Fragile Openings: Dwelling in Forensic Inpatient Care

Abstract

What counts as meaningful change in a closed forensic inpatient institution when social reintegration and independent living are not realistic possibilities? Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork in Belgian forensic psychiatry, this article follows Albert, a man who entered medium-security care after nearly forty years of imprisonment. Through participant observation, informal conversation, shared activities and collaborative discussions of ethnographic writing, I explore how Albert navigates what he calls his ‘blue’ and ‘black’ world: the familiar and relatively predictable, and the unfamiliar and unsettling. Over time, these worlds shifted through ordinary encounters involving caregivers, familiar objects and shared spaces. An invitation to pull weeds opened a previously avoided courtyard, caring for a sunflower extended this movement into a communal garden, where its subsequent destruction exposed the fragility of these openings. Drawing on phenomenological anthropology, I approach ‘inhabitability’ as a way of examining how particular relations make a constrained world possible to live in, without necessarily making it safe or one’s own. Albert’s singular trajectory suggests that meaningful change may emerge not through increasing independence, but through changing possibilities for engagement, retreat, and return within enduring institutional constraints.

1. Introduction

‘I saw someone in prison today’, the psychiatrist began, leaning slightly forward across the table. ‘He is an older gentleman, imprisoned for forty years. He is considered a high risk, so, he cannot be rehabilitated towards society, but he needs care. I want him out.’ The meeting took place in 2019 in a medium-forensic inpatient care unit in Belgium. Around the table sat members of the multidisciplinary team as the psychiatrist introduced a possible new patient. What followed was a listing of his psychiatric history, medication, cognitive functioning, previous incidents, risks, social history, juridical conditions, and whether the unit could safely provide the care someone needed. Several weeks later, Albert arrived. Changes in the Belgian legislation and several judgments by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), had strengthened the principle that mentally ill offenders should receive appropriate psychiatric treatment and care rather than remain indefinitely in prison (Jeandarme et al. 2019). For Albert, this helped to open a route from prison into closed forensic care, but not towards society. At the time of his arrival, Albert was approaching seventy. His cognitive capabilities had deteriorated, his social world was almost non-existent and independent living was never considered a realistic prospect. His transfer was conditional upon his remaining within a medium-security forensic care unit and not being left unsupervised. This made him a rather atypical admission, since contemporary forensic mental health care rightly emphasizes recovery, participation, meaningful relationship, personal development and, where possible, movement towards less restrictive forms of care. Recent work also shows how patients themselves value autonomy, self-care, progress and social integration (Lumén et al. 2024, 2025). Ethnographic scholarship has complicated linear accounts of recovery by showing how patients’ lives are (re)made through ordinary relations, institutional arrangements, material environments, dependency, repetition and care rather than individual agency alone (Myers 2015; Whittle et al. 2024). In forensic settings, these processes are further entangled with risk, law, organizational demands and questions of public safety (van Weeghel et al. 2025). Albert’s admission did not make these debates disappear or less relevant, but it made them different. If a linear trajectory towards less restrictive forms of care was not possible, what counted as movement? If risk restrictions remained necessary, could a life nevertheless become more open? If an older man came to feel attached to a closed unit, should this be read as institutional dependence, psychological security, successful care, resignation, or something else? These questions cannot be answered by choosing one disciplinary vocabulary over another. Psychology can illuminate attachment and security; criminology and forensic psychiatry make risk and public safety visible; sociology shows institutional power; social work attends to participation and relational care. Longitudinal ethnography contributes by following what happens when all of these processes meet in ordinary situations.

Albert himself offered a different, much simpler vocabulary. He spoke about the ‘blue world’ and the ‘black world’. He never offered a clear definition, but these worlds slowly became understandable through our encounters. Blue was his room, the cassette tapes he played on repeat, clothes his mother had bought decades earlier, familiar routines and particular people. The black world began around the edges of that familiarity. It could be a corridor, a strange noise, an unfamiliar person, a change or a place he did not know. When Albert was in the ‘black world’, another word appeared: vuiligheid (filth). At first, I saw the distinction in rather strict terms: blue meant safe, black meant danger. It took me years of encounters and ethnographic reflection to understand how much that translation missed. The distinction between worlds became a way of seeing Albert’s lifeworld in motion. The blue expanded slowly: Albert carried it into the courtyard, or on campus grounds, invited others in and cared for plants. The black never disappeared. The two worlds met, overlapped and sometimes collided. A sunflower would make that painfully clear.

The article uses these movements to examine institutional life from the bottom up. Goffman’s account of the total institution (Goffman 1961) remains indispensable for understanding concentrated authority and the ways institutional categories travel across domains of life. Yet a forensic unit is not only a structure imposed around patients. It is also lived through situations: a knock on a bedroom door, a staff member asking for help, a cassette tape, a restriction, a plant, a garden, an incident, and a return. Biehl and Locke’s anthropology of becoming (Biehl and Locke 2010) cautions against allowing institutional categories to finish the person analytically. Zigon’s work on dwelling and relational ethics adds a second movement: ethical life is not only located in choices made by bounded individuals but in ongoing attunements among people, things, places, histories, and possibilities (Zigon 2014a, 2014b, 2017a, 2017b, 2024). I use the term inhabitability to attend more closely to what becomes possible within these relations. Rather than proposing a clinical outcome or alternative to recovery, risk assessment, attachment, or participation, I approach inhabitability as an ethnographically grounded question: under what conditions does some part of a constrained world become possible to live in, and what makes that possibility collapse or return? Inhabitability differs from home or belonging. A courtyard can become inhabitable without becoming home. A garden can remain partly threatening and still become somewhere a person returns to. The concept directs attention not simply to whether someone occupies or participates in a particular space, but to the relations, routines, material arrangements, and possibilities for retreat through which that space becomes possible to inhabit. It therefore allows institutional constraint and meaningful change to remain present at the same time.

