Abstract EN:

Cultural activities in prisons provide a good illustration of the way the French policiy of democratizing culture has evolved over the last twenty years. If culture has been made compulsory in prisons by various laws since the 1980s and by the official policies of the ministries of Culture or of Justice, it has still hardly progressed in its development. Indeed, it has met with a great many obstacles: inappropriate premises, too much diversity int he ways of seeing how best to help the inmates, the disagreements provoked by the orchestration of cultural activities, debates over the artistic content of the workshops and finally the necessity of giving the prison staff a part to play in the cultural intervention. Once the organisational and material problems have been dealt with, there remains the question of the inmates' cultural requirements. Some activities may indeed seem elitist to them, as they have never or hardly ever been exposed to them. Thus the prison cultural policy has to resolve the debate raised by all cultural policies : is it a matter of giving as many people as possible access to "an art belonging to the common elite", to use a fashionable expression. Or should one cater to the needs of all theinmates, in that very same spirit, and respect their tendency to prefer more popular practices. The aim of this particular research will be to assess culture's role, stakes and perspectives within a prison environment, as well as its social representations