Aims. - This article is a reflection on the issues of health and care in prison in the setting of art therapy workshops. The questions raised by the practice of art for therapeutic purposes lead on to consideration of many forms of relationships between the individual and society. Method. - An ecological approach makes it possible to take the individual into account via a set of phenomena, using the contemporary art therapy methods specific to the Association Francaise de Recherches et Applications des Techniques Artistiques en Pedagogie et Medecine (AFRATAPEM). This approach takes the form of a phenomenology of artistic action for therapeutic purposes. The artistic phenomenon is articulated around four phases: impression, intention, action and production. Results. - The results show that art affords scope for change by way of the use of concepts and phenomena that belong to the artistic phenomenon as a whole. The plasticity that is an integral part of the phenomenological organisation of humans can be used in art therapy. Prison changes people as a result of its violence, while art therapy can help to reduce its harmful impact. Discussion. - In prison, relationships are controlled, and maintained at a certain level of violence, which is coherent with the setting. Thus, in the care plan offered to a detainee, the question of health and well-being is central to the social issues involved, and to how they are dealt with. It is for caregivers to assess the limits of tolerability, and when the intolerable threatens the very humanity of the individual, the legitimacy of the response needs to be discussed. The prison environment lays claim to legitimacy that could be understood as way of changing society. The person discharged after a prison sentence carries with him violence that compounds the violence pre-existing his incarceration. Because imprisonment is not envisaged in terms of its function and in the long term, just as the economy has not taken account of ecology, prisons no longer protect society from violence, but, quite the reverse, manufacture and disseminate it. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier Masson SAS.
