And by “justice” I mean nothing other than the restraint necessary to hold particular interests together, without which men would collapse into the old state of unsociability. Any punishment that goes beyond the need to preserve this bond is unjust by its very nature.

But the prison memoirs – “Scenes from the House of the Dead,” as he himself called them somewhere in the manuscript – appeared to me to be not without interest. The completely strange world, unknown until that time, the strangeness of some of the facts, some particular notes on those lost souls, attracted me, and I read with curiosity.

There people live their hard and heavy lot cooped in deep rooms, – their gestures show they’re scared, more terrified than any yearling herd; and outside wakes your earth, its breath is stirred, but these, though living still, now know it not.

Preface to the English Edition

A World of Prisons

Presented by its promoters two and a half centuries ago as moral progress in the administration of punishment, prison has become over the past decades one of the most vexing and unsettling issues in Western societies for both the spectacular increase of its population and the grim reality of its facilities. But while imprisonment is today in most countries the ineluctable reference and the ultimate horizon of the penal system, until recently neither its efficacy in reducing crime nor its respect for democratic principles has been seriously discussed outside a few academic circles. The correctional institution has been taken for granted and is barely visible. An elephant in the room, it has largely been ignored by the public. To take the most extreme example, in the United States, the number of people incarcerated increased more than sevenfold over four decades, reaching the impressive figure of 2.3 million inmates in the early 2010s, which made the country’s incarceration rate the highest in the world, yet without provoking a major debate. New laws were constantly being passed, imposing new mandatory minimum sentencing and criminalizing new offenses. New facilities were regularly being built, involving new private actors and new security measures. An ever tougher legislation and an expanding correctional system were business as usual in government, and these widely popular policies were little questioned. Only in recent years has the problem begun to be addressed, in large part because of the colossal share it represents in the states’ budgets. The political, moral, and social implications of mass incarceration have remained for the most part in the background.

In fact, what prisons entail involves two distinct, albeit related, aspects: penal and correctional – how offenders are punished and how incarceration is conducted. Studying the penal system involves analyzing how problems are socially constructed, how the public emotionally reacts to particular events, how some crimes are deemed serious and others are not, how the executive and the legislator produce norms and laws, how the police use their discretionary power to focus on specific offenses or offenders, how prosecutors and judges decide to indict and sentence certain acts while ignoring others. In the end, it is this entire complex process that leads to the filling or emptying of prisons and determines the composition of their population. Studying the correctional system implies examining the infrastructure and functioning of its facilities, the recruitment, training, activity, and supervision of its personnel, the rights and obligations that inmates are supposed to have, the daily interactions among those who are confined and with those who guard them, the formal and informal modes of regulating, settling, and sanctioning the various issues that may arise. Indeed, it is this dense network of material and immaterial elements that defines what life in prison looks like for those who serve a sentence as well as for those who work there.

Both the investigation of the penal chain and the inquiry into the correctional apparatus are indispensable to a full understanding of the prison system. However, they represent distinct challenges for social scientists, since the former, being open, is much more accessible to direct observation and other scientific approaches than the latter, which is, by definition, closed. This explains why most research is carried out on the penal chain, while little knowledge is available about the correctional apparatus. This is particularly true in the United States, where an impressive sum of sociological, historical, and legal studies exists on the logics and mechanisms that have led to the phenomenon known as mass incarceration, but where what it means to be incarcerated for the millions of individuals who enter prisons and jails each year is hardly studied. Indeed, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, most of the 50 State Departments of Corrections, and the 3,000 local jails have maintained a high degree of opacity regarding what goes on in their facilities, restricting both scientific activities and external assessment, and therefore avoiding public or legal accountability about how prisoners are treated. It is much less the case, however, in other countries, such as Britain, where observational methods and interview techniques have recently resulted in substantial works on prison.

