Strategies Of Control (classics Of Law & Society) [Paperback]

This groundbreaking study of transitions and control in the California prison system has been extensively read, cited, and quoted in unpublished formand is at last available worldwide. A compelling part of the canon of studies in penology, criminology, sociology, and organizational theory, this new edition of STRATEGIES OF CONTROL adds a 2016 foreword by Howard S. Becker and afterword by Jonathan Simon. Considered influential to two generations of scholars worldwide, Messingers thesis examining prison systems organization and reformor in some ways, regressionis said to anticipate Erving Goffmans and Michel Foucaults writings on total institutions by many years, and raised themes that years later would fully resonate in criminology and sociology.

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 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 couldnt answer those questions by observing one of those prisons for a year or two. Not so in the authors decade of research leading up to this work. Indeed, Becker concludes, Messingers study provides the blueprint for more accurate and persuasive analyses of large organizations of every kind.

Simon writes in the afterword that the book remains an important contribution to understanding the nature of imprisonment and more broadly to the study of punishment in modern society, providing a crucial background for rethinking the recent history of prisons and particularly the rise of mass incarceration, which has seen the proliferation of multi-prison systems, extensions of bureaucratic manlC©