Despite the shocked public sensibilities arising from periodic news items of flagrant abuses in prisons in the U.S. and abroad, community attitudes most often resemble distracted indulgence, polite disregard or frank disdain. A cultural unconsciousness of the prison interior is not without cost however, and hopelessness is a usual outcome on both sides of the wall. For the purpose of promoting an understanding of this world and those who live within it, a psychoanalytic perspective is taken in the psychological work which is done there, including assessment and individual and group therapy. A psychoanalytically styled reflection and methodology in clinical contacts tempers the insidious and unrelenting pull toward mindlessness so endemic to institutional settings while opening a space for wonderment, hope, and growth within inmates and staff.