In France, the penal chain and correctional apparatus are relatively open to outsiders’ gaze. The ministry of justice, which is in charge of both, has its own small research unit, as does the National School of Prison Administration, and it finances the main public research center in criminology. Social scientists and legal scholars are regularly solicited to conduct surveys on various aspects of the justice and prison systems, notably to evaluate new policies or respond to specific questions, but independently conceived projects can also be granted permission, which has given birth to a growing field of research on justice and prison. The present book has greatly benefited from this relative opening. Over four years, I have been able to spend time, day and night for a total of seven months, in the short-stay facility of an important urban area. Such an institution is generally reserved for pre-trial detainees, the proportion of whom has recently decreased to one-fourth of the facility’s population, and for convicted persons with a sentence of less than two years, although some inmates may remain five years or more. During my research I have gradually been authorized – and have progressively authorized myself – to be present in all parts of the facility and attend all sorts of its activities, from cultural programs to parole board meetings, from disciplinary hearings to the solitary confinement unit. It has been more difficult to gain the trust of the prisoners than that of the personnel, and probably also to have sufficient confidence in myself to sit with the former in their cells than to stay with the latter in the walkways. But however fascinating life in such a facility may be, and however demanding its observation may become, I have repeatedly tried to step outside, on the one hand to study the everyday work of the justice system in the district criminal court, and, on the other, to examine the considerable body of legal, administrative, and statistical documents on the evolution of punishment practices, in order to apprehend the processes that have led to the prison system being what it is. This book is thus an attempt to analyze both the penal chain and the correctional apparatus. It aims at characterizing the punitive moment through which French society – like many others – is going, and at comprehending the carceral condition as it is experienced by those who endure it.

* * *

France today has the highest number of prisoners of its peacetime history. Its incarceration rate is 100 per 100,000 inhabitants, which is still seven times less than in the United States. In the past six decades, there has been a more than threefold increase in the prison population, which has swelled from 20,000 in 1955 to 67,000 in 2015. One could logically imagine the reason for this evolution to be a rise in crime. Such is not the case, however. Although the curve of crime statistics is always difficult to interpret, since it is influenced by the way offenses are represented in the public sphere and constituted under the law as well as by the activity of the police and the decisions of the judges, for the most robust data available, which also corresponds to the most serious crime, namely homicides, the trend over the past century and a half is clearly of decline, except for a short period in the 1970s when a moderate increase was observed. In fact, the dramatic expansion of the prison population is the consequence of a more severe penal system. This repressive turn results from two main phenomena. First, new offenses have been criminalized. Driving without a license, for instance, was until the 1990s a rare violation of traffic laws usually sanctioned by a fine. In the following decade, with the creation of a penalty point system and the multiplication of radars on the roads, the number of suspended licenses skyrocketed, while a 2004 law made it an offense punishable by a one-year prison sentence. Today, driving with a suspended license is the cause of one incarceration out of ten. Second, for a given breach of the law, prison sentences have been passed more frequently and for longer periods. Most notably, a 2007 law establishing mandatory minimum sentencing for recidivists has contributed to an increase of 9 percent in prison sentences and 17 percent in time to be served that was observed during the following five years. But when one examines these statistics closely, it appears that, paradoxically, the smaller the offense the greater the escalation in harshness. Other factors have also played a role, in particular the growing use of immediate appearance trials, which has a prison sentencing rate twice that of the normal procedure, and the activation of prison sentences for minor offenses perpetrated several years earlier, for which probation was already in progress. In sum, an increase in harshness rather than a rise in crime caused the expansion of the prison population. French society was undergoing a punitive moment.

This repressive trend being what it is, two further questions need to be asked. Is punishment justly allocated? Is it fairly distributed? In other words, are the crimes that cause more damage to society the most severely sanctioned (justice), and is the same offense punished in the same manner across society (fairness)? Ample discussion of these two points is provided in the book, and I will therefore limit the answers to one illustration: drug law violations. In terms of justice, suffice it to say that in the 2000s the number of convictions for use of marijuana has more than tripled, as a result of the establishment of quota of arrests by the police, while for financial crime it has decreased by one-third, after the introduction of legal measures rendering the indictments for such law infringements more difficult. It would be difficult to argue that smoking a substance that is legal in certain countries might be more prejudicial to society than embezzling funds. Currently, in France, imprisonment sentences for drug law violations represent one incarceration out of seven, essentially for possession and resale of cannabis, with one-fourth of these violations corresponding to mere use. In terms of fairness, while epidemiological surveys show that marijuana consumption is widely distributed among the youth, being even slightly more frequent in the middle class, those sentenced to imprisonment belong only to disadvantaged groups and ethnoracial minorities. The main reason for this discrepancy is that law enforcement officers concentrate their activity in housing projects rather than around universities, anduse socioracial profiling to decide whom to stop and search. Presently, in French prisons, half of the prisoners are unemployed, half of them declare to have no profession, four out of five have not finished high school, and in the short-stay facility where I conducted my research, three-fourths of the inmates belonged to ethnoracial minorities, being mostly black and Arab men. The unjust and unfair allocation of punishment explains in good part the formidable disparities observed in French correctional institutions. In this respect, it should be noted that the expansion of the prison population with its socioracial component occurred at the very moment when socioeconomic inequalities started to deepen after a long period of contraction and when ethnoracial minorities became the target of stigmatization campaigns from right-wing parties. The penal state has definitely been a way of governing the poor.

With this analysis in mind, it is possible to enter the prison system itself and better apprehend the way it operates. Indeed, it is not enough to wonder how contemporary societies have come to incarcerate so many people with such a disproportionate representation of the most disadvantaged and discriminated categories. One has to ask: what is it to be confined in a French prison today? Guards often say that the only thing of which prisoners are deprived is their freedom, and this belief has been at the heart of the very idea of the prison since its inception. Judges even maintain that the so-called incarceration shock may be salutary for the person convicted in the sense that it allows him to realize the consequence of his act. Yet, were freedom the only deprivation endured and the incarceration shock actually salutary, French correctional facilities might not have the highest suicide rate in the European Union, twice that of comparable countries such as Germany or Britain and five times what it was half a century ago. While the reasons for this suicide epidemic are unclear, it suggests that what inmates lack in prison is not just liberty. It is also privacy in their shared cell, an affective and sexual life with the constraints imposed on their rare visitors, the possibility to make decisions on ordinary needs like taking a medicine when in pain, the right to express emotions like anger when facing frustrations. What they are deprived of is their dignity, as they are subjected to body searches, and fair treatment, when they are sanctioned for misdeeds that the administration knows they have not committed. What the incarceration shock implies can be the loss of their job with the anticipated difficulty involved in finding another one, the disruption of their marital, family, and social life, and the exposure to violent encounters and criminal networks. At the end of the four years I devoted to studying prison life, the most obvious conclusion I could draw was that, contrary to the common idea that the prison system is expanding like an archipelago beyond its walls, something remains irreducible in the carceral condition.

For the social scientist, and probably for the public as well, the question that then comes to mind is: what is prison life like under this carceral condition in France? Much of my work has been an attempt to provide an answer to this question. Beyond the deprivations and the shock, beyond the drastic security measures and the harsh conditions of confinement, what is the prison experience for both personnel and prisoners? As one gets progressively immersed in the correctional system, whether as a new inmate, a novice officer, or a social scientist, one becomes aware of much more complex relationships and arrangements between the multiple agents and within the various contexts than what one expected. The imagined total institution appears as a field of forces, where the rules are permanently tested, negotiated, and diverted by guards as well as inmates. Of course, these rules are defined by the prison staff; certain officers do misuse them; all ultimately enforce them strictly and even brutally in the event of conflicts. In other words, power is unevenly distributed and some abuse it. Yet, in the daily life of the facility, compromises constantly occur: a shower is authorized although it is not supposed to be, an inmate back from a visit is left for a while in the walkway instead of being locked up, an officer agrees to serve as intermediary to pass tobacco or coffee from one cell to another. These adjustments are deemed to contribute to keeping the peace within the prison for the evident benefit of all. But they also reveal the existence, within limits steadily iterated, of mutual respect acquired through months or years of cohabitation.

