Abstract

Imprisonment causes a biographical and relational fracture in the life course of the detainees. The inmates, immersed in a daily life that they do not recognize and without many tools to interpret it, find themselves alone on a difficult path of «adaptation» to the time and space of the sentence. Regarding this situation, the paper proposes an in-depth analysis of the care of relationships in prison. The attention will be placed on constraints and conditioning, as well as on possible «margins of manoeuvre» in a context in which relations are moulded according to subjection devices and strongly asymmetrical power dynamics typical of «total» institutions.