Typology of Total Institutions
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 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, 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 the better to 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.
- 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.
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