The claim is deliberately limited. Albert does not represent forensic patients, nor should his worlds be generalized into a typology. The value of this single longitudinal case is analytical rather than representative: following one trajectory over several years allows us to examine how particular possibilities for dwelling emerge, become vulnerable, and are sometimes re-established. Through Albert’s encounters, care and control, dependence and movement, protection and exposure, and institutional structure and personal world-building do not appear as simple opposites. They become entangled in situations. The broader contribution is interdisciplinary: meaningful institutional change may sometimes be visible not as movement out of dependency or toward an external endpoint, but as a changing capacity to inhabit a shared world under conditions that remain constrained.

2. Materials and Methods

This article forms part of a broader doctoral ethnography within Belgian forensic psychiatry. The wider project follows several men subject to internment as they make lives within a closed, medium-security forensic psychiatric institution. Organized around longitudinal case studies, the dissertation asks how lifeworlds take shape under conditions of psychiatric care, legal constraint, and uncertain or indefinite duration. Albert’s trajectory is therefore neither presented as representative of forensic patients nor treated as an isolated clinical case. Rather, it is one trajectory within a broader ethnographic field, selected because it makes particularly visible the relationship between institutional structures and everyday practices of world-building.

My position within the field required particular ethical and methodological attention. Alongside my doctoral research, I work in the institution as a forensic social worker, although my own care unit was excluded from the study. I had previously been Albert’s social worker, but this professional responsibility had ended before he became a research participant. Recruitment took place through meetings with patients in care units and residents in long-stay units, where I introduced the research and invited those interested to participate. Albert volunteered through this general invitation rather than being approached individually by his former social worker. By the time he joined the research, I was no longer involved in his treatment planning or multidisciplinary meetings. I did not consult his clinical file to reconstruct earlier encounters or use clinical documentation as ethnographic material. None of the in-depth conversations during the fieldwork period were recorded into his electronic patient record or routinely communicated to his current care team. Ethnographic encounters took place outside my former professional responsibilities, including visits on weekend and other occasions in my free time. These boundaries were important, but they did not erase the history of our relationship or the institutional authority associated with my continuing employment. Albert had known me in a professional capacity, and I could not assume that this familiarity was without consequence for how he understood the research or my presence. Nor could I simply set aside the knowledge acquired through years of social work. Professionally, I had learned to recognize the language of risk, treatment goals, incidents, progress and participation. Ethnography required me to reconsider what such descriptions left out. The observation ‘remains in his room’ became an account of familiar objects, memories, routines and carefully negotiated encounters. An afternoon spent gardening became a twenty meter walk that once been impossible. Rather than claiming a complete separation between my professional knowledge and ethnographic interpretation, I maintained boundaries between clinical and research responsibilities while critically examining how my earlier familiarity shaped what I noticed, remembered and understood. Research conversations were ordinarily treated as confidential and separate from clinical reporting, although this did not remove professional responsibilities where serious safety concerns or breaches of legal conditions required intervention.

The wider doctoral research received ethical approval from KU Leuven’s Social and Societal Ethics Committee (protocol no G-2021-4559-R3(MIN), date 25 October 2022). Albert and his legal representative subsequently provided informed consent. Before participation, I explained the research, its intended use, his rights as a participant, and the handling of ethnographic material, discussing his understanding and willingness to participate. Although I had known Albert professionally since 2019, no research data concerning him were collected before ethical approval. Accounts of earlier encounters were reconstructed retrospectively from my own memory only after he had agreed to participate. These recollections concerned his everyday experiences and ways of inhabiting the institution, rather than his treatment history or my former casework. They were not drawn from clinical files or contemporaneous professional records. The retrospective memos were subsequently discussed with Albert, allowing him to respond to how I remembered and described these earlier situations. Nevertheless, such conversations cannot establish the exact details of past events or eliminate the influence of later experiences on memory. I therefore distinguish these reconstructions from material produced during the approved research period.

Following ethical approval, fieldwork involved recurrent participant observation, informal conversation, shared activities, walking and sustained encounters in the ordinary spaces of institutional life. These encounters were longitudinal, rather than conducted according to a fixed schedule. Rather than treating these encounters primarily as occasions for collecting information, I approached them as opportunities to spend time with participants and attend to how their worlds became perceptible through our shared presence. I wrote analytical memos following encounters, generally on the same day, and subsequently developed these into ethnographic vignettes. Writing was not simply a final stage of analysis but part of the research process itself. Moving repeatedly between desk and field, I returned to Albert and other participants with observations, written accounts and emerging interpretations. We discussed how particular situations were described, what was important and where my understanding differed from theirs. These conversations offered opportunities to question and revise my interpretations, although they did not necessarily produce a single, shared account. Collaborative discussion was therefore not treated as verification of an objective version of events, but as an ongoing part of understanding lives that could never be fully accessible from the researcher’s perspective. Consent was similarly approached as an ongoing relationship rather than a single administrative procedure. Participants were repeatedly informed of the purpose of the research, the intended use of their experiences, and the anonymization of the material. They could decline conversations, refrain from discussing particular experiences, or object to the inclusion of material without consequences for their care. Albert’s cognitive disability did not, in itself, mean that he was unable to understand the research or decide whether to participate. His own agreement and continuing engagement remained central, while the involvement of his legal representative provided an additional safeguard.

