Confinement, agency and reinsertion. An ethnographic analysis of a life inside and outside prison

Abstract

This article is based on a case study and analyzes, through ethnographic fieldwork, the vital trajectory of a woman using two temporal axes, her life in prison and her life in "freedom". First, it presents the way in which she exercised agency in a penitentiary context. Second, by contrast, the way in which her post-release life turned into a prison with invisible walls in which she felt, literally, cornered. The objective is to reflect on how confinement practices are perpetuated beyond the walls, to present prisons as ambiguous spaces, and to show that recidivism is closely related to a structural issue of lack of personal resources, contributing to the debate on “reinsertion processes”.