When Otherness Wears a Uniform.

This paper is based on a study of the training for prison jobs disabled persons receive. It shows how the arrival of disabled persons in prison jobs in France reveals a dominant social and professional order constructed in reaction to regulations from which this institution and its staff are suffering. It explores institutional practices that play a part in keeping disabled workers on the margins or in attempting to assimilate them, and analyzes the individual behaviors that perpetuate these practices. This paper places these institutional and individual practices in the context of way of thinking that is a defense against the weakness of the French prison system and its jobs.