The institution plays an important role in the production of this internal order. The threat of sanctions, which affects not only the stay in prison but also the time served and the possibility of parole, definitely counts. Yet, after having been publicly criticized at the turn of the century, and so as to conform with the European Prison Rules, the correctional system has undergone important transformations, both material and organizational, such as an improvement of the environment in the admissions unit or the presence of a lawyer during disciplinary hearings. A person familiar with the correctional apparatus in the United States would certainly be surprised to discover that French inmates are incited to vote rather than being disenfranchised, and cannot be submitted to solitary confinement for more than 30 days instead of having no maximum. Conversely, an observer of the French prison system would undoubtedly be astounded to learn that in the United States inmates may be shackled or controlled by pepper spray, and guards can beat up a prisoner and even kill him without being sanctioned by the institution or indicted by a prosecutor. National contexts differ. They matter. They influence legal guarantees, institutional regulations, and professional ethos.

Yet, beyond these differences, which are certainly crucial for those who spend months or years behind bars, one question is of universal relevance: that of the sense and function of the prison. It can be formulated in philosophical terms, but it has to be examined on an empirical basis. A common justification of the prison is utilitarian: it reduces crime via incapacitation, deterrence, and rehabilitation. For short-term sentences, which represent in France the great majority, with four out of five being less than one year, this justification is difficult to argue, since studies show that recidivism is higher after incarceration than when an alternative penalty is given. Indeed, the destructuring of family and professional life is not compensated by efforts toward reinsertion during prison time, the stay being too short to provide useful activities and plan re-entry under supervision. The months spent in prison are experienced as vainly lost: no work, no class, no sports, and no social work undertaken. Imprisonment reveals the naked truth of its sole meaning: the retribution of a wrong as a form of socialized vengeance. However, even if one accepts this justification, according to which the suffering of the person convicted must be commensurate with the injury to the victim or the damage to society, could one argue that smoking marijuana, driving with a suspended license, even stealing a cellphone or an auto radio is worth several months in prison?

* * *

After having spent a decade or so exploring the compassionate elements of contemporary societies via the analysis of the deployment of humanitarian reason, I have since dedicated my research to their repressive component through the study of policing and punishing – the dark side after the bright one, so to speak. In that respect, my earlier book, Enforcing Order, and this one, Prison Worlds, constitute a diptych illuminating how repression operates from the street to the cell. Both texts rely on the same ethnographic method, a similar presence in the field for a long period of time, an analogous endeavor to connect local observations to the legal framework, the political context, the demographics of the concerned populations, and, in the end, an equivalent attempt to draw conclusions of general value regarding the logics and mechanisms involved in the way punishment is distributed. From that perspective, I tend to think that the deeper the ethnographic inquiry the broader the anthropological comprehension. In the same way as the study of the daily work of an anticrime squad in the disadvantaged outskirts of Paris can illuminate the activity of law enforcement in Ferguson, Rio, Johannesburg, or Bangkok, so the investigation in a French short-stay prison can shed light on the functioning of correctional facilities in the United States, Brazil, South Africa, or Thailand. It is not a matter of suggesting that things would be similar everywhere, but that certain phenomena may be found anywhere. To deny ethnography this sort of generalizability is to try to deprive it of its unique critical edge. Indeed, some facts, details, interactions, and meanings can only be observed and interpreted via this method: they remain invisible or impossible to measure via others. And recognizing them entails not only scientific discoveries but also political issues.

In this respect, it may be that contemporary societies – some of them at least – have reached a turning point or are on the verge of doing so. The punitive moment that I have analyzed in this book is finally being questioned, at least in certain places. The cost and efficacy of the correctional apparatus are sometimes disputed. The social disruption provoked by incarceration and its role in the production and reproduction of crime begin to be acknowledged. In recent years, several European countries with already low incarceration rates, such as Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, have reduced even more their prison population. This trend has also been noted most recently in the United States, although at a slower pace and starting from a much higher level. Conversely, in France, like in most countries worldwide, the incarceration rate continues to grow, as the retributive ideology is kept alive via law and order policies often underlain by a politics of fear. But even if the decline in the prison population were to be confirmed and extended, it should not distract attention from the carceral condition to which I have devoted most of this book. Ultimately, society can be judged on the state of its prisons and the way it treats its prisoners.