The analysis was longitudinal, interpretative and phenomenological, developed through repeated movement between encounters, analytical memos, ethnographic writing, conversations with participants, and theoretical reflection. The primary analytical focus was not Albert as an isolated individual, but the situations and relations through which particular parts of his world became familiar, threatening, accessible, or difficult to inhabit. I followed recurring expressions, gestures, practices, and changes in his relationships with people, objects, routines and spaces. His references to the ‘blue’ and ‘black’ world were especially important, although Albert never offered systematic definitions of either. Their significance emerged gradually through his words, bodily responses, movements, attachments, refusals and engagements with familiar and unfamiliar situations. I do not claim direct access to what these worlds felt like for him. Instead, I examine how they became perceptible through encounters and how my interpretations of them changed over time. I developed interpretations by following recurring situations and reconsidering them in light of subsequent encounters rather than organizing them through a predefined coding framework. Particular attention was given to events that challenged an emerging account. Throughout the article, I describe Albert’s gradual expansion of his familiar world until the destruction of a sunflower complicated this interpretation, making visible the vulnerability that accompanied these openings. His subsequent withdrawal, continued relationships with familiar people and his eventual return to the garden further challenge any straightforward distinction between progress and regression. I reconsidered competing interpretations through subsequent observations, discussed with Albert, and engagements with different theoretical perspectives (including dwelling, attunement, world-building and institutional control). Rather than seeking to resolve these perspectives into a single explanatory model, I examined what each made visible and what it risked overlooking. This approach offers a transparent account of interpretative decisions rather than a standardized coding procedure or a clinical assessment of change. Its strengths lie in sustained engagement, the contextual detail of everyday encounters, the possibility of revisiting interpretations over time and the involvement of participants in discussing ethnographic writing. Its limitations are equally as important. Retrospective memories cannot be treated as contemporaneous observations, collaborative discussions do not eliminate differences in interpretation or institutional power, and the researcher’s longstanding familiarity with the setting both enables and complicates ethnographic understanding. A single case cannot establish the prevalence of these processes or their clinical effects. Albert’s trajectory instead offers analytical insight into the conditions through which a constrained institutional world may become provisionally inhabitable, without suggesting that these conditions will operate identically elsewhere.

All names are pseudonyms, and potentially identifying details have been altered. Because the ethnographic material concerns a small and potentially identifiable forensic population, the underlying fieldnotes cannot be made publicly available without compromising participants’ confidentiality.

3. Results and Interpretative Analysis

3.1. The Blue and Black World

In the first months after Albert’s arrival in forensic care, when I encountered him in my professional capacity, I mostly knew him through a doorway. The care unit occupies a square bungalow building surrounding a small courtyard. Everyday life moves around its corridor, doors open and close, food smells stay present for hours after lunch, a television hums from the living room. Men cross the hallway for coffee, cigarettes, medication, or simply because they have nowhere else to go. Albert was not part of this, he spent his day sitting in a reclining chair in his room, hands resting along the armrests, looking toward the small window. Staff approached him carefully. They knocked and announced their entrance. They kept their questions short, never expecting an answer, yet continued asking anyway. ‘did you sleep well, Albert? Everything okay? What a beautiful morning, don’t you think?’ It is easy to overlook these small gestures within the ordinary care routine, but they mattered. Albert never expressed he wanted company and he, more often than not, gave no indication that he wanted to talk. Still, staff continued to address him as someone already included in the everyday life of the care unit. When my great-aunt passed away, she left behind a box of old cassette tapes, most of them containing Austrian accordion music. Rather than throwing them away, I brought them to Albert. Soon after, the accordion filled the corridor with a cheerful persistence. The cassettes joined the other things in his room that seemed to have survived from another time. Albert refused to buy new clothes but wore the ones his mother bought him decades ago. The fabric thinned, some pieces fitted badly, others had holes in them. Still, he kept them.

It was around these objects I began to see glimpses of the blue world. He stretched the word blauw (blue) almost fondly. But it was not just something Albert named, it was also present in the way he inhabited the space of his room: music loosened his body, his fingers rested softly on the armchair as he closed his eyes, sometimes giving away a little smile as he disappeared into the accordion music. He caressed the fabric of his old shirts while wearing them, almost as if he was giving himself a small hug. He made his bed in the morning and carefully folded his night robe. When particular staff members entered and talked about the day, he responded with a little ‘hm’ and a small nod. It was not much, but it was different. The black world, on the other hand, sounded and looked different. Albert’s hands would tighten around the armrests when the corridor became busy or when particular people entered the room. The unfamiliar world outside his room was black. At such moments, I often heard him mutter vuiligheid (filth). My first interpretation of these worlds was tidy and wrong in its tidiness: blue was safe, black was dangerous. Blue was familiar, black was new. There was some truth in this, but it treated these worlds as labels Albert had attached to two already existing categories. The longer I knew him, the less adequate it seemed. I did not have access to a private blue world inside Albert’s mind, but I encountered the blue in relations: between Albert and his music, clothes, room, particular staff members and familiar routines. The black similarly appeared between Albert and strange noise, unfamiliarity, certain people, changes and spaces. I saw these worlds become present in the way Albert inhabited the space. The blue and black were not so much a theory, but a geography he lived.

