The Crutch of Ritual: Social Control in the Modern American Capital Punishment System Page: 38
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comfortable with the eventual execution when the victim is well-behaved, adequately controlled,
and seemingly resigned to his fate. The process of creating this docile sacrificial lamb begins as
soon as the offender begins his prison stay.
In Sykes' 1958 study of a maximum security prison, The Society of Captives, the author
considers the many "signs pointing to a prisoner's degradation... the anonymity of a uniform and
a number rather than a name, the shaven head, the insistence on gestures of respect and
subordination when addressing officials, and so on" (p. 66). Note the language of 'degradation,'
echoing Garfinkel's work on ritual degradation ceremonies. According to Sykes, the degradation
of maximum-security inmates leads to a "loss of autonomy" as a result of the "vast body of rules
and regulations which are designed to control his behavior in minute detail" (p. 73). Sykes also
highlighted the seemingly "incomprehensible order or rule [which] is a basic feature of life in the
prison," as the rules and regulations designed to degrade the inmates "'don't make sense' from
a prisoner's point of view" (p. 74). The often-nonsensical nature of the prison's degradation
rituals points to their ritual function as symbolic rather than practical.
In his seminal 1961 work Asylums, Erving Goffman explores the nature and form of what
he calls 'total institutions,' or social establishments such as insane asylums and prisons that keep
their inhabitants largely or fully cut off from the outside world. In his treatment of prisons
specifically, he discusses at length the rituals of mortification that inmates are forced to undergo
as a normal part of their daily lives. Echoing Sykes' interpretation, he notes the extreme loss of
control and personal identity that this process creates, concluding that "total institutions disrupt
or defile precisely those actions that have the role of attesting to the actor and those in his
presence that he has some command over his world" (p. 43).38
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Pellegrino, Alexandra Clarke. The Crutch of Ritual: Social Control in the Modern American Capital Punishment System, thesis, August 2019; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1538795/m1/42/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .