Dialectique de l'intimité dans l'espace carcéral : l'expérience des personnes incarcérées

In Canada, where prisons are characterized by permanent community life and confronted with overcrowding and double-bunking, prisoner privacy has become a central problem, but is often overlooked. Therefore, this study aims to contribute to widening the scope of the prison literature by examining how privacy is experienced in an environment which is a priori hostile to it. To do so, our study moves away from a reductive view of this complex phenomenon which has a tendency, in most empirical work about prison, to be explored through the angle of sexuality, or studied as an issue among others.  Embedded within a cross-disciplinary approach, this study draws from Dubet’s sociology of experience and de Certeau’s rich conceptualization, to offer a new understanding of what privacy means to prisoners by giving them back an active role. Rooted within a qualitative methodology, this study comprises 44 semi-directive interviews with male and female prisoners incarcerated in five provincial prisons in Québec. The use of a phenomenological analysis approach allowed us to access the meaning given by prisoners to their own privacy and, consequently, to understand their experience by adopting their point of view.  Our results reveal the complexity of privacy, particularly when experienced in a carceral environment. This study firstly assessed how prisoners perceived their privacy and underlines the multiple dimensions and meanings of this phenomenon. It then unveils in three steps, drawing from a spatial approach of prison, the environment in which prisoners try to recreate intimate moments. First, it explores the collective spaces of the detention ward and questions the possibility of privacy being recreated within them, despite the community life that is enforced. Second, it focuses on a space within prison: the cell. Often considered as the most private space in prison, our study questions its nature as a refuge, considering the constant intrusions that occur within this environment. Finally, our study aims to look beyond prison walls to focus on aspects of privacy that extends farther than the institution, through relationships with love ones or travelling outside of prison.  Through these developments, our analysis brings into light the agency and strategies that prisoners employ to (re)build their privacy, through daily negotiation of the carceral space and the objects embedded within this space. They also reveal constant obstacles to privacy, which becomes the stake of a permanent battle between intrusions and strategies, which balance each other out.  By unveiling the dialectic at the centre of which prisoners try to maintain their private space, this thesis presents prison as a flexible environment, which remains restrictive. Moreover, it circumscribes the scope of the tactics deployed, which, despite demonstrating the agency of prisoners, induce the strengthening of certain aspects of the institution. In conclusion, this approach enables us to reflect upon the privacy of prisoners, their experience, the contemporary prison, as well as the notion of “carceral.”

Keyphrases: prison, intrusion, privacy, carceral experience, tactics, agency, carceral geography, qualitative methodology, phenomenology