Based on ethnographic research carried out with women under custodial sentences in women’s prison units in Rio de Janeiro, this article aims to describe the labor relations that I could observe in these contexts. Provided for in the Law on Criminal Executions as a right and a responsibility of the convicted woman, work within the prison units does not include all of them and this generates a series of implications in the relationships between the inmates in the units, both among themselves and in relation to the penal police and the unit management. Based on this, and in dialogue with authors who discussed the notions of “gift”, “debt”, and “recognition”, “disregard” and “moral insult”, my proposal is to think about the division of labor in prison not as a right available to all, but as an opportunity which, when denied, can generate acts of disregard, similar to other rights in our unequal and hierarchical society. Thus, my objective is to think about how the distribution and division of labor carried out by state agents in the prison context, if considered its moral dimensions, can characterize more than rights and obligations, opportunities or acts of disregard.