Total Institution - Typology of Total Institutions

Typology of Total Institutions

Total institutions are divided by Goffman into five different types:

1. institutions established to care for people felt to be both harmless and incapable: orphanages, poor houses and nursing homes.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.