That geography, however, was never entirely his to draw. During Albert’s first week on the unit, the staff found a small booklet among his possessions. It contained photographs of children he had cut from magazines and used for sexual arousal. The booklet was among Albert’s familiar possessions, although its place within what he called the blue world remains my interpretation. For the forensic treatment team, however, it was connected to his pre-offense behavior and could not remain available to him, it was confiscated. Those who removed it were met with angry looks and repeated mutters of vuiligheid, which continued well after the event. The incident prevents the blue world from becoming a sentimental shorthand for Albert’s authentic world. Not everything that made a world familiar could therefore be preserved in the name of making him comfortable. The institution had obligations, not only towards care for Albert, but towards care and public safety. Albert was free to arrange his room, wear his old clothes, play cassettes and express which staff members he wanted near him, but he could not decide everything. The blue world was made and negotiated on a daily basis. A closed door could protect Albert from the noisy corridor while the staff key reminded everyone that the room was still an institutional space. Familiarity could be supported but also interrupted by professional judgement. This is why I understand the blue world as more than a conscious act of place-making. Albert was not furnishing a private world beyond institutional power, he was dwelling: trying, day after day, to find ways of living among relations, things and restrictions that he could influence but never control.

The significance of this becomes clear when Albert’s room is placed within the institution surrounding it. Goffman’s account of the total institution (Goffman 1961) remains important because forensic care gathers domains of life that outside the institution are ordinarily separated. Where one sleeps, eats, takes medication, meets friends, handles money and spends leisure time is brought under a shared institutional authority. This reaches beyond the locked door. The identity of ‘mentally ill offender’ travels through clinical files, documents, risk assessments, multidisciplinary meetings, tribunal decisions, housing possibilities and intimate relationships. Internment is therefore not merely a juridical measure imposed upon a person, but it becomes woven through many of the relations in which a life can be lived. Goffman shows the concentration of institutional power, yet, Albert’s room shows that institutional life is more than power alone. Didier Fassin’s work on ‘Prison Worlds’ (Fassin 2017) and Lisa Guenther’s phenomenology on solitary confinement (Guenther 2013), although concerned with institutional conditions different from Albert’s, draw attention to what is at stake when a person’s social and perceptual world becomes radically narrowed. Guenther rejects the idea that a complete self remains safely intact somewhere inside the individual while the relational world around a person is stripped away. Personhood itself depends upon meaningful intersubjective and perceptual relations (Guenther 2013, p. 179). Forensic patients arriving in the care unit, had not ceased to be persons nor had prison erased the identities they carried with them. For Albert, his mother remains in the clothes he refuses to discard, memories persist in routines and attachments and preferences survive institutional transfers. Yet, long institutional trajectories could profoundly narrow the circumstances through which these relations found expression. A person could become easily described through diagnosis, offense, risk, medication, compliance and legal status.

Through the phenomenological lens, care, or Heidegger’s sorge (Heidegger 1958), starts from the premise that being-in-the-world is never the existence of a self-contained individual who subsequently establishes relations with an external environment. Instead, we find ourselves already involved with things, places and others that matter to us. Our being-in-the-world is thus always a form of being-with (Paley 2000). I use Michael Jackson’s concept of lifeworld to explore this ethnographically, as lifeworlds are not private realities carried around inside individuals but fields of relationship in which possibilities emerge, disappear and are negotiated (Jackson 2014, 2017). Seen this way, Albert’s blue world is never simply his: his mother was present in the clothes he wore; my aunt unknowingly entered through cassette tapes, staff entered through knocks, keys, medication and laundry. The institution was present in the very boundary that made his room different from the corridor. Albert could be alone without ever being outside a shared world. Instead, the blue world was continually being made between Albert and a world that was never entirely of his choosing. I do not want to move away from the institutional categories because Albert has a diagnosis, offense history, cognitive limitations and risks that mattered. But these descriptions could never fully encompass him. Biehl and Locke (2010) ask to follow the unfinished ways people continue to make their lives within social and institutional worlds that both constrain and enable what can happen next. Albert’s room held another kind of knowledge: of what he kept close, what he repeated, what he rejected, what settled his body, whom he allowed near, and what could suddenly make the blue turn black. The blue world therefore does not replace the clinical, forensic picture with a more anthropological one but it complicates the idea that either picture could ever be complete. Albert was an older man subject to internment, a person whose risk required strict and continuing restrictions but he was also a son to a mother long gone and a music lover. What mattered was not simply what belonged to the blue and black, but how their boundaries were made, maintained and negotiated.