D. F., March 2016

Acknowledgments

Prisoner: You’re back, then? Are you writing another book?

Me: No, it’s still the same one.

Prisoner: It’s going to be never-ending, then.

Prison officer: It’s like The Lord of the Rings: it’ll run into volumes!

(returning from the yard, July 2013)

It is a remarkable paradox that in France, prison, the prime site of confinement, is a space open to research. One need only point to the number of studies carried out there and the books and articles published on the subject. The contrast with the closed world of the police is notable in this respect. I, like others before me, have benefited from this openness, both at the central level of the Directorate of Prison Administration and the local level of the prison where I conducted my research. Not only was I warmly received by those in positions of responsibility in these institutions, but I was also welcomed by the staff – correctional officers, probation and re-entry counselors, and contractors employed by the private service provider – and the civilian personnel – doctors and nurses in the walk-in clinic, the clergy of diverse faiths and members of various advocacy organizations–as well as by sentencing judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, and even, in the district court (tribunal de grande instance), magistrates sitting in immediate appearance trials.

As I indicated to all these informants when I outlined my project to them, my aim is both to respect the anonymity of places and persons, and to ensure the confidentiality of the observations and testimonies gathered. For this reason I am unable to acknowledge individually all of the many people who allowed me to conduct my research with an exceptional degree of freedom, for which I am grateful to two successive directors and their deputies, and in the atmosphere of trust and cordiality that I encountered among the staff and others involved in the prison. This desire to protect my sources, as journalists put it, has also led me to modify some personal attributes and elements of biography that would have rendered the people whose actions or words I report too easily identifiable. In particular, where duties are exercised by a small number of agents, I have usually used genderneutral terms, except in cases where indicating the gender of the person concerned was essential to understanding and not potentially prejudicial to them. I wish to express my sincere gratitude to all those I cannot cite.

We may wonder about the reasons for the French prison system’s relatively benign disposition toward researchers – an attitude that is not necessarily echoed in other countries. After all, given the information on the situation in French prisons that filters through in newspaper and magazine articles, TV programs, press statements from organizations such as the International Prison Observatory (Observatoire international des prisons), parliamentary reports, and also reports from the National Ombudsman (Médiateur de la République) and especially the General Inspector of Prisons and Detention Centers (Contrôleur général des lieux de privation de liberté) – all of them generally authoritative documents that are unsparing in their criticism of prison policy and practices – the institution might well fear the proliferation of outside scrutiny, and could easily cordon itself off from the curiosity of social scientists. That it does not is entirely to its credit.

There are two explanations for it. The first, more clearly manifest at the level of national administration, is due to a form of democratic culture, certainly reinforced by pressure from the forces listed above, combined with a will to knowledge that is evident from the fact that the Directorate of Prison Administration has its own office for surveys and planning, that the main research center in this field operates under the aegis of the French Ministry of Justice, and that calls for scientific projects on the prison system are regularly published. The second, more perceptible at the local level, relates to adegree of dismay felt in the prison service over the negative public image of prisons and prison staff, which these latter consider unjustified. Working for an institution that the French president described in parliament as a “national disgrace for France” just as I was beginning my study is not easy, especially when the staff have the feeling that the realities of the prison environment are ultimately as much the result of political choices, legislative measures, budget constraints, and court decisions as they are of penitentiary practice itself. In these circumstances, the scrutiny and reflections of researchers could hardly make the representation worse, especially as researchers are credited both with spending more time there, allowing them to immerse themselves in the environment and thus to understand it better, and being more independent of ideological and institutional interests. “We have nothing to hide,” I was often told by members of the management team in the prison, and indeed they were as good as their word, letting me organize my work as I wished, including in places and at moments that did not show the establishment in the best light, and even after the publication of my book on policing, when I was applying for a renewal of my research authorization, which might have been refused in the context of the public debate generated by that book. Prison guards too encouraged me: “We hope you’re going to show prison how it really is.” They felt that they were still too often tarred with the traditional image of the “screw,” and regularlyinquired about the progress of my research.

