ABSTRACT
It is widely appreciated that total institutions typically fall considerably short of their offcial aims. It is less widely appreciated that each of these offcial goals or characters seems admirably suited to provide a key to meaning – a language of explanation that the staff, and sometimes the inmates, can bring to every crevice of action in the institution.… Each institutional goal lets loose a doctrine, with its own inquisitors and martyrs.… (Goffman 1961: 83-4)
Propaganda that promotes control units as effective against crime – in and out of prison – perpetrates a cruel hoax on an unsuspecting and too often gullible public.1
