Since the French Revolution in 1789, depriving persons of their freedom by locking them up has become the automatic answer of public authorities to penal and psychiatric matters. This institutional solution to the social problems of delinquency and insanity is organised around a new paradigm : the " total institution ". This standardising model tramples on persons, their dignity and their rights ; nevertheless prison and psychiatric total institutions remain the tool society chooses most of the time to keep its " disturbing " persons apart. The shock of the Nazi abuses added to this dehumanising instrumentalisation of inmates triggers a new fervour for the human rights and brings to light, with the destruction of the totalitarian model, the more flexible paradigm of public service and its " rules ", a priori conductor of a protecting framework for individuals ; it does not mean to renounce to deprivation of freedom but to give a humanist framework of action to manage these cases. Thus, the inmate holds rights specific to successive citizenship recognised to persons in time. But, the evolution is neither linear nor finished. Deprivation of freedom, in its triangular relations between person, society and institution, remains the latent prey of all securitarian tendencies, to the detriment of the rights of the concerned persons. Behind the theory, the democratic challenge is, for society, to accept the levelling up of these rights ; their adaptation must no longer be used as a disguise to take their fundamental rights away from inmates.