But the world of prison is not made up solely of the prison management, its staff, and independent contractors. It is also, above all, made up of the life of the prisoners who spend months or years there. They too were generous in their welcome. Admittedly, one of their most frequent complaints wasthat they were not listened to by the wardens, the guards, or the probation and re-entry counselors. If a stranger comes in and invites them to talk, it is likely that he will be well received. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that the relationship went beyond a simple expectation of being heard. What was being manifested was the feeling that they were recognized as something other than just inmates. What was also expressed was the idea that the vehicle of the written word could give weight to what they were telling me. I am grateful to them for the interest they showed and the confidences they shared with me.

I hope that in this book I have preserved something of the truth of their experience, while at the same time protecting the anonymity and confidentiality of their individual histories, a procedure that has in some cases led me to omit elements of their stories or statements. The family names that appear in some of the reported conversations have of course been changed. However, I have never resorted to the practice, widespread in the social sciences, of using an invented surname or forename, or even an initial, as it seems to me that this process gives an anecdotal turn to their story. Contrary to this common usage, I have preferred to call them simply what they are: men. I use the term “prisoner” or “inmate” only in the context of administrative or demographic data relating to the prison population and in descriptions of interactions with prison staff, where the roles of each are predetermined. I have adopted the same practice in relation to the terms “defendant” and “suspect” in situations involving the courts or the police. When I recount the story of an individual or describe his relationship with me or with others, I say “the man” in order to restore to him a kind of dignity of which prison, the courts, and the police tend to deprive them – a fact they themselves complain of, maintaining that once they cross the threshold of the prison they are no longer anything but their inmate number.

This study was financed by an advanced grant that I was awarded in 2009, under the IDEAS program of the European Research Council: my proposal was to explore a domain I called political and moral anthropology. The support afforded by this grant goes far beyond the actual funding: it opens the doors of institutions, makes it possible to employ young researchers, 10 of whom were involved in this collective project, focusing on different areas and different subjects, and, finally, facilitates the dissemination and discussion of research outcomes – in other words, contributes to the production of a public space in which the social sciences have their place. The study was conducted in France, but has become a book in the United States. The freedom I enjoy at the Institute for Advanced Study, the interdisciplinary interactions that constitute the daily life of this institution, and the intellectual ethos characteristic of it were all essential to the work of reflection and writing. It is also the Institute, along with Iris, Institut de recherche interdisciplinaire sur les enjeux sociaux, and the program Tepsis, that funded the translation. As was the case with Bruno Auerbach at Le Seuil, so John Thompson, at Polity Press, accepted this project enthusiastically when I proposed it to him. And, as for several of my previous books, I have benefited from Rachel Gomme’s remarkable work of translation as well as from Patrick Brown’s, Laura McCune’s, and Sarah Dancy’s attentive copyediting.Finally, the book owes much to the conversations I had throughout the writing process with Anne-Claire Defossez, particularly during our precious mountain hikes, and beyond these discussions, to a particular idea that we share of what the world is and what it could be.

D. F., Princeton, August 2015

“So, this case . . . is quite extraordinary! All in all, it’s just another unfortunate road traffic incident, of the kind we see all too many. But, you’re giving us a real adventure story.” Thus the presiding judge, adopting a cheery tone, introduces the final case of the immediate appearance trials in a session she described to me later as “light, but quite representative of our work.” To be specific, the session has covered armed robbery, domestic violence, resisting arrest, and driving without a license. The last glimmers of winter daylight are filtering through the high windows of the plain concrete and glass district court building. At one end of the vast, almost empty courtroom, the judge sits on a raised dais, accompanied by her two associate magistrates, whose voices remain unheard throughout the four hours it takes to try the five cases. Alongside her, the court clerk does not lift her eyes from her computer screen, while the court usher busies himself looking for a lost document.

