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Since Michel Foucault, it has been accepted that modern penal institutions achieve their disciplinary goals, in part, by constructing subjects and subjectivity. The chapter challenges this notion by looking at the daily life in the penal colony, and specifically, at the range of actions that staff and inmates take outside or against the institution’s demands. A theoretical framework is developed building on the work of Erving Goffman and Pierre Bourdieu, which sees historical subjects as incoherent, fragmented, and often contradictory, affected by social and cultural institutions that make conflicting demands on them.

This chapter will argue that the development of mental health policy was hugely influenced by conceptions of space and place. By the middle of the 20th century the asylum had become, in the public and sociological imagination a Gothic institution of seclusion and abuse. The chapter will explore the development of this representation of the asylum. The final representations of the asylum contrast dramatically with the original ones that saw the new institutions as a modern, progressive deinstitutionalisation was to present the community in binary opposition to the asylum. Community based services would, almost by reason of their location, lead to the creation of a new form of inclusive mental health provision. This is based on an idealised notion of community. As the pressures on mental health services grew, a range of social policies that were introduced that meant that urban communities, in particular, became exclusionary rather than inclusionary.

Chapter 3 presents findings from interviews with prisoners, focusing on what prisoners named as problems, what they said they have filed grievances on, and what consequences they anticipated. The frequency of these prisoners’ naming and claiming is inconsistent with findings in the literature on disputing, legal mobilization, and “trouble.” Despite their expressions of self-blame, their stigmatized status, and fears of retaliation and provoking “trouble” for themselves, the vast majority of prisoners have filed grievances, and many have filed multiple grievances. The authors argue that the institutional context of prison—a total institution in which law is a hyper-visible organizing force—enhances this form of legal mobilization by prisoners, trumping the very social and psychological factors that this context otherwise produces and that in other populations tamp down claims making.

This chapter examines the process of socialization, of becoming a person—the way we become aware of the social world we are a part of and learn to participate in it. It first considers the lessons of early childhood and how a child learns a particular language before discussing George Herbert Mead's views on childhood learning. It then analyzes the processes that occur when people are removed from the larger social order and confined to total institutions and “becoming a person once again,” also known as “secondary socialization” or “resocialization.” It suggests that, whether one is speaking of “becoming a person” in the early years or repeating some part of that process later, members of a society live by an informal grammar.

In this chapter, former prisoners’ narratives are used to explore what it means to serve time in the “total institution” of prison, the prison experience and its connection to prisoner reentry, and what it means to be a convicted felon in society. Society expects prisoners reentering society to succeed by getting a job and not returning to a life of crime, but many fail, yet scholars rarely incorporate felons’ voices into the analysis to understand why. This chapter argues that there are many contradictions embedded in the reentry process, that there is little public support and social capital, and that participants find out that reentering society is harder than they anticipated. Relying on first-person accounts, the chapter exposes why it is so hard to reenter by exploring participants’ experience of living under the oppressive penal chain attached to a felony conviction. Readers are introduced to a unique perspective on serving time in prison and reentering society as a felon.

This thematic chapter focuses on the relationships and interaction between the SS and inmates inside the Dachau prisoner compound. It identifies a radicalizing tension in this hands-on aspect of the Dachau School between the SS drive to pathologize the inmates as a collective ‘other’ and the urge to categorize, divide, and express the specificities of the Nazi worldview. It critiques theoretical literature on institutional psychology (including the Stanford Prison Experiment) and examines the ‘grey’ and liminal territory between perpetrators and prisoners. It traces the changing demography of the prisoner population during the era of the Dachau School and analyses the treatment of various prisoner groups. It concludes with an analysis of the mass imprisonment of 11,000 Jewish in Dachau after the ‘Night of the Broken Glass’ in November 1938, the first time that Jews formed a majority of the inmate population: a glimpse into the future of the camp system.

One warm Sunday evening in September 1993, I found myself walking aimlessly around the McMaster University campus. Earlier the same week, I had seen a poster advertising' Church at the John, an event organized by the McMaster chapter of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF). Since I was academically interested in conservative Protestantism, and since at that point I knew no one in the city, I decided, for lack of other options, to attend this meeting. What I found there fell completely outside my expectations, prompted an elaborate series of questions, and ultimately resulted in the present book. Since I assumed that the meeting would be small, I worried that being ten minutes late might draw unwanted attention to my presence. As I descended the stairs of the Downstairs John (or simply' the John, McMaster's largest student bar, I could hear the noises of a large group of people. I thought I might have misread the poster a few days earlier; when I entered the bustling room, I was virtually certain I had. Except for the well-lit stage at one end of the room, the John was dark, and almost six hundred people were crowded into a space designed for no more than four hundred and fifty. The room was narrow and long, with a low stage at one end, pool tables at the opposite end, and a bar along the side of the room. People were standing and sitting in the aisles, on the bar, and against the walls beneath the bikini-clad models and slogans that festooned the neon beer signs. I discreetly asked one person who was standing against the wall if this was the right room for the IVCF meeting, and he replied that it was. I looked at him more intently to determine if he was joking, but he just smiled at me politely and bowed his head. After a few confusing moments, I realized he was praying. I turned away from him and noticed that all the other people in the room had bowed their heads in a prayer being led by a demure young woman on the stage.