This thesis is about the organizational dynamics of total institutions. It looks at prisons, concentration camps, and, by implication, other custodial systems, examining the relationships between bureaucratic hierarchies at three levels of abstraction. It recognizes a tertiary level, which consists of Departmental chiefs, policy makers and logistics experts; a secondary level, consisting of the local administration of these systems; and a primary or informal level of organization - that of the inmates. Most importantly, it considers these three strata as being interrelated in the pursuit of specific sets of goals. The goals of the first two structures are formally instituted and legally regulated; those of the third are unofficial, informal, and without legal sanction. The dilemma of authoritarian organization is that the mutually incompatible components of group requisites at each of the three levels, must somehow be re­conciled with one another if the system is to function at all. In New Zealand, the twin goals of the primary structure of the maximum security prison are stated as being custody and 11rehabilittation” and these objectives are passed on to the prison executive. But since "rehabilitatoin11 has proven difficult to achieve in a custodial context, the fulfilment of one goal necessarily requires the neglect of the other. Since the public {upon whose support the prison is ultimately reliant) is more concerned that these prisoners be contained than reformed, custodial ends have come to gain precedence over treatment objectives. Furthermore, the pressures of the inmate group, who demand a degree of autonomy and freedom from the ministrations of authority, create a situation wherein officialdom is forced to compromise official interests with those of informal power, if order is to be maintained. And this it must be in order that custodial objectives be fulfilled. This project is divided into three sections. The first discusses authoritarian bureaucratic systems in general, particularly in relation to goals, structures, and functions; the second examines a variety of prison situations and discusses them in relation to some of the theoretical concepts introduced in Section One. The third section is the field study. It begins by analysing the disjunction between official statement and action in the Justice Department of New Zealand, and continues with an account of the internal organization of this country's only maximum security prison, Paremoremo. The author is an inmate of the above institution and as such, the study is in part, an ethnographic analysis of prison culture. But it is more, it not only describes this culture; it also attempts to relate components of the inmates' social structure and belief stem to the influences exerted by formal authority. That is, it attempts to integrate the sociology of the community of captives into the matrix of organizational theory itself by viewing aspects of informal structure as being dynamically interrelated with official policy and action. Broadly, then, the substructures of penal bureaucracies are seen as being dynamically interrelated, with each one of their structural components being influenced by, and yet, having an effect upon, each of the others, in a widely varying number of ways.