In the defendant’s box, partially enclosed by walls of wood and plexiglass, stands a man of 35 who looks 10 years younger: thin, haggard, shavenheaded, dressed in jeans and a tee-shirt. With his drawn features, doubtless the result of being held in custody, he seems lost, frowning with a sort of anxious perplexity at the judge’s torrent of words, which are interrupted only by occasional questions to which he replies in brief sentences uttered in a low, uncertain voice. Behind him, the two policemen who brought him in after removing his handcuffs. In front of him, the court-appointed attorney he met a short time before, and whose assistance he has accepted. Opposite him, a young prosecuting attorney. I am the only one seated on the public benches. Not a single relative, friend, or witness is in attendance for any of the five cases heard. In contrast with the presiding judge’s breezy remarks, a motto inscribed in giant letters on the wall above her offers a sententious reminder of the solemnity of the place: “The court is the ultimate arbiter, declaring and recalling the value of things.”

It takes all of the presiding judge’s talents as a storyteller to liven up the account of the – all in all rather banal – events that have led to the defendant’s appearance before her. One Sunday in late summer, in a small town nearby, a car veered off the road and crashed into a signpost. The collision caused it to roll onto its side, but the occupants lifted it back up again and drove off. When the police, who had been called by a witness, arrived, the vehicle had disappeared, but they found the license plate that had been torn off in the collision and easily identified the car in question, which was found in a parking lot not far away. When they questioned the owner, a woman in her 30s, she explained that her partner had been driving the vehicle. She claimed to have no idea where he was, but stated that he “had friends among Roma people.” The police officers then asked her to tell him that he was required to present himself at the police station. The man did not comply with the oral summons given to his partner, and four months later, the police arrived at his home at 6:30 in the morning to question him. Discovering that he no longer had a driver’s license and that his car was not insured, they arrested him and notified the public prosecutor; the following day, they brought him to court for an immediate appearance trial.

Having recounted the facts, the judge asks the accused how he pleads, and when he admits to the charges, she explodes: “What a completely stupid thing to do! Did you think you could live on the run like that?” The defendant explains softly that he was not on the run; he lives close to the police station, and on his return from work in the evening he has several times met police officers who know him well and could easily have asked him to accompany them down to the precinct. “Come on, tell the truth in court!” the judge insists. “You took advantage of not being arrested to enjoy the holidays with your family.” The defendant lowers his head. He has three young children, one of them adopted, and his partner is expecting a fourth. The judge feigns surprise: “Looking at you, you give the impression of someone showing remorse, but you’re not at all sorry! When the police officers questioned you, you said you would only talk to the judge with your lawyer.” Realizing that this remark is highly inappropriate, she corrects herself, acknowledging that this is indeed his right.

Examination of the case file reveals 19 citations over the previous 15 years, generally for similar offenses. These often resulted in a fine, once in the confiscation of his vehicle, and four times in prison sentences: of two months, four months, six months, and one longer stay of 36 months on account of violence and the activation of suspended sentences. “It’s a mystery how to make you understand that you cannot drive without a license and without insurance. You’re a danger to the public, and we’re only going to be safe if we put you in prison. What do you think?” The man remains silent. The judge moves on to rapidly scanning the social review, which is required in immediate appearance trials and is conducted by a psychologist from a rehabilitation organization. The report states that the man’s late father was a mechanic and that his mother brought up her seven children on her own. Having dropped out of a vocational school, their son began working at a very young age in temporary jobs, before finding more stable employment as a delivery driver, during the course of which he received 12 points on his license. The resulting prison sentences caused him to lose his job, and it was also one of these sentences that interrupted the lessons he had begun taking precisely for the purpose of regaining his license. He was released eight months earlier from his most recent prison sentence and looked for work for a long time before being hired as a temporary warehouseman in a company that was about to offer him a fixed-term contract the following week. He is also a former heroin user and is still enrolled in a methadone maintenance treatment. “You’ve been on methadone for four years?” asks the judge reprovingly. “That’s pretty much a treatment for life, isn’t it! One drug replacing another.” Suspecting that he ran off after the accident in order to avoid being breathalysed, she adds: “And if you drink on top of that, it’s hardly going to help.” Overwhelmed, the man remains silent.

