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While the magistrates who have assigned them to detention are hoping that their stay in prison will mean a sharp check to their delinquency and encourage the development of their individual conscience, juvenile detainees downplay the fact they are in prison and make out their individual experience to be commonplace in order to incorporate them into an ordinary “youth” culture and lifestyle. As a consequence, they spend their days transforming the prison into an annex of the housing projects they live in, and making their offenses out to be nothing more than a part of everyday life, or a precursor to their social inclusion. Such representations ease the stay in prison, but call into question the meaning that the experience will have for each of them.