The central claim of this article is that microsociological accounts of prison life should not be divorced from questions that relate to the macrosociological roles that the institution performs in society. The argument developed in the article provides a way of thinking that brings the sociology of the prison into a more theoretically comprehensive account of strategies of domination and transformation, without falling victim to limited understandings of how imprisonment is experienced in time and place. To this end, the literature associated with `translation' and `governmentality' is described to indicate the key elements that enable an analysis of how power operates. The diverse forces, techniques and rationalities that comprise penal systems are deployed through the various discourses identified in the article. These discourses are discussed in relation to the dominant alignments present in an English prison from 1965 to 1990, the construction of gendered conduct and contemporary strategies of exclusion in the West to illustrate some elements in a move towards a social theory of imprisonment.
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