Prison Worlds

An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition

Didier Fassin

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781509507580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The prison is a recent invention, hardly more than two centuries old, yet it has become the universal system of punishment. How can we understand the place that the correctional system occupies in contemporary societies? What are the experiences of those who are incarcerated as well as those who work there?

To answer these questions, Didier Fassin conducted a four-year-long study in a French short-stay prison, following inmates from their trial to their release. He shows how the widespread use of imprisonment has reinforced social and racial inequalities and how advances in civil rights clash with the rationales and practices used to maintain security and order. He also analyzes the concerns and compromises of the correctional staff, the hardships and resistance of the inmates, and the ways in which life on the inside intersects with life on the outside. In the end, the carceral condition appears to be irreducible to other forms of penalty both because of the chain of privations it entails and because of the experience of meaninglessness it comprises. Examined through ethnographic lenses, prison worlds are thus both a reflection of society and its mirror.

At a time when many countries have begun to realize the impasse of mass incarceration and question the consequences of the punitive turn, this book will provide empirical and theoretical tools to reflect on the meaning of punishment in contemporary societies.

1
For Whom the Cell Fills

To an observer belonging to a different society, certain of our practices would appear to be similar in nature to anthropophagy, which we deem so alien to our own notion of civilization. I am thinking of our customs regarding justice and prison.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 1955

“Put me in solitary! I’d rather be in solitary than stay with this guy. I can’t handle it, I can’t take it anymore!” Visibly beside himself, the young man rushes out of his cell, pushing past the five guards standing in the opening of the heavy door. It is evening, all the inmates have been locked up until the next morning and in theory the night shift should not have any contact with them, apart from confirming their presence through the peephole when they make their rounds. Guards only open a cell in the event of an actual or suspected incident, and in such cases, as a precaution, they come in a group under the lead of the prison lieutenant on duty. On this occasion, an argument between two prisoners sharing a cell, and the anticipation of a fight, have led them to intervene.

When they open the door, they find themselves face to face with two very agitated men. One of them, in his 30s, arrogant and defiant, declares volubly that he does not want to stay with his cellmate any longer. By turns threatening and charming, hinting at the risk that “it’ll end in tears,” and trying to get the officers on his side with his repeated “you know me, I don’t want any trouble,” he is doing his best to push his cellmate over the edge by making him look ridiculous. In particular, he repeats several times that he is “fed up with this guy lying there playing with his balls,” eliciting sniggers from the guards. The other man, who is little more than 20, seems stressed and upset. White-faced, he holds himself together for a few moments until, unable to bear this humiliating situation that the guards show no sign of wanting to put a stop to, he explodes with frustration and rushes out into the gangway to escape his bully’s sarcastic remarks. Having previously verified that a place has come free after another inmate left that same day, the lieutenant is conciliatory. He asks him calmly to take his things and leadshim to the other cell.¹ In the course of this brief move, the man begs for some tobacco. One of the guards, who explains to me in an aside that he always has some in his pocket to give to prisoners who crave it but have none, gives him a little tobacco. “Can’t you give me a bit more?” wheedles the prisoner. Irritated by this demand, the officer becomes angry. He takes back his gift, and makes the man enter his new cell. As the team begins to move away, the man realizes he has forgotten to bring his mattress cover with him and asks, through the door, to be let out to go and fetch it. “It’s too late now,” is the reply. And despite his protestations, the guards resume their round.

“Doubling up” in cells is a major source of problems in the day-to-day life of prisons.² Friction between cellmates not only results in violence between them, but also leads to conflicts with the staff. Many “refusals to return to cell,” which can degenerate into a confrontation with a guard and end in solitary confinement, are an expression of protest against the imposition of a cellmate. Ensuring good cell matches is an exacting additional task for senior officers, who are required to satisfy multiple criteria in the process. Decisions are made mainly on the basis of age, penal status, and whether or not the individuals smoke, but also in addition, as far as is possible, their mental health, personality, origin, religion, and even their personal preferences are taken into consideration. All these are elements that are of primary importance in keeping the peace and maintaining order in the facility, but also stem from the application of the European Prison Rules, and their incorporation into correctional law. Notwithstanding these efforts, which I witnessed during meetings of the joint services committee, where assigning prisoners is one of the essential tasks, there were constant problems. Doubling up generated permanent tensions in the prison. It was poorly tolerated, and gave rise to incessant requests and recurring negotiations with the senior officers as prisoners returned from exercise and sought to secure, if not a cell to themselves, at least a cellmate they got along with better. This situation, directly linked to prison overcrowding, was already worrying when I began my research, but it worsened rapidly over the months.

