Abstract
As epidemiological data have shown since the early 2000 years, a significant proportion of the French prison population is made up of people with serious psychiatric disorders. Faced with this observation, several questions arise : why do French prisons seem to have become contemporary asylums ? Can they now be considered places of care ? To what extent has the prison sentence become a therapeutic time ? This talk, based on empirical data produced during a multi-sited ethnography over several years (2011-2022), proposes to question the intersecting evolutions of public psychiatry and criminal justice in order to understand the complex reality of mental disorders in prison and the experience of those who find themselves confronted with them.
