DEFINING TOTAL INSTITUTIONS

"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.”

(1) those established to care for persons felt to be both incapable and harmless (e.g., elderly homes); (2) those to care for persons felt to be incapable but unintended threats to the community (e.g., mental hospital); (3) those established to protect the community against those who are intended threats to its welfare (e.g., jails, POW camps, concentration campus); (4) those established to pursue some worklike and instrumental task (e.g., army barracks, ships)
• Totality can be symbolized by barrier to social interaction with outside; through physical disconnect with outside world (locked doors, high walls, barbed wire, forests, water, etc.
• Though not neat classification, nor exhaustive typology, we can view slavery as a most total institution.

COMMON CHARACTERISTICS OF TOTAL INSTITUTIONS

1. All aspects of life are conducted in same place and under same single authority
2. Carefully structured activities
3. Explicit formal rulings govern structured activities
4. Activities serve ultimate goal (economic profit; control over men/women)
5. Strict demarcation of roles; hierarchical
6. Social mobility between the two strata (inmate, “staff”) is grossly restricted
7. Even TALK across the boundaries may be conducted in special tone of voice such that inmates’ verbal behavior reflects their place in system of dominance
8. Just as talk across boundaries is restricted, so, too, is passage of information – especially about staff’s plans for inmates.
9. Little choice in this total institution
10. In some institutions, there is a kind of slavery with inmate’ full time placed at convenience of staff; here inmates’ sense of self and sense of possession can become contaminated
11. Total Institutions are incompatible with family; hard to maintain; constraints on family formations.

Inmate World within Total Institution

1. Typical for inmates to come with a “presenting culture” derived from a “home world” And this is the point made by Atiba in noting that perhaps section on African Diaspora; continuities is too far in the lecture; important to remember where descendents came from.  Diverse; diversity of tongues; cultures
2. Integration into total institution may entail a kind of “disculturation” – an “Untraining” if you will – which makes it difficult for person to adjust to his old way of life (disconnect of African Americans with African homelands)
3. Can create tensions between total Institution and homeworld; some losses are irrevocable (Africanisms in American culture versus ??)
4. Admission to T.I.  entail “trimming” or “Programming” – because new arrival [allows himself] to be shaped and coded into an object that can be fed into administrative machinery of establishment.  (change in clothing, hair style, etc.)
5. May involve “obedience tests” at outset
6. Possessions are taken; and with that one’s sense of self
7. Stripped of “usual” appearance
8. May suffer personal self defacement; stripped of one’s “identity kit”
9. Certain movements, postures, and stances will convey lowly images of the individual
10. Physical stance – required to hold body in humiliating pose; perform verbal acts of deference (e.g., saying “sir”, begging, humbly asking for little things like permission to drink water)

• Physical contamination:  unclean food, soiled towels, messy quarters
• Interpersonal contamination:  Forced social relationships.  When inmate loses control over who observes him in his/her predicament, or who knows of his/her past, he is being contaminated by a forced relationship to these people for it is through such knowledge and perception that relations are expressed.
• Inmate thus undergoes mortification of self by contaminative exposure of a physical and interpersonal kind.
• More overt cases of interpersonal contamination; forced relationships (rape, molestation, when one’s possessions are pawed over by official, contact with undesirable fellow inmates)
• Less direct source of mortification:  LOOPING
• Individual find that his protective response to an assault upon self is collapsed into the situation; cannot defend himself in usual way by establishing distance between mortifying situation and himself.
• Through looping, an inmate’s reaction to his own situation is collapse back into this situation itself; and he is not allowed to retain the usual segregation of these phases of action.
• Agency further lost by virtue of regimentation and tyrannization.
• "Echelon” authority:  ANY member of staff class has certain rights to discipline ANY member of the inmate class.  In slavery, ALL staff produce children who become staff by virtue of their ascribed status.

• Total institution strips person of agency, belief that he has any command over his world; that he is a person with “adult” self determination, autonomy, and freedom of action.
• Inmates must show internalization of the worldview of the staff
• Inmate’s use of speech also show their personal inefficacy
• External Mortification is complimented by self/internal mortification
• AND mortification officially rationalized on groups of sanitation, security, it’s for their own good.

Lester:  To be a slave; The Plantation

1. To be a human being under conditions in which that humanity was denied
2. Slavery seen as benefit to slaves (dumb, brute animals, whose sole attributes were working, singing, and dancing)
3. Since they were like children, slavery benefited them

TESTIMONIES SHOW THAT:

• Slaves were nameless (only initials)
• Unable to retaliate (looping, external mortification
• No control
• Internalization of view of slaveholder;
• Privilege of “mixed” blood; allow some room for social mobility among class of slaves
• Other slaves forced to be complicit in system; forced to whip others (though find way to subvert expectations) – interpersonal contamination
• Ascribed lot
• Actually resisted ascribed lot