One of the wardens did not mince his words: “More than 900 people in a space designed for fewer than 600, that’s the first institutional violence the state imposes on prisons. The principle of one prisoner per cell goes back to the Third Republic. Over a century later, we still can’t guarantee it.” During the four years between the beginning and the end of my research, the number of people given a prison sentence rose by 35 percent, while the number actually in custody increased by 18 percent. Over the same period, human resources remained unchanged and even fell slightly in terms of guards, generating a 23 percent increase in workload. In fact, despite the growth in adjusted sentences resulting in parole, which more than doubled, not least through use of electronic monitoring, which even tripled, the occupancy rate rose from 125 to 147 percent, which means that the excess prison population almost doubled. Considering, moreover, that some cells are left vacant for maintenance reasons, that others are used for isolation purposes, and that finally some individuals held under special conditions because they are deemed dangerous are housed alone, almost all “ordinary” prisoners are in fact “doubled up.” Faced with this troubling development, the prison management had installed bunk beds in almost all the cells, creating a total of 1,020 possible bed places. “I am proud to say that we have never had to put mattresses on the floor and make prisoners sleep there, as other prisons have,” one of the directors said to me. As he was well aware, this pragmatic solution, which allowed him to mitigate the serious shortage of spaces, at the same time endorsed a form of exemption from the legal obligation to provide each inmate with an individual cell.

Such is the de facto norm in short-stay correctional facilities in France, since the increase in prison places has never kept pace with the growth in the prison population in recent decades. The number of people sentenced to prison in France, including those under electronic monitoring, rose from 31,551 in 1982 to 50,115 in 1992, 48,594 in 2002, and 73,780 in 2012. This represents an increase of 133 percent in three decades, with a 52 percent rise just since the early 2000s.³ Statistics for people actually incarcerated have seen a similar progression, with record totals beaten month after month: the figure of 68,569 prisoners, corresponding to an occupancy rate of 12 percent, was reached on July 1, 2013, the time at which I was completing my research.⁴ This growth in the prison population and the resultant over-occupation of cells are unevenly distributed. As one warden remarked in frustration: “It’s an extraordinary paradox that, in long-term prisons, which house those people who have been sentenced, the principle of ‘one prisoner, one cell, one job’ is applied, whereas in short-stay prisons, where many inmates are awaiting trial, they are housed two or even three to a cell. Once they’ve been found guilty, they are properly treated. While they’re still presumed innocent, they’re all piled together.” Ironically, this unequal treatment was reproduced, despite his best efforts, in the very facility he was in charge of, since the application of the European Prison Rules in the block that housed those sentenced to medium terms of imprisonment meant they had to be held one to a cell, placing even greater pressure on the remainder of the prisoners, many of whom were awaiting trial. The carceral condition of the prisoner on remand, who can retain this status for years pending trial or appeal, is in many respects unfavorable compared with that of those who have been convicted.

This troubling observation was confirmed in a report presented to the French National Assembly, which spoke of “endemic overpopulation” and reported an occupancy rate of 92 percent in long-term prisons compared with 135 percent in short-stay prisons. In another report, this time to the French Senate, a simple explanation was given: in long-term prisons, “the conditions of imprisonment and length of stay mean that the prisoner population is much more difficult and changes less; it is therefore essential to maintain correct conditions of incarceration.” Conversely, in short-stay prisons, “faster turnover means that much more difficult conditions of imprisonment can be tolerated.” As a result, the authors argue, these differences in occupancy rate can be explained in terms of “power relations” working to the disadvantage of those awaiting trial, who become the “adjustment variable in the prison system.”⁵ Thus it is a form of political cynicism, in which confirmed criminals are treated better than alleged offenders because the former are feared more than the latter, that accounts for this inequality between long-term and short-stay prisons. It is a significant inequality: as of July 1, 2012 the rate of occupation was over 200 percent in six short-stay prisons in metropolitan France, and in almost all prisons in the overseas territories. In these facilities it is not even correct to talk of “doubling up,” since prisoners are often housed three or four to a cell designed for one person, with mattresses on the floor making it virtually impossible to move around these confined, densely inhabited spaces. In such conditions, it is easy to imagine the tensions that arise among inmates and with staff.

