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 of Resocialisation

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.

Consent can blur, though. Residential drug-treatment programmes modelled on therapeutic communities have used status hierarchies, confrontation, and closely managed schedules. Their aim was to dismantle an “addict” identity and build a “recovering” one (Skoll, 1992).

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 the process but are compelled to undergo it. It often happens within total institutions, which 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.

The line can blur in high-control groups. Religious and political groups of this kind, popularly called cults, use similar techniques on a voluntary-in-name-only basis.

Recruitment is often technically consensual. Sustained psychological pressure, isolation from outside contacts, and control over information can then make membership function much like confinement. No physical wall is needed to prevent departure.

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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.

Goffman (1961) defined the term in Asylums as a residence and workplace for many like-situated people, cut off from wider society for an appreciable time. They “together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life” (p. xiii).

Goffman called this an ideal type. No real institution is completely closed, and they differ in how sharply staff and inmates are divided and in whether entry is voluntary.

A prison sits near the most total end. A kibbutz or college sorority, which people join by choice, sits much nearer the open end (Ellis, 2021).

The framework has since been extended to nursing homes, long-term psychiatric wards, immigration detention, and residential rehabilitation programmes.

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 and destructive case. The same mechanisms of isolation, batch treatment, and identity destruction served dehumanisation and murder, not reform.
• 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 of Resocialisation

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. Their staff hold formal authority, but peers inside the institution shape which norms actually take hold. That split helps explain why an institution’s stated aims and its real effects can diverge widely.

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. Within total institutions, they hold formal authority to run the system of rewards and punishments that drives the process.

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.

Inside institutions, peers often matter as much as staff. Among prisoners, an informal inmate code of loyalty, information-sharing, and status can shape daily behaviour more than the official rules.

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. They can also help with resocialisation, especially when someone returns from an institutional setting or faces a major life transition.

On release or discharge, family may help a person relearn ordinary civilian routines after years under institutional control. That adjustment can be almost as demanding as the original resocialisation.

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 of Resocialisation

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.

Goffman (1961) called it the mortification of the self. It is common in total institutions, where a person’s past identity is systematically dismantled.

Textbooks often call it a degradation ceremony, a term Garfinkel (1956) introduced earlier in his analysis of how public rituals lower a person’s status.

The intensity varies widely.

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. These are symbolic acts of total control and identity removal.

These acts remove more than property. They strip away the social supports of identity: a person’s name, possessions, clothing and grooming, privacy, and control over their own body and personal information.

Zurcher (1967) showed how this works at a US naval recruit training centre.

Zurcher’s study is still the clearest account of how mortification works in a relatively benign involuntary setting. It is a single-site study from the 1960s with no comparison group or follow-up, so it cannot show how durable the change was.

The Stanford Prison Experiment (Haney et al., 1973) compressed the same stage into days. Mock prisoners lost their names and wore numbered smocks. Its well-known ethical problems mean it illustrates how quickly people assume institutional roles, but it is not clean proof that settings alone create cruelty.

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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.

Staff expect more than obedience. Individuals must internalise new behaviours, routines, and values that match institutional goals.

Privileges such as television time, exercise, better food, and visits depend on conformity. Resistance costs those privileges or brings isolation and other sanctions.

This fits social learning theory (Bandura, 1977). People learn partly through direct reinforcement and partly by watching which behaviours others are rewarded or punished for. Being told the rules is not enough, so the new self must be practised until it becomes habitual.

Symbolic interactionists add that identity change also runs through meaning. An inmate starts to see themselves through the institution’s categories, much as the looking-glass self describes people seeing themselves as others see them.

Mead (1934) similarly described people taking on the expectations of a “generalized other”, which here means the institution itself.

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 adopt the new behaviours and values, while others become angry and hostile towards the system.

Even the most total institutions rarely achieve complete control. Goffman (1961) described secondary adjustments: informal, sometimes covert practices, such as hoarding forbidden items or keeping outside contacts, that let a fragment of the old self survive.

The high recidivism rate in the U.S. suggests that many inmates may conform to prison norms but still show little respect for the laws of wider society after 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, such as 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: 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.

• High recidivism: About 83% of U.S. state prisoners released in 2005 were rearrested within nine years (Alper et al., 2018). This raises questions about 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 with a degradation ceremony. This ritual-like admission sequence symbolically and practically strips 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 moving between radically different social environments, especially when the previous one was tightly structured and all-encompassing.

Competing Explanations

Sociologists disagree about why institutions change people so unevenly. Four debates matter most.

Debate	One view	Rival view
Source of inmate culture	Deprivation: confinement creates it (Clemmer, 1940)	Importation: it is brought in from outside (Irwin & Cressey, 1962)
Purpose of resocialization	Functionalism: restores shared values	Conflict theory: reproduces inequality (Foucault, 1977)
How identity changes	Social learning: reinforcement and modelling (Bandura, 1977)	Symbolic interactionism: new meanings for the self
Who does the identity work	Top-down: staff design it	Bottom-up: people author their own story (Maruna, 2001)

Deprivation vs Importation

Clemmer (1940) introduced prisonization, the process by which a new inmate absorbs the prison’s customs and norms. He thought this culture came from the deprivations of confinement itself. That is the deprivation model.

