Prison as a Total institution

Prison as a Total institution

Introduction

Ever since the 1960s and 70s the role of prisons within the social fabric has been questioned and deconstructed. Studies such as Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1991), G.M. Sykes' Society of Captives: Study of a Maximum Security Prison (1992) and notions such as Irving Goffman's 'total institutions' in his book Asylums (1971) have consistently asserted the importance of the prison in the psychosocial make-up of Western society. For these authors, the prison represents more than merely a place of incarceration or punishment, it goes to very heart of a society's relationship to the people that both transgress and uphold the law; in Simulacra and Simulation (2004), for instance Jean Baudrillard makes the observation that prison serves the function of a mask to hide the real carceral nature of the socius (Baudrillard, 2004: 12) and, according to Foucault, prison is merely one of many 'enunciative modalities' (Foucault, 1989: 55) that shape the episteme and create social Others.

Analysis

Of course, what links many of these views is the connection between the prison and the asylum, criminality and mental illness. Foucault's work on prisons came after his doctoral thesis Madness and Civilization (2004) and Goffman's study on institutions for the insane crosses over, at various points to discuss prisons and their uses; in fact Goffman is quite candid that, in his view at least, the prison and the insane asylum share not only intrinsic qualities but intrinsic social functions and his description of a total institution could easily be used to describe the both “A total institution may be defined as 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, 1971: 11)

It is little wonder, then, that more and more, as we shall see, the prison psychologist is seen as an important practical and theoretical quilting point between the two notions; criminality and the mind of the criminal. This essay attempts to look at this dialogical topic assessing the place of the prison psychologist today and what they can tell us about, not only the offender and the whole notion of offending but the prison and the practice of imprisonment itself. In their 1963 work Pentonville: A Sociological Study of an English Prison (1963), Barer, Morris and Morris describe the distinct lack of any psychiatric or psychological professionals working within the English penal system:

“The most striking feature of the medical services at Pentonville is their concentration on physical illness and their almost total lack of provision for mental illness. The prison has no psychiatrist, no psychologist and makes no use of consultants in these disciplines.” (Barer, Morris and Morris, 1963: 39)

This situation has changed tremendously since 1963. Today there are twelve areas in England and Wales each with its own team of forensic psychologists and assistants who are expected to provide services for not only the prisoners in ...