Sport in the underlife of a total institution: Social control and resistance in Canadian prisons

Abstract

While it is clear from a small body of scholarly literature that sport and physical activity play important roles in the daily lives of many inmates in diverse prison contexts around the world, there remains relatively little research that sociologically explores the significance of these physical practices in correctional environments. This paper helps to address this gap by examining one of the key tensions in prison sport: its deployment by corrections policymakers and administrators as a form of social control and its simultaneous use by prisoners as a vehicle for resistance and subversion. Situating the research in Goffman’s concept of the total institution, the paper explores how prisoners, though stripped of many resources for self presentation and collective subversion, refashion sport activities, materials, and spaces to their own purposes – and, in doing so, how they resist, in a limited fashion, the prison’s social control aims. More broadly, these findings point to the potential social significance of sport and physical activity as vehicles for the limited expression of agency in situations of extreme deprivation or imposing disciplinary regimes.