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This paper aims to delimit the role of school in prisons: first, its symbolic and legal role with reference to official texts which stress that education is a right; and secondly, its actual role, drawing on interviews conducted with “inmates-students.” The confrontation of these two discourses makes it possible to highlight the paradoxes of the prison institution which has difficulty reconciling its different missions. In prison, the logic of security and discipline prevail over the logic of schooling, very often transforming access to education into a privilege.