Cut off from normal sources of status, security, and goods, inmates build a substitute value system from scratch.

Irwin and Cressey (1962) disagreed. Their importation model says much prison culture is carried in from criminal subcultures that existed before confinement.

The models are not simply right or wrong. Deprivation explains why any isolated institution develops its own status system, even a non-punitive one. Importation explains why prison cultures often look continuous with the criminal identities the institution is trying to replace.

The disagreement matters for whether prison-based resocialisation can realistically succeed.

Functionalism vs Conflict Theory

A functionalist reading treats resocialization as social control. It restores people to a shared value consensus after deviance, illness, or a major role change. This fits the stated aims of the military or a rehabilitation clinic.

Foucault (1977) offered a conflict reading. He argued that prisons and their surveillance systems reproduce inequalities of power rather than repair individuals. They target the poor and marginalised and train docile, self-regulating bodies.

His central point is that modern discipline works through continuous, internalised surveillance, modelled on Bentham’s panopticon. Inmates learn to police themselves. No guard needs to be watching.

The conflict account better fits the pattern of resocialisation failing most often in prisons, whose populations come overwhelmingly from already-disadvantaged groups.

Social Learning vs Symbolic Interactionism

Both perspectives say resocialisation works through structured social experience. They stress different mechanisms. Bandura’s (1977) social learning theory emphasises reinforcement and modelling. Symbolic interactionism adds that people come to see themselves through the institution’s categories.

The two are complementary, since rewards and punishments may be how an institution’s meanings get internalised. They still predict different outcomes once external reinforcement is removed:

• Social learning: behaviour should fade without continued reinforcement.
• Interactionism: a genuinely internalised self-concept should persist.

Top-Down vs Narrative Identity

The total-institution model is top-down. Staff use the institution’s authority to design and run resocialisation. Maruna (2001) offered a bottom-up alternative.

According to Maruna’s research, people who successfully stopped offending typically did so by authoring their own redemptive life story. They reinterpreted their past so that a prosocial future identity felt coherent and achievable.

If Maruna is broadly right, institutional efforts may matter less for lasting change than whether the institution leaves room for people to do this narrative work themselves.

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Contemporary Research

Recent evidence adds a caution. The classic model captures something real about coercive institutions, but it overstates how total their control is and how reliably they reach their official aims.

Are Prisons Really Total Institutions?

This is an intensive first-hand ethnography of exactly the setting Goffman theorised. But it covers one prison, seen through the lens of religion. It may not generalise to men’s, maximum-security, or non-US prisons.

Does Prison-Based Rehabilitation Work?

Beaudry and colleagues (2021) reviewed randomised controlled trials of psychological interventions delivered in prison. Overall, reoffending fell.

That effect disappeared once smaller, more biased studies were excluded. This points to publication bias inflating the apparent benefit.

The recidivism data point the same way. About 83% of U.S. state prisoners released in 2005 were rearrested within nine years (Alper et al., 2018). Together, the two sources weigh against confident claims that prison resocialisation works.

One reason, covered under Competing Explanations above, is that prisons may resocialise people into the inmate subculture rather than into wider society.

Does Voluntary Resocialization Work Better?

Kelly, Humphreys, and Ferri (2020) pooled 27 studies and over 10,000 participants in a Cochrane review of Alcoholics Anonymous and clinically delivered twelve-step facilitation. These programmes produced significantly higher rates of continuous abstinence than comparison treatments such as cognitive behavioural therapy or motivational enhancement therapy.

They performed about equally on most other drinking outcomes and reduced healthcare costs. The evidence is stronger than for prison programmes.

Maruna’s (2001) work on desistance offers a plausible explanation. Programmes like AA pair external structure with an active, first-person role in authoring a “recovering” identity. Resocialisation seems to work more reliably when it recruits a person’s own capacity to make sense of who they are becoming, rather than overriding it.

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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.

Garfinkel, H. (1956). Conditions of successful degradation ceremonies. American Journal of Sociology, 61(5), 420–424. https://doi.org/10.1086/221800

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.

Zurcher, L. A., Jr. (1967). The naval recruit training center: A study of role assimilation in a total institution. Sociological Inquiry, 37(1), 85–98. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-682X.1967.tb00641.x

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🔁 Resocialisation in Institutions and Criminal Justice

Alper, M., Durose, M. R., & Markman, J. (2018). 2018 update on prisoner recidivism: A 9-year follow-up period (2005–2014). U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Beaudry, G., Yu, R., Perry, A. E., & Fazel, S. (2021). Effectiveness of psychological interventions in prison to reduce recidivism: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. The Lancet Psychiatry, 8(9), 759–773. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(21)00170-X

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

Ellis, R. (2021). Prisons as porous institutions. Theory and Society, 50(2), 175–199. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-020-09426-w

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

Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). A study of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison. Naval Research Reviews, 9, 1–17.

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

Irwin, J., & Cressey, D. R. (1962). Thieves, convicts, and the inmate culture. Social Problems, 10(2), 142–155. https://doi.org/10.2307/799047

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.

Kelly, J. F., Humphreys, K., & Ferri, M. (2020). Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs for alcohol use disorder. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, (3), CD012880. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD012880.pub2

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

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🌍 Contemporary Case Studies and Research

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