Abstract
For six decades, scholars have relied on Erving Goffman’s (1961) theory of total institutions to understand prison culture. Viewing prisons as total institutions offers insights into role performance and coercive control. However, mounting evidence suggests that prisons are not, in fact, total institutions. In this article, I first trace two credible challenges to the idea of prison as a total institution based on existing data: that prison gates open daily and that prisons operate within a context of overlapping surveillance and punishment supported by broader political and economic interests. Second, I draw on empirical findings from my own yearlong ethnographic study inside one U.S. state women’s prison to illuminate a third challenge to the total institution paradigm. Using religion in prison as a case study, I describe the process of institutional infusion, in which an outside institution proffers attitudes, practices, and resources that individuals may draw on to shape their material and interpretive experiences within a host institution. Prisons are structured to accommodate institutional infusion, further calling their totality into question. I conclude that we can learn far more about the realities and inequalities of the prison experience by viewing prisons as porous institutions.
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Notes
Notably, some of these challenges pertain to current usage of the term “total institution” of the prison, rather than Goffman’s original description, although the distinction between the two has eroded in the past few decades.
Exact parameters withheld to maintain confidentiality of the field site.
We might conceive of minimum-security prisons as “less total” than maximum-security prisons; conversely, as an extension of my argument, I recommend construing maximum-security prisons as “less porous” than minimum-security prisons.
In 1993, Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Action (RFRA 2012), which was drafted with the help of evangelical groups like Charles Colson’s Prison Fellowship. Religious freedom in prison was signed into law, mandating that the only restrictions to religious practice must be based on a “compelling government interest,” which primarily included concerns about the safety and security of prisoners (see also Erzen 2017). In 1997, the Supreme Court heard the case City of Boerne v. Flores, ruling that RFRA can only apply to federal prisons and prisons in Washington, DC, as local ordinances should not be subject to federal regulation. As a result, state prisons were no longer required to abide by RFRA. RLUIPA passed three years later, and made religious freedom a condition of receiving federal funds.
These examples indicate that although religious volunteers had relative autonomy once inside prison, the sorting process by prison administrators and the intractably coercive prison context shaped religious messages, such that they may also have worked in furtherance of penal goals. I explore the tension between freedom and constraint of religious messages and practices in greater depth elsewhere (Ellis 2020).
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Valerio Baćak, Randall Collins, Annette Lareau, Junhow Wei, and Melissa Wilde for helpful feedback on this project, as well as the editor, anonymous reviewers, and Karen Lucas for incisive suggestions that strengthened this article.
Funding
This study was supported by research grants from the Association for the Sociology of Religion and the Religious Research Association. This study was funded by fellowships from the Mellon Foundation / American Council of Learned Societies, the Louisville Institute, the National Science Foundation [DGE-0822], and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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Ellis, R. Prisons as porous institutions. Theor Soc 50, 175–199 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-020-09426-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-020-09426-w