Total institution

A total institution or residential institution is a place of work and residence 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. Privacy is limited in total institutions, as all aspects of life including sleep, play, and work, are conducted in the same place. The concept is mostly associated with the work of sociologist Erving Goffman. 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. An expanded version appeared in Donald Cressey's collection, The Prison, and was reprinted in Goffman's 1961 collection, Asylums. Fine and Manning, however, note that Goffman heard the term in lectures by Everett Hughes (likely during the late-1940s seminar, "Work and Occupations"). Regardless of whether Goffman coined the term, he can be credited with popularizing it. Total institutions are divided by Goffman into five different types: institutions established to care for people felt to be both harmless and incapable: orphanages, poor houses, group homes and nursing homes. 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. 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. 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.