Resocialization

Resocialization is the process of unlearning old behaviors and norms and adopting new ones, often through intense social experiences. It usually happens in settings like the military, prisons, or rehab, where people undergo a major shift in identity and way of life. It’s a powerful form of social learning that can be either voluntary or forced.

Types

Sociologists generally classify resocialisation into two major types: voluntary and involuntary.

The difference lies in whether the individual chooses to undergo the process or is compelled by external forces, often within highly structured environments.

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1. Voluntary Resocialisation

When people willingly adopt a new role, identity, or way of life

Voluntary resocialisation occurs when individuals actively choose to enter a new setting, take on a new status, or commit to personal transformation.

While the process can still be intense and emotionally demanding, the key difference is choice and consent.

Common contexts include:

• Becoming a student, employee, or retiree: Life transitions often require learning new routines, responsibilities, and social norms. For example, a new employee must learn workplace etiquette, adapt to team culture, and follow institutional values.
• Changing careers or moving between organisations: People often must unlearn one set of behavioural expectations and take on another. For instance, someone moving from a nonprofit to a corporate job may experience culture shock and require significant adjustment.
• Entering therapy or medical treatment: In psychological or behavioural therapy, especially for trauma survivors or individuals with mental health challenges, people often undergo a long-term reorientation of their beliefs, self-perception, and behaviour. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), for instance, requires replacing unhelpful thought patterns with more adaptive ones.
• Religious conversion or joining spiritual communities: Converts often adopt a new worldview, practices, and identity. This may include changes in dress, speech, diet, rituals, and community affiliations.
• Joining self-help or recovery groups: Groups like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) use structured programs to help members shift from a self-destructive identity to one focused on healing, accountability, and sobriety.
• Moving to a senior care home: Although sometimes prompted by family or health needs, many older adults voluntarily move into assisted living and gradually adapt to new social routines and reduced independence.

💡 Key features:

• Active participation
• Internal motivation for change
• High potential for identity transformation
• Often supported by social networks or structured programs

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2. Involuntary Resocialisation

When people are forced to change by powerful external forces

Involuntary resocialisation occurs when individuals do not choose to undergo the process, but are instead compelled to do so, often within total institutions that exercise complete control over their environment and behaviour.

This type of resocialisation is often coercive, intense, and psychologically disruptive, aiming to break down a person’s former identity and rebuild a new one that conforms to institutional norms.

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🔒 What Are Total Institutions?

A concept developed by sociologist Erving Goffman, total institutions are places where all aspects of life are conducted in the same place under a single authority, and where barriers separate the individual from the outside world.

Defining characteristics:

• Complete isolation from mainstream society
• Strict control over routines, behaviour, and schedules
• Uniform treatment of individuals as part of a group
• Use of degradation ceremonies to strip former identities
• Goal of compliance, conformity, and re-education

Examples of total institutions:

• Prisons and jails: Inmates are stripped of autonomy, often identified by numbers, and forced to follow institutional rules. The aim is behavioural reform, but in practice, adaptation may be superficial.
• Military boot camps: Recruits are systematically stripped of their civilian identity and rebuilt as soldiers through intense discipline, conformity, and collective bonding.
• Psychiatric hospitals (historically): Patients were confined, monitored, and subjected to treatments designed to “normalise” behaviour, often without consent.
• Religious convents and monasteries: Individuals give up personal possessions and social ties to live under strict religious discipline, often for life.
• Nazi concentration camps: The most extreme form of involuntary resocialisation, where identities were systematically destroyed and replaced with complete dehumanisation.
• Ships at sea (classical example): Goffman noted that life aboard ships can reflect total institution dynamics, where daily life, work, and identity are closely managed within a confined space.

