Temporary passage: state categories to refer to populations and institutions in the prison policy management model

Abstract A document containing a prison policy management model was examined during a study of the governmental categories established to address confinement in Brazil. Based on Bourdieu and Hertz, an attempt was made to develop an ethnography attentive to the expressions used to refer to populations and institutions so that they could reveal ongoing terminological changes and maintenance. Deprivation of liberty is traversed by public policies and vice versa, pointing to prisons as “intersectoral spaces” and prisoners as “people deprived of liberty”.