3.2. Twenty Meters

I remember one morning, several months after Albert arrived at the care unit, sitting in the courtyard. A few men had come outside after breakfast to smoke, chairs scraped over the paving stones. Someone clicked a lighter several times before catching a flame, another told me about his weekend. Albert appeared from the side door, and began pulling weeds. I watched him for a while, eventually he stood up and headed towards the side door leading back to his room. ‘Thank you, Albert. It looks better than ever,’ I said, but he did not turn around. Later, I asked Sylvia, one of the nurses, ‘since when does Albert come into the courtyard?’ She smiled, ‘Since this weekend. I asked him to help me pull out the weeds. Ever since, he found his way on his own.’ I remember feeling absurdly proud. Albert walked 20 m from his room to the courtyard to pull weeds. Written down like that, the event sounds almost comically small, but for the past few months these 20 m were unavailable. Later in the briefing, I heard Sylvia brief the other colleagues: Albert participated in gardening. But it was more than that, he crossed the border of the black world. Reflecting upon this situation, Sylvia’s invitation was crucial. She had not asked Albert to work on his social skills; she asked him for help. Her invitation contained reciprocity: come here, stand beside me, do something with me, be part of my morning. This was not entirely new; staff had been including Albert in small ways for months. They asked him how he had slept, knowing the answer might not come. They commented on the weather, they sat near him, entered his blue world carefully. Sylvia’s invitation reversed the direction: she asked Albert to enter her world.

The courtyard did not suddenly become safe or blue, but it became possible under particular conditions. It was an enclosed yard, and the route back to his room was short. The act of weeding was repetitive, without him having a conversation with any of the other men or staff. Sylvia was familiar, other men could be nearby without demanding anything from him. And when it all became too much, Albert could return to his room. The result was not increased independence, but a new entanglement. A psychological reading might understand this movement through attachment (Behrens et al. 2025; Mullen 2018): over time, familiar caregivers and predictable routines provided sufficient security for Albert to explore beyond his room. Such a reading captures an important part of what was happening. Yet, the ethnography directs attention somewhat differently. Sylvia did not function as a secure base in isolation. Her invitation worked together with weeds, walls, repetition, familiar faces, institutional routines and a doorway through which Albert could retreat. Rather than asking primarily how Albert became attached to particular caregivers or the institutions, inhabitability directs attention to the conditions under which these relations made another part of the world possible for him to enter, remain in, and leave. My choice of word is deliberately ordinary. It asks what has to come together before somewhere can be lived in. The concept of ‘homing’ by Lancione (2018) comes close as it treats home as something made through material and social practices rather than simply possessed. But, Albert was not turning the courtyard into a home. He could dwell there, in the black, without feeling a sense of belonging. Inhabitability leaves room for that thinner, more provisional achievement. Zigon (2017a) calls this kind of ongoing adjustment attunement. We do not stand outside the world and master it, but continually adjust the relations already in motion. Sylvia adjusted what she asked of Albert, and he responded. The courtyard offered enough predictability, with his room nearby. Albert was able to move because several relations held together around him.

3.3. Come and Listen

Over time, Albert began leaving his room to find particular staff members. He never explained why. When I asked, ‘How are you, Albert?’ No answer, but his hand would settle on my shoulder, slowly twitch it. Then he would take my hand and lead me down the corridor. In his room he let go, moved toward the cassette player and the accordion started. Sometimes he returned to his chair, sometimes he stood next to me for a while. Conversation was optional, being there was not.

This tiny ritual changed how I understood the blue world. At first, I imagined it as protection: a place to come to when the black was too much. But now, he was leaving the blue to fetch someone and let that person be part of his world. Albert started calling most of the staff dingske, which literally translates into ‘little thingy’, a Flemish affectionate saying to address someone whose name has escaped you. Nurses, social workers, therapists, all became dingske. The professional roles did not disappear: a nurse listening to the accordion in his room would later administer his medication or enforce a restriction. Yet, another relation became possible alongside the professional one. Jarrett Zigon asks the question ‘how is it between us?’ (Zigon 2024), which does not begin by asking what kind of person Albert is or what kind of professional role is present. It begins within the space between: what does this relation asks of us? Albert’s hand my shoulder was a small demand for presence, following him into the blue was a response.

This makes dwelling become an ethics of world-building, rather than simply a description of comfort (Zigon 2017b, 2018b). A world is made through the repeated relations. The cassette player, chair, doorway, hand and the person who stayed for a while all became part of the arrangement. Nobody had to share the same experience for a piece of the world to be shared. In other words, worlds can be shared without being completely shared. The music of my great-aunt’s cassettes meant something different than me, than for Albert, whose memories were unavailable to me. Yet, we could still be together in the same situation. Dwelling never requires perfect understanding, often it is enough to remain.

3.4. Plants That Need Tomorrow

On an October morning in 2023, Albert and I were walking across the hospital grounds. He suddenly stopped beside a small cluster of forget-me-nots growing between the paved road and the grass. Albert bent down. He touched the leaves individually, removing those that had withered. ‘Shall we take them with us?’, I asked. He carefully loosened the flowers from the soil. Back on the unit, he replanted them in small pots on his windowsill. He removed excess earth, positioned the roots, and pressed the soil gently back around them. Watching him, I recorded an uncomfortable thought in my notes that day: It is a bizarre thought that the hands carefully pressing the soil around the roots of these flowers are the same hands that were once capable of taking someone’s life.

