ABSTRACT
ONE of the focal points in Sykes' analysis of the New Jersey State Prison is his consideration of the notion of 'total power'. The maximum security prison with its comprehensive rules, its staff who are prosecution, judge and jury in their own cause, and its ability to mobilize, in extremity, the coercive machinery of the wider society, its courts or even its guns, bears a remarkable resemblance to a totalitarian social system. In reality, as Sykes argues, there are major defects in the structure of total power:
The lack of a sense of duty among those who are held captive, the obvious fallacies of coercion, the pathetic collection of rewards and punishments to induce compliance, the strong pressures toward the corruption of the guard in the form of friendship, reciprocity and transfer of duties into the hands of trusted inmates—all are structural defects in the prison's system of power rather than individual inadequacies. 1
