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Beyond its “expiatory” or rehabilitative function, can work be a privileged place where prisoners experience social friendship – which underpins the meaning of their life in society – and thus experience their dignity? The aim of this article is to demonstrate the prophetic nature of the necessary link between work and social friendship in prison for society as a whole. At the same time, it shows the damage caused when work is disconnected from the transformative force of social friendship, and thereby loses its status as work, unhappily giving way to that of exploitation. Within the microsociety of the prison, a potential setting for all evils and all forms of poverty, respecting and promoting the dignity of the incarcerated worker is a guarantee of respect for all workers, offering a fairly precise measure of the dignity of the social body at work (Mt 25, 40).