Abstract

These notes derive from the tutoring experience carried out by the authors with a group of detainees enrolled in the Sociology course of the University Milano-Bicocca. The authors describe the socialization processes of going to jail, with particular emphasis on the different - and often conflicting - tensions addressed by those who enter a detention centre for the first time. In particular, the spaces in which the tutoring experience took place, and the interactions with detainees, prison officers, and other operators, are described. It is argued that the lack of adequate institutional attention toward jail conditions function as the main frame of the socialization processes; this frame informs the sense-making practices in which a variety of - seemingly trivial - aspects of everyday life are involved.