⚠️ Risks and limitations:

• Psychological distress and identity confusion
• Surface-level conformity rather than true transformation
• High likelihood of institutionalisation—difficulty adjusting after release
• Questionable long-term effectiveness (e.g., high prison recidivism rates)

Feature	Voluntary Resocialisation	Involuntary Resocialisation
Choice	Initiated by the individual	Imposed by external forces
Control	Individual retains autonomy	Controlled by institutions or authority figures
Settings	Education, therapy, religion, jobs, recovery groups	Prisons, military, hospitals, convents, camps
Process	Supported by guidance, reflection, and social support	Often involves coercion, degradation, and strict discipline
Emotional experience	Empowering but challenging	Stressful, alienating, potentially traumatic
Outcome	Often leads to internalised identity change	May result in resistance, compliance, or psychological harm

Examples

Understanding resocialisation is easier when we look at real-life examples. These show how people adapt to new roles, often by unlearning old norms and taking on entirely new ways of thinking and behaving.

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Voluntary Resocialisation Examples

These occur when individuals choose to adopt a new lifestyle, role, or belief system.

• University Freshers: First-year students often move away from home and must quickly adapt to independence, new academic expectations, and social dynamics.
• Therapy for Abuse Survivors: Adults who experienced childhood trauma may undergo therapy that helps them replace harmful thought patterns with healthier coping mechanisms.
• Joining a Religion: Converting to a religion like Islam or Christianity may involve adopting new daily rituals, dietary laws, dress codes, and moral frameworks.
• Alcoholics Anonymous (AA): Participants internalise a new value system through the twelve-step process, reshaping their identity from “addict” to “recovering member.”
• Career Change: Transitioning from a military role to a civilian job often requires rethinking authority, communication style, and even emotional expression.

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Involuntary Resocialisation Examples

These occur when a person is forced into a new environment or role, often under institutional control.

• Prison Inmates: On entering prison, inmates give up personal possessions, wear uniforms, follow strict routines, and adapt to both formal rules and inmate culture.
• Military Boot Camp: New recruits undergo strict discipline, loss of individuality, and intensive training to prepare for combat and group cohesion.
• Psychiatric Hospitalisation: Inpatients may be stripped of clothing, confined to scheduled activities, and treated under rules that remove autonomy for safety and treatment.
• Reform Schools: Juvenile offenders may be placed in residential schools with structured daily routines, uniforms, and therapy programs aimed at behavioural change.
• Concentration Camps (Historical): Prisoners were systematically dehumanised through forced labour, loss of names (replaced by numbers), starvation, and constant surveillance.

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Everyday Resocialisation Examples

Not all resocialisation occurs in extreme environments – many everyday experiences also involve deep identity shifts.

• Moving to a New Country: Immigrants must learn new cultural norms, languages, and laws, often leaving behind familiar customs to integrate into a new society.
• Retirement: After decades of working, retirees may need to develop new routines, hobbies, and social networks that give life meaning and structure.
• Becoming a Parent: Parenthood requires a shift from focusing on the self to prioritising the needs, routines, and development of a child.
• Corporate Onboarding: Employees in high-powered companies are often socialised into competitive, high-performance environments that may conflict with previous values.
• Joining a Cult: Cults often strip members of their past identity and instil new beliefs, language, and behaviour through group isolation, emotional manipulation, and ritual.

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Agents of Resocialization

Who or what shapes new identities, behaviours, and values during resocialisation?

In sociology, agents of resocialization are the individuals, groups, or institutions that facilitate the learning of new norms, values, attitudes, and behaviours during a significant life transition.

These agents play a crucial role in helping people adapt to new roles, environments, or social expectations – whether voluntarily or involuntarily.

Agents can vary in intent, authority, and methods depending on the setting.

In voluntary contexts, they often guide and support change. In involuntary contexts, they may impose change through force, discipline, or manipulation.

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1. Institutions

Institutions are often the most powerful agents of resocialization, especially in involuntary settings.

Examples:

• Prisons and Correctional Facilities: Enforce strict behavioural codes and surveillance to control and reshape inmate behaviour.
• Military: Uses basic training, hierarchy, and routine to transform civilians into soldiers.
• Psychiatric Hospitals: May use therapy, medication, and structured environments to modify thought and behaviour patterns.
• Religious Convents and Monasteries: Demand strict adherence to spiritual discipline, communal living, and role-specific behaviours.
• Schools: While not typically total institutions, schools may act as agents of resocialization when students transition to new educational environments or cultures (e.g., international students, military academies).