It is now time for the prosecution to present its case. Of the three offenses, explains the public prosecutor, only two have been proven. In this tale that she describes, in an echo of the judge’s dramatization of the narrative, as “surrealistic,” the offense of fleeing the scene cannot be legally established because the circumstances of the accident meant that the accused was forced to stop, and did not drive off immediately. However, the lack of a license and insurance is confirmed, and moreover these are repeat offenses since he has recently been convicted of the same crimes. Because of this aggravating factor, she asks the judge to apply the mandatory sentence principle; in doing so, she effectively extends the scope of this automatic sanction beyond that prescribed by the legislation, which limits it to crimes punishable by sentences of three years or more. Moreover, far from encouraging clemency, “the recent employment and his good integration into his family” only make things worse from her perspective and justify a heavier penalty since, she argues, these favorable circumstances have not prevented him from committing further offenses. Regretting only that she cannot request the confiscation of the car, which is registered to his partner, the prosecutor concludes by calling for a custodial sentence of six months imprisonment with immediate incarceration. The judge suggests that she add reckless driving to the list of charges, in order to allow for compensation of the municipality, the mayor having submitted a claim, backed up by invoices, for 240 euros to replace the damaged signpost.

When it comes to the public defender’s turn to address the court, he begins, to the evident surprise of his client, by denigrating his partner. In an attempt to refute the offense of fleeing the scene, which has however already been dropped by the prosecutor, he accuses the young woman of lying to the police by stating that her partner was not at their home, when in fact he was; and so it was she, not he, who obstructed the course of justice. The lawyer does, however, acknowledge that the offenses relating to the lack of driver’s license and insurance are incontestable, “offenses which represent a danger to society, since he’s hardly the world’s greatest driver,” he adds with irony, to the increased astonishment of the defendant. But he bases his arguments against returning the accused to prison on the social context. He makes mention of the defendant’s family and work circumstances, noting that he “supports his partner and their three children,” “doesn’t sit around doing nothing and living off welfare,” “is following a treatment plan,” and “is attempting to reintegrate into society.” He therefore asks that the accused be “given this one last chance, or maybe the first chance after his troubled criminal past,” in view of both the recent change for the better with the job he has just been offered and the family’s precarious financial situation, with their only income being his wages. In a weary tone, he concludes his case by recalling, without conviction, the “possibility of alternative penalties that will help him become aware of the seriousness of his actions and support him on the path to proper integration” – penalties that he does not, however, specify. The judge intervenes once more to correct him on the stability of the employment, reminding him that it is nothing more than the promise of a fixed-term contract. A discussion ensues with the public prosecutor and the public defender on the meaning of temporary jobs and the need to reform labor law. The accused appears once more amazed by this unexpected digression. Finally, the judge turns toward him to ask if he wishes to add anything. In a scarcely audible voice, the man says that he regrets his action and is now “on the right track.” Hardly has he finished speaking when the judge declares a recess in order to deliberate. The hearing has lasted just 35 minutes.

Half an hour later, the court is reconvened. For driving without a license and insurance, the judge issues a sentence of six months’ imprisonment, and also awards damages to the civil claimants. The man appears despondent but resigned. The police officers replace his handcuffs and escort him to the prison, where he will be incarcerated.

It is there that I see him again three days later. He is in the new arrivals section of the prison, a sort of acclimatization zone between the outside world and the reality of incarceration, where inmates spend a few days before being transferred to the main buildings. The cell, where he is alone for the time being, measures about 100 square feet. The walls are painted pastel blue. It is minimally furnished: a basin with a mirror above it, a toilet hidden behind a screen, an iron bunk bed, a table and two plastic chairs, a closet. The barred window is covered by a thick rubberized grille, through which an exercise yard can be glimpsed, its high walls topped by coils of concertina razor wire. The few essential items given to each new arrival are placed in one corner. A transit zone, the cell does not have any of the decorative items found in cells where prisoners spend longer periods of time. After offering me one of the two chairs, the man sits down on the bottom bunk.

As I explain my research to him, he smiles fleetingly and says that he recognizes me, having noticed my presence in the courtroom, and wondered

Prison Worlds

An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition

Preface to the English Edition

A World of Prisons

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Where It All Begins