In daily life on a forensic care unit, the offense can disappear behind coffee, laundry, jokes, medication and cigarette breaks, before it suddenly returns as a second image laid over the first one. The flowers did not solve that contradiction, they did not reveal a ‘gentle Albert’ hidden behind his forensic history, nor do they redeem what happened. Both images remain. Cheryl Mattingly’s idea of a perplexing particular (Mattingly 2019) allows us to remain within this tension, without resolving the contradiction. A particular situation can disturb a way of knowing, without offering another stable category in its place. The plants also introduced a different time into his blue world. The cassette tapes and old clothes were present and came up when Albert decided to. Plants were less patient: soil dried, leaves wilted, light changed; caring for it meant responding to something whose needs Albert did not determine. Here, Zigon’s world-building almost becomes literal as ethical life is not confined to decisions made inside a person, but through the relations that call for attention (Zigon 2014b). Zigon’s later relation ethics further develops this point by looking precisely at such betweens: not because plants and people are identical but because life is continually shaped through relations among existents (Zigon 2024). Caring is relational: the plant’s continued presence depended on Albert, while its needs also called Albert into particular actions. One of the most speaking images of this meshwork of lines and relations, is Tim Ingold’s metaphor of the world as an assemblage of lines of life crossing, knotting and continuing (Ingold 2010, 2011). Albert’s lines crossed those of the staff, cassette tapes, clothes, plants, institutional schedules and so forth. The question to ask is not which of these relations caused change, but what became possible when they intersect.

3.5. Leaving Something Blue Outside

In spring 2024, the forensic department developed a gardening initiative on the hospital grounds known as De Kwekerij (The Nursery). Flowerbeds were planted and paths were tended. Patients and staff worked beside one another in different combinations. During the summer, a sunflower competition was organized. The rules were simple: plant a seed, care for it and see whose sunflower grew tallest. Nurses on Albert’s unit invited him to participate and he joined the activity. His sunflower grew beautifully. We returned to it repeatedly. It seemed an extension of what I already knew: Albert liked the plants in his room, and now he liked them in the garden. Only later did the difference become apparent to me: the pot on his windowsill had been brought into the blue, the sunflower could not. To care for it, Albert moved in the black world, but he had to leave it in a world he could not control. In a sense, the sunflower did something the twenty meter walk started: to tie the blue to the black.

De Kwekerij also complicates the forensic institution as a machine of control. The garden existed because the institution created it: staff organized materials, time and access. Yet, once it existed, it developed rhythms of its own. A professionally organized activity became a small ecology in which relations could take forms that had not been written into treatment plans. Institutional control did not vanish. De Kwekerij belonged to the same institution that removed Albert’s booklet. Staff still held the keys, made risk assessments and judged whether unsupervised leave was possible. Care and control are not two separate systems between which Albert moved, they inhabited the same world. The structure that restricted Albert could also create the conditions under which particular openings became possible. Biehl and Locke (2010) argue that anthropology should remain attentive to the lives that continue to exceed the categories that used to organize them, even under strong structural constraints. Albert never escaped the institution (and control) when he entered de Kwekerij, nor did gardening redeem him from his forensic status. He became differently entangled with the institution and its grounds. What had initially appeared largely black could now contain a plant he cared for, familiar staff, repeated routines, and a reason to return. Albert’s dwelling began with the world available to him, including the remains of earlier relationships and the possibilities emerging within the institution (Zigon 2018a).

3.6. When Black Entered the Garden

One September afternoon, I heard that someone destroyed the sunflowers. Albert had become intensely agitated after hearing what happened and was temporarily separated from the shared space in order to calm down. When I saw him later, the intensity had passed. I only heard him mutter vuiligheid. Albert withdrew from the garden, but not from the people he had come to know. By then, we had known each other for five years. I continued visiting him as I ordinarily did, and we talked about what happened. He remained willing to share his experiences with me and agreed that I could include this incident in the research. His withdrawal was not a refusal of our encounters, rather, it showed how one part of his world could become difficult to inhabit while other relationships remained available. Until then, Albert’s trajectory read as a rather pleasant story: his blue world was expanding a little further every time. The destroyed sunflower exposed the weakness in the story. It showed that every opening was also an exposure. Caring for something in a shared world meant accepting that other people could reach it too. World-building did not mean making the world was safe, but becoming attached within a world that remained partly beyond one’s control. Zigon (2014a) argues that dwelling does not produce a finished world in which relations work together, but an ongoing labor of staying responsive when they do not. The black world did not conquer the garden, it had been there all along as one of the conditions that is attached to a shared world: the possibility of a breakdown.

The destruction can be understood as such a breakdown. What had held together his world no longer held in quite the same way. The disruption cannot be located solely inside Albert. His agitation was real, just as much as the change in the world to which he was responding. The garden was no longer the garden it had been the day before. Zigon describes a breakdown as a disturbance in the ordinary attunement through which one moves unreflectively within everyday life. When that attunement no longer works, the question arises how to go on, and fidelity to a world must be (re)negotiated (Zigon 2014a, p. 27). It is more than an external event which produces an internal reaction, instead, several relations changed at once. The work of dwelling begins again from this altered world. The institution responded in several registers. Staff first had to manage the immediate situation because Albert’s agitation could not simply be admired as meaningful (Chester et al. 2017). Safety matters. Yet, the response also acknowledged the loss of the sunflower itself. Replacement seeds were offered and a consolation prize was arranged. When the person responsible for the destruction was known, a restorative conversation was organized. The institution was not simply containing Albert’s reaction, it responded to the damaged relation. This complicates a clinical description centred primarily on Albert’s agitation and the need for intervention. I do not question the need for intervention at that moment. My point is that focusing solely on the intervention leaves something out. By focussing on worlds, one can see that failure was relational. It does not remove Albert’s responsibility of his behavior, nor does it make the person who destroyed the flowers irrelevant. It changes the scales at which we look at. Zigon’s ‘how is it between us?’ (Zigon 2024) directs attention towards the relation: what had been made here, what happened to it and what might allow life to continue after it was damaged?

