Organizational Goals and Inmate Organization

Abstract

Relationships between organizational goals and informal organization in three minimum-security prisons were examined in an attempt to replicate Grusky's study and to investigate relations between formal and informal structure in total institutions and conditions which generate oppositional informal organization. (1) Inmate attitudes were found to be more positive in treatment institutions than in custodial ones. (2) Inmate attitudes were shaped significantly by prison experience: the longer the time spent in prison, the most pronounced was its effect. (3) Differences in attitudes between prisons resulted from different patterns of informal organization, rather than inmates reacting individually to their similar prison experience, since attitudes were found to be related to involvement in informal organization, and informal leaders in these institutions systematically differed in their attitudes. (4) Differences in informal organization arose out of the different functions performed by the inmate subsystems in response to conditions set by the organization's goals. (5) The functions performed by the inmate subsystem, in turn, had implications for the roles of informal inmate leaders.

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