In this article, we present the ethnographic material and our interpretations of the meanings that imprisoned people in the Federal District gave to their daily experiences, with a special focus on the situations, reports and perceptions of these social actors related to what we classify as structural processes. of discursive exclusion. We argue that these processes constitute a fundamental aspect of the incarceration experience, which allows the invisibility and perpetuation of the institutional violence, dehumanization and systematic denial of rights in this context. This reality is, moreover, revealing of the inferiorization of imprisoned people in terms of citizenship and the denial of their condition as subjects of rights.