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2. Authority Figures

Individuals in positions of power are often central to shaping new identities—especially when resocialisation is involuntary or structured.

Examples:

• Drill Sergeants in the military who enforce conformity and instil group identity.
• Therapists or Psychologists who guide clients through cognitive and behavioural transformation.
• Prison Guards or Wardens who regulate daily life and impose behavioural discipline.
• Rehabilitation Program Leaders in addiction treatment centres or halfway houses.
• Cult Leaders who shape members’ beliefs through indoctrination, isolation, and emotional manipulation.

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3. Peer Groups

Peers can reinforce new norms or serve as role models. Peer pressure, group dynamics, and shared experience all influence how someone adopts (or resists) new behaviours.

Examples:

• Fellow recruits in military training who bond over shared challenges.
• Support group members in programs like Alcoholics Anonymous or group therapy.
• Inmates in prisons, whose informal norms (inmate code) often shape behaviour more than official rules.
• Religious or spiritual communities that reinforce shared beliefs and practices.
• Workplace teams that encourage conformity to organisational culture during onboarding or role changes.

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4. Family

Family members are lifelong agents of socialisation, but they can also play a role in resocialisation, especially when someone returns from an institutional setting or experiences a major life transition.

Examples:

• Families supporting someone after prison release may help them adapt to freedom and re-establish healthy habits.
• Parents of a newly diagnosed neurodivergent child may resocialise themselves to understand and adopt new parenting strategies.
• Spouses adjusting to each other’s evolving roles (e.g., after retirement or illness).

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5. Media and Technology

Mass media and digital environments can also function as agents of resocialisation by promoting new values, identities, and norms—especially in voluntary or lifestyle-oriented transformations.

Examples:

• Online recovery communities for people dealing with addiction or mental health challenges.
• Self-help influencers or podcasts that promote mindset shifts or new behaviours.
• News and documentaries that reshape public perception and individual beliefs (e.g., on race, gender, or climate change).
• Corporate training modules or e-learning platforms during professional resocialisation.

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Stages

Resocialisation typically unfolds in two main stages, especially in total institutions, but broader applications (e.g. therapy, parenting, retirement) may include additional steps.

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Stage 1: Degradation Ceremony (Involuntary contexts)

Symbolically stripping away the old self

This is the initial stage, where individuals are stripped of their former identity, status, and sense of self.

The purpose is to break down the individual’s existing self-concept to make way for a new institutional identity.

Coined by Erving Goffman, this step is common in total institutions, where the individual’s past identity is systematically dismantled.

This process can range in intensity:

In milder cases, such as an elderly person entering a senior care home, it may involve giving up personal belongings or autonomy in daily routines.

In more extreme cases, the degradation is overt and systematic:

• New prisoners may lose their freedom, privacy, rights, and personal possessions. They may be identified by serial numbers instead of names.
• Military recruits often have their hair shaved, wear identical uniforms, and undergo verbal challenges (e.g., humiliation or questioning of masculinity by drill sergeants) to erode their civilian identity.
• In mental asylums or prisons, inmates might be stripped naked, checked for vermin, or forcibly shaved—symbolic acts of total control and identity removal.

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Stage 2: Rebuilding the New Identity

Learning new norms, values, and behaviours

Once the old self is erased or suspended, the process of resocialisation begins.

Individuals are taught new expectations and rules, and often rewarded or punished based on how well they conform.

This is done through a strict system of rewards and punishments aimed at enforcing conformity and obedience.

Individuals are expected to internalise new behaviours, routines, and values aligned with institutional goals.

