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The research presented here deals with the social treatment of women leaving prison through the dual perspective of personal experiences and institutional practices of post-prison accommodation, and through the prism of the relation to space and the concept of inhabiting. The matter of accommodation for women leaving prison refers to logics and issues of actors who place it at the frontiers of criminal policy, social intervention and gender. Based on a marginal, invisible and unconventional public, this research examines the specificity and issues pertaining to social housing in the transitional space-time of release from prison, that is both fertile and uncertain for particularly isolated and stigmatised women. This research shows that if the primary function of social housing is to provide temporary shelter in a constrained and partly collective space, the singular context of prison release engages all actors in complex and paradoxical relationships with the institutional space. For the women involved, the challenges of this transition are at several levels: grounding after a residential path marked by ruptures, rebuilding a personal space and intimacy, dealing with the presence of others and reclaiming a way of inhabiting the world through temporary housing.