“Stretched between double constrain and double injunction. The commitment to progressivetraining of Belgian penitentiary wardens. Case study”, LEROY Joël / Supervision: Professor Étienne BOURGEOIS (PhD)The “current” world and its social or legal changes obviously impact on this “little world within the bigger” which is the penitentiary one.Important breakthroughs in the last decades, e.g. regarding man’s and detainee’s right or respect culture, enforce themselves, step by step, to the rules and workers from the penitentiary world applying them. In this way, discrepancies which have always existed between institution aims and mission aims, between intern safety and extern safety or warding prerogatives and counseling needed to reinsert detainees, widen. We noticed how international society-bound tensions that are currently fiercely debated in Belgian jailhouses pass from the macro level (the one of the super structure) to the micro level (the one of the working individual). To the experiencing workers this lead to a profound change of professional gestures and their mental representation of the work. Considering both what they call the strict (le strict) and the social (le social), penitentiary wardens talk of deep professional bewilderments as well as identity crisis.This thesis, which follows two other works of ours on the reforming Belgian penitentiary world, poses the question of the possible links between those identity tensions and the wardens training commitment who work in the cell part of jailhouses (place where the detainees live and where the wardens work).By this qualitative and monographic study, after having thought about the “whys” of the training commitment of workers subscribing to auto-determined and progressive professional trainings, we intended to better understand whether and how commitment to trainings allows or not those wardens at least temporarily to solve for their own welfare as well as for others their professional and identity dilemma.
