Violence in prison is a constant subject of concern for the prison administration; it is today a major issue for penitentiary policies (with an action plan of the director of the prison administration that was presented in 2022). But violence is a slippery object, its definition is never definitively established. The variable and subjective nature of the notion leads to equally variable discourses and conceptions: relativization of the phenomenon for outside observers of the prison environment or security alert for internal actors. From this angle, violence focuses the attention of institutional actors and calls for more robust and ever-increasing security measures. But it also invites us to question the function of the custodial sentence in a democracy and its methods of exercise. In other words, by focusing on violence in detention, the 6th International Research Days in the penitentiary Environment aim to think and rethink violence based on the function and modalities of sentencing in a democracy, as well as the practices and systems for managing violence
according to the general frameworks that underlie them, the logics that they follow and the meaning that animates or constitutes them.

Therefore, the choice to question violence from the political, institutional and praxeological angle not only makes it possible to reverse the naturalistic and fatalistic conceptions of violence in prison, but also opens up to reflections and innovative proposals that break or renew the frameworks of thought and action in the fight against violence. There are three themes

• Theme 1: Deprivation of liberty and violence
• Theme 2: systems and practices for managing violence
• Theme 3: challenges, innovations and foresight

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