This research presents a reflection on the current reader practices that involve the teaching of literature in the school environment from the perspective of the formation of the reader. In order to focus on the procedures and norms governing Penitentiary Education, the incoherence of a teaching format based on the absorption of language codes and the introjection of formulations already placed by literary criticism on the books chosen for reading . The proposal, drawn here, seeks to think of reading as a possibility of meeting with the other, of awakening personal potentialities and of reconstituting a subjectivity, often inert and stigmatized. For this, it is necessary to reconfigure the relationship between the reading mediator and the student reader, as well as certain concepts about the objectives of this practice that seem to guide the current education projects worked within prisons throughout Brazil.