Key features:

• Structured routines and new roles
• Rewards for compliance, punishments for resistance
• Social reinforcement through peers or authority figures

Examples:

• Basic training in the military (marching, drills, discipline)
• Therapy programs that replace maladaptive thinking with healthier coping strategies
• Twelve-step programs like AA, which introduce a new worldview and self-concept

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Individuals respond differently to resocialisation. Some may be rehabilitated and adopt the new behaviours and values, while others may become angry and hostile towards the system. The high recidivism rate in the U.S. suggests that many inmates, despite institutional resocialisation efforts, may conform to prison norms but still have little respect for the laws of wider society upon release

Impact & Consequences

Resocialisation is often a life-altering process, especially when it involves intense role changes or occurs in total institutions.

Whether voluntary or involuntary, it can have profound psychological, behavioural, and social consequences.

These outcomes may be positive—such as personal growth or rehabilitation—or negative, such as identity loss or long-term trauma.

How resocialisation affects identity, behaviour, and social roles

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1. Identity Transformation

Resocialisation can lead to the development of a new self-concept or a completely revised personal identity.

• Individuals may adopt new beliefs, roles, and values that redefine who they are.
• In voluntary settings (e.g., therapy, recovery programs), this transformation can be empowering, helping people overcome harmful behaviours or mindsets.
• In involuntary contexts (e.g., prisons or boot camps), it may feel forced or artificial, creating internal conflict between old and new identities.

Example: A person recovering from addiction may come to see themselves not as a “failure” but as a “survivor” or “mentor,” reshaping their self-worth and direction in life.

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2. Behavioural Change

Resocialisation requires the unlearning of old habits and the acquisition of new behaviours that are appropriate for the individual’s new role.

• Structured environments may use rewards, punishments, or routines to reinforce desired behaviours.
• Success depends on the person’s willingness and capacity to change.
• In some cases, the behaviour may appear to change outwardly (compliance), but the internal mindset remains unchanged.

Example: A soldier in training may learn punctuality, obedience, and discipline, which persist long after their service ends.

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3. Role Adaptation

Resocialisation often marks a shift from one major social role to another—e.g., civilian to soldier, student to worker, or inmate to free citizen.

• This shift involves learning new expectations, responsibilities, and social scripts.
• Adapting well to a new role often depends on whether the individual receives support, guidance, and social reinforcement.

Example: Retirees may struggle to redefine their purpose after leaving the workforce, especially if their self-esteem was tied to their professional identity.

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4. Emotional and Psychological Effects

The resocialisation process is frequently stressful and can evoke a range of emotional responses.

• Individuals may feel anxiety, confusion, grief (for their old identity), or loss of control.
• In coercive environments, resocialisation may cause trauma or lead to long-term resistance and resentment.
• However, in supportive contexts, it can also lead to healing, resilience, and empowerment.

Example: Inmates released from prison may face psychological challenges readjusting to freedom, especially if they feel institutionalised.

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5. Social Reintegration or Alienation

How successfully someone is resocialised affects their relationship to society.

• Successful resocialisation may lead to social reintegration, improved relationships, and role fulfillment.
• Unsuccessful resocialisation can lead to social alienation, relapse into old behaviours, or marginalisation.

Example: High recidivism rates in prisons suggest that many inmates are not fully resocialised into mainstream society, despite institutional attempts to reform them.

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Critical Evaluation

Resocialisation plays a critical role in helping individuals adjust to new roles and expectations, whether through therapy, education, or institutional discipline.

In voluntary contexts, it can lead to healing, empowerment, and personal growth.

However, in involuntary and coercive environments – especially total institutions – it often produces mixed outcomes, including emotional distress, surface-level compliance, and long-term reintegration challenges.

A more effective approach to resocialisation may depend on:

• Respecting individual autonomy
• Offering psychological support
• Creating environments that foster identity reconstruction, rather than destroy it.

🌱 Strengths and Advantages

1. Rehabilitation and Positive Change

Resocialisation can lead to profound personal transformation, especially when it is part of a structured and supportive program.

