Abstract Introduction : Health units have a heavy responsibility to ensure access to care for people in custody in an environment where the deprivation of individual freedoms makes their coordination sometimes complex. According to the current principles of the law of 18 January 1994, which aims to guarantee continuity of care for prisoners and makes it comparable to those provided in the general population, the experience of "patient-prisoner" remains largely under-represented. A prison population that seems to obey determinants of its own, which impact the assessment of medical care provided in a prison setting. Thus, the objective of our study is to evaluate the particularity of medical care in prisons in Nouakchott while trying to identify factors that may exert an influence on it. Méthods : we conducted a prospective analytical and descriptive study with distribution of anonymous questionnaires to all the prisoners incarcerated in the different prisons of Nouakchott. Results : Responses were collected from 316 inmates. Overall, participants seemed dissatisfied with the care provided by the health unit earlier, 38.9% of inmates considering their medical treatment in detention equivalent to that known before and 16.2% even considered it better. Contrary to what might have been expected, the age of inmates and gender did not appear to be determinants in the perception of medical care. Extended time to care in an emergency. The general perception of a state of health in detention, reported as degraded by 44.62% of detainees. Conclusion : our study shows that medical care does not tend to meet the expectations of the prison population, which is dissatisfied with the care provided by the health unit. Improving this management remains a challenge for the prison medicine of tomorrow. Keywords: prison, prison medicine, inmates, health, medical care.