Strategies of Control

This groundbreaking study of transitions and control in the California prison system has been extensively cited and quoted in unpublished form, and is finally available worldwide. A compelling part of the canon of studies in penology, criminology, sociology, and organizational theory, STRATEGIES OF CONTROL's new edition adds a foreword by Howard Becker and afterword by Jonathan Simon, both contributing substantive and meaningful views of this important work. Considered influential to...
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This groundbreaking study of transitions and control in the California prison system has been extensively cited and quoted in unpublished form, and is finally available worldwide. A compelling part of the canon of studies in penology, criminology, sociology, and organizational theory, STRATEGIES OF CONTROL's new edition adds a foreword by Howard Becker and afterword by Jonathan Simon, both contributing substantive and meaningful views of this important work. Considered influential to two generations of scholars worldwide, Messinger's thesis examining prison systems' organization and reform--or in some ways, regression--is said to anticipate Erving Goffman's and Michel Foucault's writings on "total institutions" by many years, and raised themes that only years later would become influential in criminology and sociology. Its new digital edition features quality formatting, active Contents, linked notes and cross-references, and all of the tables and charts of the original study. // Writing in the new foreword, Becker notes that this is a "a masterful analysis of a systematically connected group of organizations, seeing them not as separate entities, but as a system whose organizational routines and peculiarities we couldn't understand if we didn't know their external connections as well as their internal workings." Its research methodology was painstaking: "The officials of the new system's components, especially the wardens of the individual prisons, had [many] questions on their minds. You couldn't answer those questions by observing one of those prisons for a year or two." Not so in the decade of research leading up to this work. Indeed, Becker concludes, "Messinger's study provides the blueprint for more accurate and persuasive analyses of large organizations of every kind."