Starting from an ethnographic perspective, the data that support the development of the article are part of a research project that had as a general objective, to account for the complexity and sense of confinement in a women’s prison belonging to the Argentine Federal Penitentiary Service (SPF). From this perspective, the jail is understood as a particular type of social system, where punishment and penalty are administered, but also constantly redefined itself from the complex social relationships that constitute it. This article is intended to account for such complexity by showing how affectivities are part of punishment administration, redefining not only their senses but also the own experience of prison.

This article analyzes the National Penitentiary Policy Master Plan and the Strategic Plan of the Federal Penitentiary Service 2016/2020, and their merits and shortcomings in the Argentine prison context. Based on these instruments, and following the Brasilia Rules, it is proposed policies to prevent crime through four types of reforms: a) normative, regarding the progressiveness of the sentence, the regulation of the work activity of persons deprived of liberty in the penitentiary situation, the education and training of personnel, as well as the procedure regarding their entry, promotion, and discharge, in addition to the assimilation of the gender perspective in institutional policy; b) infrastructural, that is, the construction of prisons and their organization to reduce overcrowding; c) resocialization of inmates in penitentiary establishments; and finally, d) integration for the str...