Abstract

The essay starts from the experience of conflict negotiation among members of youth gangs, originally from Latin America. The field of research moves from the youth experience of jail and tries to explore the different dimensions of agencies performed by the inmates, considering them as active subjects, not only as a victim of a criminalizing system as an immigrant first of all. One of the strategies to access the field is the mix of ethnography and visual sociology skills. The use of camera allows the researchers to connect to the everyday life of gang member spread inside or outside the prison. Following Erving Goffman suggestions on secondary adaptations inside a total institution, we suggest three categories of inmate agency: jail as a project, as home making, as a parenthesis.