Let’s start with the definition of social control to explain the main topic of this article: Social control is a set of instruments or mechanisms for enforcing social standards and can be distinguished into external instruments or inner instruments. External instruments in turn can be distinguished into formal instruments, such as sanctions, or informal instruments, such as punishments, contempt, and marginalization. Instead, the inner instruments are the mechanisms aimed at establishing discipline, responsibility, and respect for social norms in the individual. This concept is very much linked to that of the total institution of Goffman; according to this last, the total institutions are those institutions such as asylums, prisons, hospices, which keep under control the lives of people who reside in all their aspects.
The prison institutions, commonly called prisons, are institutions that originally had the function of hosting those who had transgressed the rules imposed by the state and who had to be flogged publicly. Following the Enlightenment era, however, the idea was born that the penalties should be more humanitarian in nature, and then were born the first prisons where the punishment was no longer the punishment, but that of being constantly monitored and controlled. Some theories have been developed about prison functions. Pay theory, utilitarian theories, and Durkheim theory (an important sociologist). The pay theory is the belief that the function is to restore order by sentencing the offender to a penalty proportionate to the damage he committed. Utilitarian theories, on the other hand, hold that prisons have three functions, a preventive function, that is, deterrent, to discourage individuals, the function of literally arresting the culprit as it constitutes a risk to society, and the rehabilitative function. In other words, the prisoner is seen as an individual who must be re-educated to social norms and then reintegrated into society. According to Durkheim, prisons have a manifest function, which is to punish offenders, but also a latent function that is to reiterate and restore in the community the idea of what is lawful and what is unacceptable because it is deviant behavior.
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