The article is devoted to highlighting the prison as a social organization, a product of the social institution of punishment. The goal is to try to find out how views on the prison changed during the 20th and 21st centuries, what is its vision as a social organization in foreign and domestic sociology, what categories penitentiary sociology uses, what problems and challenges it has today.

The relevance of the study is due to the fact that the prison has always been and is a section of society itself, its macro model. Sociology is a science that studies the totality of social communities and social institutions that are formed in the process of society’s functioning. Among the complex of social communities, deviant ones occupy a separate place, and among the social institutions that regulate the functioning of deviant communities, the prison occupies an important place.

Conclusions. Prison is a social organization designed to protect society from dangerous deviants, to correct, resocialize them and return the individual to the path of social benefit. Along with this, a significant number of sociologists have considered it as a totalitarian organization in which its own order, social organization, division into statuses and roles, and subculture prevail, where the “desocialization” of the individual occurs. The study and use of the experience of penitentiary sociology will be useful for overcoming modern challenges of the prison.

Key words: sociology, penitentiary sociology, social control, sociology of deviant behavior, prison, punishment.

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