gender: in reality, each officer, in accordance with their own personality, has their own d istinct approach to dealing with prisoners. Such approaches cover a range of possibilities, within which very varied relations may exist. To put it differently, impersonal relations are, amongst other things, a manner of maintaining distance in human relations; differentiated management is a “closer” management style, usually for better, sometimes for worse 115. For their part, prisoners, like their family and friends as well highlighted by Caroline Touraut 116, demand an approach to their management that is in some respects contradictory: based on strict equality, to the exclusion of any “special treatment”, while taking personal factors and their situation into consideration. Prisoners expose those who receive special favours to public contempt: when inmates see a fellow prisoner obtain a job that they have requested before them, this appears to them to constitute a great injustice. Conversely, one example of the demand for personal factors to be taken into consideration can be seen in the insistence with which certain prisoners request special dietary provisions on health grounds, and in their disappointment when such requests are refused (along with the anxiety to which this gives rise). Moreover, these attitudes are perhaps not as contradictory as they seem: equality of services provided to prisoners is not incompatible with a degree of difference, as long as the latter corresponds to incontestable needs. The factors that encourage diversity arise, in the first place, from the requirements of security. Small numbers of staff cannot be left for long periods faced with superior numbers of prisoners. The latter therefore have to be split into small groups. Imprisonment is therefore enforced within the framework of these multiple separations (by building, by floor and by wing) dictated by prudence. Security not only divides into groups of limited dimensions. It also institutes multiple categories, whose character is more or less known and admitted. To the category of “highsecurity prisoners” are thus added categories that are regional, or specific to particular institutions which, with various epithets, indicate prisoners considered dangerous. The administration moreover has a long memory on this point, applying labels from institution to institution which no longer necessarily correspond to the development of the person concerned. The protection of certain offenders in prison also requires their assignment to particular areas, this distribution of special categories thus increasing the topographical complexity of institutions. These factors have their origin, as already mentioned, in the need for staff to adapt to prisoners’ different personalities. Members of staff are aided by experience in sorting “polite” and “respectful” prisoners from “demanding” and “unpredictable” prisoners. Officers’ day-to-day decisions, observations made orally and sometimes recorded in the “electronic liaison register” and, above all, informal exchanges between officers as well as their own personal initiative determine the particular attitudes taken towards individual prisoners. However “personality” may also be the result of an act or gesture that is held against a prisoner. Prisoners who send grievances or file complaints can end up being classed in a category held in scant regard by officers. How, in the light of the above, is the question of removal from prison for hospital treatment posed? The latter consists of taking prisoners out of the institutions in which they are imprisoned in order to take them to a hospital, which is usually nearby, in order to undergo examinations or receive treatment there. To this end, after the usual procedure for leaving the institution, which compulsorily includes a “body” search, they are handed over to an escort in charge of driving 115 On one occasion a prison officer was asked “If you were a prisoner yourself, what would you do in order to get the staff to listen to you?” He replied without hesitation: “I would behave insufferably”. 116 La famille à l’épreuve de la prison [“Families and the ordeal of prison”], op. cit. 53