In this text, I intend to demonstrate that the interpersonal dimension of citizenship, which frequently translates into demands for recognition, is vital in order to comprehend how social actors live and perceive violations of rights. In this ethnographic context, female and male prisons in the Federal District, the recurrence of narratives and field observations that referred to the quality of social bonds point to systematic patterns of disrespect and discursive exclusion in these institutions which cannot be adequately apprehended by the legal terminology, since they represent, beyond the violation of formal rights, an attack against fundamental dimensions of the personal integrity of imprisoned people. The moralities that pervade social relations, and which are marked by expectations of faire treatment and mutual respect, are, thus, a central aspect of the consolidation of rights that refer to the civil components of citizenship.