The phrase "total institution" is correct and usable in written English.
It is used to describe a place or environment in which people are subject to a highly regulated, disciplined lifestyle that is imposed upon them from the outside. For example, "Life in military boot camp is considered a type of total institution, in which the recruits are expected to obey orders without question."
The concept "total institution" refers to the life of psychiatric patients in institutional settings and originated from his ethnographic fieldwork in 1955 6 in a federal institution of over 7,000 inmates in Washington D.C, United States.
The supermarket is what Erving Goffman might call a total institution.
A four-year residential college is what sociologists call a total institution: it controls the conditions under which students eat, sleep, work, and party.
The professor of anthropological science and life fellow of King's College, Alan Macfarlane, wrote of the place that it is a "total institution", comparable in this to prisons, boarding schools or army barracks.
The ward is what the sociologist Erving Goffman once called a "total institution," like asylums, armies, prisons, monasteries, and Oxbridge colleges — an institution that strips you of your identity and equips you with a new one.
Indeed, to see that prison is "a total institution", without any reference to the transition from prison to the community (commonly known as "through the prison gate"), is simply to reinforce the lack of strategic vision that characterises government's criminal justice policy.
Nazi death camps, as any total institutions, were designed to deny any free will or choice from inmates.
He taught a course called "Total Institutions" in which he compared plantation slavery with social life in prisons and asylums.
"The central feature of all these total institutions is that different parts of life occur within one physical space – sleeping, eating, drinking, sport, prayer and thought.
In Goffman's fiercely argued analysis, mental hospitals function as "total institutions" that aim to reinforce predicable behaviour – not just for inmates, but for staff, too.
In common with orphanages, mental hospitals and military barracks, they were "total institutions", preoccupied with minimising risk and facilitating staff routines at the expense of granting adults autonomy and self-respect.