* * *

In theory there are two explanations for prison overcrowding: either too many people are being locked up, or not enough prisons are being built. In other words, either some of the people held in correctional facilities should not be there, or there are not enough places for all of those who should be incarcerated. For a long time it was the second of these explanations that prevailed, while the first was rarely taken into consideration. The response was therefore to build new prisons. In 1987, the Gaullist minister of justice Albin Chalandon launched the massive initiative known as the “13,000 program” in response to the situation he reported having discovered on taking up his post – to wit, the presence of 51,000 inmates in prisons designed for only 32,500 places.⁶ Over the following two decades, several building programs aimed at both expanding and renovating prison real estate were announced by successive governments, without necessarily ensuing in corresponding construction. The last but one, at the height of the law-and-order policies implemented by successive right-wing governments, a plan to build 25 new prisons announced by minister of justice Michel Mercier in May 2011, overturned that of his predecessor, Michèle Alliot-Marie. It envisaged the creation of 20,000 new places by 2018, a figure raised to 30,000 by President Nicolas Sarkozy a few weeks later; a report issued the following year planned to reach the total of 80,000 in 2017, an increase of almost 50 percent over current capacity.⁷ However, when Christiane Taubira was appointed minister of justice in the left coalition government in 2012, she began to question the idea that more prisons were needed, and suggested instead that there were perhaps too many people in prison for whom other penalties might have been both more just and more efficacious. The goal was subsequently reduced to 63,000 places in five years, with priority being given to devising alternatives to imprisonment and to sentence adjustment.⁸ Once again, it was a question of whether individuals who should not be in prison were being incarcerated, or whether prison capacity is not being adequately adjusted to the real need for incarceration.

When I put this question to one of the wardens, his response was cautious. “Actually, it’s both,” he said, but he went on to expand much more fully on the first interpretation, admitting that “when you lock people up, you often feel you’re committing an injustice,” than on the second, in support of which he remarked simply that “in any case, there are French people who are calling for security, and we owe it to them.” A few days later, meeting a prisoner in his cell, I did not even need to ask him the question: “They goon about how there’s not enough space in prisons and then they jail people just for that!” he exclaimed, referring to his own case. He had been imprisoned two months earlier and was sharing his cell with a young Caribbean man. He was 51 years old, of Haitian nationality, but had been legally resident in France for many years. He worked in construction, but described himself as a “hairdresser, photographer, manager.” He had a number of previous convictions for minor offenses, three of which had already led him to the same prison. This time he had been caught by the railroad police just as he jumped the turnstile without validating his ticket. Not wanting to miss his train, he had lost his temper: “They insulted me. I answered back. They jumped on me and beat me up. I was off sick for two weeks!” Yet it was the police officers who lodged a complaint against him, an almost systematic practice when the person has been injured in the course of his arrest, so as to forestall any legal claim. His time in police custody had been a trying experience, because “if you’re in there for insulting the cops, they give you a hard time.” Following an immediate appearance trial, he was sentenced to six months in prison. “I was hoping for just a suspended sentence. I didn’t raise a hand to them, I didn’t resist arrest, the cops didn’t even claim compensation. I said to the judge: ‘I don’t get it: I’m not a drug-dealer, I’m not violent, I’m not an Islamic fundamentalist. Why are you jailing me for six months?’ He said: ‘Consider yourself lucky: the public prosecutor asked for a full year.’” Philosophically, he concluded: “I’m not saying it wasn’t wrong to try and travel withou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface to the English Edition – A World of Prisons
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue – Where It All Begins
• Introduction – The Expanding Prison
• 1 – For Whom the Cell Fills
• 2 – A Well-Kept Public Secret
• 3 – Ye Who Enter Here
• 4 – Life in Prison: A User’s Manual
• 5 – In the Nature of Things
• 6 – A Profession in Search of Honor
• 7 – Violent, All Too Violent
• 8 – Rights, Interrupted
• 9 – Land of Order and Security
• 10 – The Never-Ending Punishment
• 11 – An Unfinished Business
• Conclusion – The Meaning of Prison
• Epilogue – Ethnography Regained
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement