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A recent reform for reorganizing the prison health-care system has improved the level of detainee care. But its application has brought to light the gap between the project « on paper » and the project « on the ground ». It has aroused a number of conflicts between prison personnel and the new hospital personnel, thrown into competition to define the legitimate treatment of the prison population. These conflicts, which have largely subsided but nevertheless flare up from time to time, are analyzed through the tensions between nurses and guards, the professional categories most involved in day-to-day contact with the detainees and ranking at the bottom of their respective hierarchies. Exacerbated by the gender of the actors, these tensions provide a means of analyzing the stakes involved in the relative humanization of the penitentiary system and in its contradictions. The guards, responsible for security, struggle to defend their professional dignity and the reduced human scope of their work. A proportion potentially diminished by the recent changes in the prisoners’ world, since improvement of the detainees’ daily lives has been delegated to agents from the outside, such as hospital caregivers, at the very time prison workers are encouraged to invest their energies in « reinsertion ». In prison, nurses spend much of their time in listening, « relational » activities and health education, valuable tasks in the official definition of their profession but largely unrecognized on hospital personnel assessment forms. Thus both guards and nurses are faced with the same devaluation of their « relational » skills used in treating stigmatized populations whose moral and social illegitimacy rub off on their own positions. Finally, these tensions reveal ordinary operations of imputing and delegating prison violence, which adds to that of the detainees social fate, « contaminates » all agents and compels cooperation.