• In prisons, rehabilitation programs aim to reform offenders by providing life, social, and vocational skills that support reintegration into society.
• Norway’s Halden Prison is a model of humane rehabilitation, offering education, therapy, and a “reintegration guarantee” to help inmates find housing and employment upon release.
• Juvenile offender programs often focus on relearning positive social behaviours and have shown success, despite broader system failures.
• Voluntary resocialisation, such as therapy for trauma survivors or participation in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), can reshape beliefs and behaviour through long-term emotional and cognitive work.
• Corporate training and retraining programs also reflect resocialisation principles, helping workers replace outdated attitudes and behaviours to function effectively in new organisational cultures.

2. Adaptation to New Roles and Environments

Resocialisation enables individuals to transition into new life stages or social statuses by equipping them with appropriate skills, values, and norms.

• Transitions include becoming a student, entering the workforce, retiring, or adjusting to widowhood.
• It allows individuals to function effectively in new environments where previous behaviours or attitudes may no longer be appropriate or helpful.

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⚠️ Limitations and Disadvantages

1. Stressful and Difficult Process

Resocialisation is typically more psychologically demanding than standard socialisation.

• It often requires individuals to unlearn deeply ingrained behaviours, which can be unsettling or distressing.
• Even when voluntary, the shift into a new life role can cause emotional strain, uncertainty, and self-doubt—especially without strong social support.

2. Ineffectiveness in Total Institutions

In settings such as prisons, resocialisation often fails to achieve lasting behavioural change.

• The high recidivism rate in the U.S. (30–60% of former inmates return to prison within two to five years) raises questions about the effectiveness of prison-based rehabilitation.
• Contributing factors:
  • Exposure to more hardened criminals
  • Internalisation of prison subculture rather than societal norms
  • Stigma of being an ex-offender
• Many inmates conform only to prison norms, not the values of the wider society.
• Workplace skills such as emotional regulation and collaboration are not cultivated in environments that reward toughness and survival.

3. Destruction of Identity and Potential Harm

Total institutions often begin the resocialisation process with a degradation ceremony—symbolically and practically stripping away the individual’s prior identity.

• This can include:
  • Loss of privacy and autonomy
  • Replacement of personal belongings with standard-issue items
  • Being referred to by serial number rather than name
• Military boot camps may use humiliation (e.g., questioning a recruit’s manhood) to dismantle civilian identity.
• These practices can result in psychological trauma, identity confusion, and hostility toward the institution or system that imposed the change.

4. Challenges of Reintegration

Even when resocialisation is successful within a total institution, reintegrating into wider society is often difficult.

• Ex-soldiers may struggle to adapt to civilian life, feeling lost, unmotivated, or disconnected from those around them.
• This highlights the long-term challenge of transitioning between radically different social environments—especially when the previous one was tightly structured and all-encompassing.

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Reading List

🧠 Foundational Sociological Texts

Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Anchor Books.

Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. Anchor Books.

Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society: From the standpoint of a social behaviorist (C. W. Morris, Ed.). University of Chicago Press.

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🔁 Resocialisation in Institutions and Criminal Justice

Clemmer, D. (1940). The prison community. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1975)

Irwin, J. (1970). The felon. Prentice-Hall.

Maruna, S. (2001). Making good: How ex-convicts reform and rebuild their lives. American Psychological Association.

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🧠 Psychological and Therapeutic Perspectives

Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Prentice-Hall.

Yalom, I. D., & Leszcz, M. (2005). The theory and practice of group psychotherapy (5th ed.). Basic Books.

Gulliver, P., & Fanslow, J. L. (2015). The journey to recovery: Understanding the process of adult survivors of childhood trauma. Qualitative Health Research, 25(8), 1090–1100. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732315575314

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🌍 Contemporary Case Studies and Research

Ben-David, S. (2005). Rehabilitation and recidivism of criminal offenders: A longitudinal study. Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, 40(1–2), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1300/J076v40n01_01

Skoll, G. R. (1992). Walk the walk and talk the talk: An ethnography of a drug abuse treatment program. Temple University Press.