Abstract
In prison, the socio‐educational services, the multipurpose room, the place of worship, the gymnasium, the classrooms, and healthcare facilities are places on which rest the expectations of humanization and inmates’ rehabilitation. The argument thus established by public authorities and current prison architects tends to consider these places and the activities they host as the added value of imprisonment/incarceration, which attempts to reproduce the experience of living outside the walls, with the city being the first reference. Seeking to make the prison a “prison‐city” reflects the desire to produce a confinement system capable of mitigating the austerity of the prison, as well as to build a “smooth” environment for prisoners’ reintegration. This article proposes to examine such an ambition via the analysis of the results of an ethnographic research conducted at two prison spaces: the “G block” of the Belgian prison called Lembas, and the “socio‐educational centre” of Sarn penitentiary, located in France.