3.7. Returning and Dwelling Without a Promised Elsewhere

At first, Albert withdrew. His plants on his windowsill remained alive and the accordion was heard in the corridor. His room could once again do what it did well: limit exposure. If my goal was to write a rehabilitation story, this would have been an awkward ending. Within clinical forensic language, Albert had progressed and then regressed. The blue and black world made me distrust this vocabulary. Albert withdrew because of a breakdown, the world altered. This does not automatically make his withdrawal good, isolation can be harmful and staff had good reason to remain concerned about it. My point is that movement inward cannot be understood without the movement outward that came before it. Protection returned because exposure had become difficult to sustain. Within recovery models, the same problem appears. Myers (2015) shows how recovery becomes normative when independence, productivity, autonomy, participation, sociability and future-oriented self-making become measures of successful personhood. Albert’s trajectory keeps us wondering about another possibility: sometimes the ability to retreat is what makes future participation possible. His blue world is not something treatment had to dismantle, nor was it an ideal refuge that should never be disturbed. It was a working threshold, to protect and isolate. Dwelling consisted in adjusting that threshold again and again.

Several weeks later, shortly after nine in the morning, I passed De Kwekerij on my way across the hospital grounds. The air was damp and the earth smelled of recent rain. Albert was there, kneeling beside the plants. Another man crouched nearby, slowly moving his fingers along the stems. Another stood farther away, watching. An occupational therapist remained close enough to be present without directing what was happening. Nobody announced Albert’s return. There was no therapeutic milestone attached to it. He was simply there. I would not call it ‘resilience’ or ‘recovery’, because it suggests that rupture had been overcome. Albert’s sunflower was still gone and he knew what could happen in the garden with the next one he planted. Yet, he still returned with that knowledge. It is different from restoration, as it does not mean returning to how it was before. Zigon’s fidelity after disappointment shows that one does not require certainty that the world has become dependable, but instead, it describes continuing to respond to relations after their fragility has become obvious (Zigon 2017a, p. 64). Albert did not accomplish this alone. De Kwekerij exists because people maintain it. Staff continuously make access possible and new plants grew because other patients were there. Albert’s room remained available if he needed to leave. I use the term inhabitability to describe this tension. The term is not a possession nor a permanent state. Albert’s return suggests that De Kwekerij had become inhabitable again, at least provisionally, through the relations that continued to make his presence there possible. It was not home, nor did it become blue. It became a place where blue and black could coexist. It is in this coexistence that dwelling is most clear to me: keeping life going among relations one cannot fully manage. World-building is not building a world from scratch, instead, we arrive in worlds already underway. Some parts are given to us, others are imposed, inherited, damaged, negotiated. We protect certain relations, abandon others, accept invitations, make our own and sometimes return after disappointment. The world changes in those movements, and so do we.

The wider ethnography contains very different versions of this work. Other men try to inhabit familiar worlds that continued to exist without them, bodies altered by medication, or futures rendered uncertain by an indefinite legal measure. I only mention them to locate Albert’s story and dwelling in a larger study. They do not confirm his story, but they share the impossibility of treating institutional life as a framework around a bounded patient. Lives are made and negotiated in the movement between people, bodies, routines, legal conditions, objects, memories and other’s worlds. Albert’s story gave this meshwork of intersecting lines, as Ingold (2011) would state, colors. The blue and black are not universal categories nor models for forensic psychiatry. They are Albert’s way of moving through one particular world. Their analytical value lies in what they taught me to notice: a threshold can be protected without being merely defensive, a door can limit freedom but also make an invitation possible, dependence enables movement, and a shared world can be entered without ever becoming entirely one’s own.

4. Discussion

Albert’s case contributes to interdisciplinary debates about institutional care by shifting attention from individual outcomes to the relations through which institutional life becomes possible, constrained and sometimes disrupted. Much research necessarily asks whether treatment reduces risk, improves functioning, strengthens attachment, increases participation, or supports recovery. Ethnography does not make these questions less important. It asks what happens when their objects of measurement are lived together. Albert’s twenty meters, for example, can simultaneously be read as increased participation, attachment-enabled exploration, a change in institutional engagement, and an act of dwelling. None of these readings is wrong. The problem begins when one is treated as complete.

The first implication concerns recovery and progress. Recovery-oriented mental health care has importantly challenged custodial models and emphasized agency, meaningful roles, social connection, and hope. Yet scholarship has also shown that recovery can become normative when autonomy, productivity, sociability, and future-oriented self-making become measures of successful personhood (Myers 2015). Albert does not provide an argument against recovery. His case identifies a situation in which its usual directional imagery becomes difficult. Independent community living was not a realistic horizon. Meaningful change instead became visible in ordinary movements: leaving a familiar room, accepting an invitation, caring for something beyond one’s immediate control, withdrawing when that exposure became overwhelming, and eventually returning.

