Prison Nursery: The Process of Socialization and Psychophysical Stakes within a Prison Section for Mother and Child

This article deals with the mechanisms of pre-socialization working in babies brought up in prison with their detained mother. Drawing on an ethnographic approach for 20 months carried out in a prison nursery of a woman’s prison, mixing concrete observation and practical analysis, we would like to insist specifically on the role of the child care worker whose presence breaks up the day into sequences and distributes affect time, and show how she participates in building the socio-affective structure from which emerges a socialization process proper to the mother-child couple. This article would also like to be seen as a way into, an opening into a world ordinarily closed and forbidden to the eye of the other.