The Prison,[6] and was reprinted in Goffman's 1961 collection, Asylums.[1][3][5]: 1  Fine and Manning, however, note that Goffman heard the term in lectures by Everett Hughes (likely during the late-1940s seminar, "Work and Occupations").[7] Regardless of whether Goffman coined the term, he can be credited with popularizing it.[8]

Typology

Total institutions are divided by Goffman into five different types:[3][9]

1. institutions established to care for people felt to be both harmless and incapable: orphanages, poor houses, group homes and nursing homes.
2. places established to care for people felt to be incapable of looking after themselves and a threat to the community, albeit an unintended one: leprosariums, mental hospitals, certain types of group homes, and tuberculosis sanitariums.
3. institutions organised to protect the community against what are felt to be intentional dangers to it, with the welfare of the people thus sequestered not the immediate issue: concentration camps, P.O.W. camps, penitentiaries, and jails.
4. institutions purportedly established to better pursue some worklike tasks and justifying themselves only on these instrumental grounds: colonial compounds, work camps, boarding schools, ships, army barracks, and large mansions from the point of view of those who live in the servants' quarters.
5. establishments designed as retreats from the world even while often serving also as training stations for the religious; examples are convents, abbeys, monasteries, and other cloisters.

David Rothman states that "historians have confirmed the validity of Goffman's concept of 'total institutions' which minimizes the differences in formal mission to establish a unity of design and structure."[10]: xxix [11]: 101 

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault discussed total institutions in the language of complete and austere institutions.[12]: 231 

Nursing homes

According to S. Lammers and A. Verhey, some 80 percent of Americans will ultimately die not in their home, but in a total institution.[2]: 853 

In recent decade the nursing home industry has quickly extended, and particular regions of the country have become huge territorial nursing homes where we hide the aged and they hide from us.[2]: 853  Long before their death, they are buried in the folds of the total institution, hidden, out of sight and out of mind.[2]: 853  In the United States, dying in a total institution has become a common experience.[13]: 495 

Tourism

Sociologists have pointed out that tourist venues such as cruise ships are acquiring many of the characteristics of total institutions. Tourists may not be aware that they are being controlled, even constrained, but the environment has been designed to subtly manipulate the behavior of patrons. These examples differ from the traditional examples in that the influence is short term.[14][15]: 106 

Spaceship Earth

Sociologist Steffen Roth has demonstrated that, if realized, Spaceship Earth would epitomise the most total institution ever created in human history.[16]

See also

• Concentration camp
• Conscription
• Disciplinary institution
• Mental asylum
• Psych ward
• Workhouse
• Psychiatric institution
• Totalitarianism
• Transinstitutionalisation

References

1. Frank, Jacquelyn (2002). The paradox of aging in place in assisted living. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 44. ISBN 0-89789-678-5.
2. Lammers, Stephen; Verhey, Allen (1998). On moral medicine: theological perspectives in medical ethics. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. p. 855. ISBN 0-8028-4249-6.
3. "Extracts from Erving Goffman". A Middlesex University resource. Retrieved 12 November 2010.
4. Giddens, Anthony (2018). Introduction to Sociology. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 126. ISBN 9780393623956.
5. Goffman, Erving (1961). Asylums: essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. Anchor Books. ISBN 9780385000161.
6. Donald R. Cressey, ed. (1961). The Prison: Studies in Institutional Organization and Change. New York: Holt.
7. Fine, Gary Alan; Smith, Gregory W. H. (2000). Erving Goffman. Vol. 1–4. SAGE. p. 36. ISBN 0-7619-6863-6.
8. Michael Tonry (2011). The Oxford Handbook of Crime and Criminal Justice. Oxford University Press. p. 884. ISBN 978-0-19-539508-2.
9. Goldstein, Martin; Goldstein, Inge (1984). The experience of science: an interdisciplinary approach. Springer. p. 231. ISBN 0-306-41538-0.
10. Rothman, David (2002). The discovery of the asylum: social order and disorder in the new republic. Transaction Publishers. pp. xxix. ISBN 0-202-30715-8.
11. Chriss, James (1999). Counseling and the therapeutic state. Transaction Publishers. p. 101. ISBN 0-202-30624-0.
12. Foucault, Michel (1995). Discipline & punish. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. p. 231. ISBN 0-679-75255-2.
13. Bryant, Clifton (2003). Handbook of Death and Dying. SAGE. p. 495. ISBN 0-7619-2514-7.
14. George Ritzer and Allan Liska, "'McDisneyization' and 'Post-tourism:' Complementary Perspectives on Contemporary Tourism," Tourism: The Experience of Tourism, ed. Stephen Williams, vol. 4, New Directions and Alternative Tourism (London: Routledge, 2004), 65-82.
15. Rojek, Chris; Urry, John (1997). Touring cultures: transformations of travel and theory. Routledge Publishing. p. 106. ISBN 0-415-11125-0.
16. Roth, Steffen (2024). Spaceship Earth. A total institution. Ecological Economics, Vol. 223.

Further reading

• Wallace, Samuel (1971). Total Institutions. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 88-464-5358-1.