The second implication concerns dependence. Social care and rehabilitation often position independence as an important good, while attachment theory reminds us that security can enable exploration. Albert’s trajectory suggests that security, dependence, and possibilities for action need not be understood as opposites. His movement depended on people, routines, walls, objects, and opportunities for retreat. Dependence was not simply the residue left behind when autonomy was incomplete. It was partly the infrastructure through which action became possible. This does not mean all dependence is benign. Institutional dependency can be produced by coercion, deprivation, or lack of alternatives. The analytical task is therefore to ask what a particular dependency does: whether it narrows a world, enables movement, or does both at once.

Third, the case complicates the familiar opposition between care and control. Forensic psychiatry is structurally committed to both. The booklet was removed because professional judgment and public safety overruled Albert’s familiarity. The garden existed because institutional organization made it possible. The same staff who held keys could also accept an invitation to listen to music. This simultaneity is not evidence that coercion is harmless, nor that benevolent relationships dissolve power. It shows that institutional power is enacted through situations whose effects are not exhausted by the abstract category of control.

Fourth, the analysis suggests that breakdown should not automatically be individualized. When the sunflower was destroyed, Albert’s agitation required immediate management. Yet something in the shared world had also been damaged. The subsequent attempts at restoration acknowledged that something beyond Albert’s immediate behavior required attention. This relational scale may be useful beyond anthropology because it connects clinical concerns with social-work and restorative approaches: instead of asking only what happened inside the patient, it asks what happened to the arrangement that had made participation possible.

The concept of inhabitability is intended to support this interdisciplinary conversation rather than replace existing concepts. It differs from attachment because it is not primarily a theory of bonds or internal working models; from recovery because it does not presume a trajectory toward a preferred endpoint; from homing because a place can become inhabitable without becoming home; and from participation because it includes forms of presence and relation that may not be verbally articulated or formally recognized. The distinction from Zigon’s dwelling and attunement is more subtle. I do not propose inhabitability as an alternative either. Zigon (2014a, 2017a, 2017b) helps us understand dwelling as an ongoing ethical and relational engagement with a world that is never fully settled, while attunement draws attention to the adjustments through which life continues among changing relations. Inhabitability directs this perspective towards a more specific ethnographic question: what makes a particular part of a constrained world possible to enter, remain within, withdraw from, or return to? In Albert’s case, this could be traced through his movement into previously avoided spaces, his engagement with familiar people and objects, the availability of retreat, and the disruptions that made these arrangements difficult to sustain. These are not universal indicators of successful dwelling, but situated expressions of how possibilities for living emerge and change. Inhabitability does not explain a different kind of ethical life from that described by Zigon. It helps specify the conditions under which dwelling becomes possible, fragile, or temporarily impossible within an institution.

Inhabitability asks how people, institutional structures, material environments, histories, and possibilities of retreat come together sufficiently for a part of the world to be lived in. These movements do not establish inhabitability on their own: entering a space through obligation, remaining there without meaningful possibilities for engagement or retreat, or withdrawing because alternatives have been removed would require a different interpretation. There are clear limits to the argument. This is a single longitudinal case in one Belgian institution. Albert’s age, cognitive capacities, offense history, and legal restrictions make his trajectory unusual. The analysis cannot establish how common these processes are, whether they produce better clinical outcomes, or whether similar arrangements would have the same effects for other patients. Moreover, the earlier encounters were reconstructed retrospectively from professional memory and subsequently discussed with Albert. Although these conversations informed the interpretation, they cannot eliminate the limitations of retrospective recall. Nor should the ethnographic language of world-building obscure the seriousness of forensic risk or the unequal authority through which institutional possibilities are distributed. These limitations are not incidental. They define what the case can contribute: conceptual and experiential resolution rather than representativeness. Future interdisciplinary research could examine inhabitability comparatively across forensic units, prisons, long-term psychiatric care, residential elder care, and supported housing. Such work could ask how architectural design, staffing continuity, risk regimes, opportunities for retreat, material activities, and forms of relational security shape what becomes possible in institutional life. It could also explore where inhabitability conflicts with other legitimate goals, including safety, rights, autonomy, and community reintegration. The concept is useful only if it keeps these tensions visible.

5. Conclusions

Forensic psychiatric treatment is often understood through movement: through levels of security, through treatment goals, through leave conditions, and ideally, toward greater autonomy. Albert also moved, although his movements are easy to miss. He moved from chair to doorway, from doorway to courtyard, from courtyard to garden. After the destruction of his sunflower, he withdrew into the familiarity of his room, and weeks later, he returned to the garden. None of these movements can be understood through Albert alone. A closed forensic unit remains a place of unequal power, professional authority, legal restriction, and risk management. Albert’s booklet was removed; doors were locked; his movements were restricted. The same institution was also full of invitations, routines, relationships, irritations, plants, and openings that emerged through ordinary encounters. It was closed without being socially or existentially sealed. Albert’s singular case therefore does not provide a model of forensic care. It offers a way of seeing. Inhabitability directs attention to the situations in which a constrained world becomes possible to live in and to the fragility of that possibility. It asks an interdisciplinary question that can sit beside risk, recovery, attachment, participation, and institutional critique: what kind of world is being made here, what makes it possible to inhabit and what happens when those possibilities break down?