Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates

by Erving Goffman

First, there are the “house rules,” a relatively explicit and formal set of prescriptions and proscriptions that lays out the main requirements of inmate conduct. These rules spell out the austere round of life of the inmate. Admission procedures, which strip the recruit of his past supports, can be seen as the institution's way of getting him ready to start living by house rules.

The new recruit frequently starts out with something like the staff's popular misconceptions of the character of the inmates; he comes to find that most of his fellows have all the properties of ordinary, occasionally decent human beings worthy of sympathy and support. The offenses that inmates are known to have committed on the outside cease to provide an effective means for judging their personal qualities—a lesson that conscientious objectors, for example, seem to have learned in prison.101 Further, if the inmates are persons who are accused of having committed a crime of some kind against society, then the new inmate, even though sometimes in fact quite guiltless, may come to share both the guilty feelings of his fellows and their well-elaborated defenses against these feelings. A sense of common injustice and a sense of bitterness against the outside world tend to develop, marking an important movement in the inmate's moral career.

I read this while working in a behavioral health treatment center. It inspired a new perspective on the process of being institutionalized from the patients perspective. I didn’t finish this book because the content became dark and dense, too heavy to finish.