Overcoming the disparity of documentary corpus, a collective work analyzes the common points between prisons, penal colonies, barracks, hospices, asylums and convents. So many institutions where punitiveness permeates the institutional routine.
Punishments are at the heart of the stimulating work Punitive routines directed by Elsa Génard and Mathilde Rossigneux-Méheust. It is the result of research carried out by eighteen historians, many from the Research Group on Disciplinary Institutions (GRID), which intends to create a common and comparative history of prisons, penal colonies, barracks, hospices, hospitals, high schools, psychiatric asylums, factories and convents.
This comparative approach, including Erving Goffman in Asylums (1961) and Michel Foucault in Monitor and punish (1975) had laid the foundations, and which gave rise to several research projects, is continued here for the contemporary era (XIXe–XXe century) with, as an angle of approach, the history of punitive everyday life.
Dungeons and punishment books
Aiming to grasp, through the “ micropenalties “, the nature of power in disciplinary institutions, the work is divided into nine chapters, examining the administration of punishments, punitive repertoires and the effects of punishment. Added to this are short articles centered on a document (unfortunately, not always readable) and exploring punitive materiality: spaces (“ discipline room » in prison, high school dungeons, etc.), documents (certificates of good conduct issued to conscripts ; documentary film on school discipline, etc.) or objects (discipline used to mortify nuns or straitjacket used in asylums, prisons or by the police).
The book thus offers a dive into the disciplinary archives, in particular the “ scriptures of punishment » (registers, lists, files), fruits of bureaucratic rationalization from the XIXe century. We learn that the Villers-Cotterêts retirement home kept punishment notebooks for its residents from 1947 until 2005. !
In order to examine the “ institutional continuum “, beyond the sometimes compartmentalized historiographies, also beyond the purposes assigned to each institution (to punish, correct, heal, lead to salvation), the book adopts – and this is one of its great strengths – a demanding and courageous methodological bias: starting from a common investigation protocol and writing with several hands (four, six and sometimes eight), in order to confront the areas of investigation, without ignoring the difficulties of the enterprise.
Among them is the disparity of documentary corpora, linked both to institutional and memorial traditions, as well as to different conservation logics. To the documentary abundance of prisons, which keep the balance sheet of repressive activity – the Prison statisticscreated in 1852, provides information on the disciplinary state of the central centers (individuals punished, escapes) -, responds to the scarcity of archives of the practice preserved by the military institution, while discipline is omnipresent there. Although daily in the asylum, the punishments are also silent, because they constitute an admission of failure.
In common
Despite these difficulties, historians dialogue, confront and distinguish between military, educational, prison and assistance institutions (chapters 1 and 6 are, in this respect, remarkable). It is thus a question of prisons, hospices, hospitals, factories and high schools in France and Belgium, asylums and penal colonies in the colonial territories (Algeria and Guyana), psychiatric hospitals of the GDR and prisons of Francoist Spain.
The collective dimension of this work is observed even in the table of contents, where the names of the authors are erased in favor of their common objects. The comparative approach is based on the strong historical connection between several of these institutions (prisons as assistance institutions are the heirs of the General Hospital). Many of them supervise populations from the working classes and all have both their punitive practices and their method of recording in common.
Among the punitive techniques deployed are bullying and violence (physical, psychological and sexual), isolation (cell, dungeon, disciplinary or police room, where prisoners walk in circles for hours), restraint (straitjackets, shackles), deprivation (of food, alcohol, tobacco, correspondence or exit, to which are added monetary deductions in prison). In hospital and asylum institutions, the straitjacket or confinement in cells prove to be ambiguous tools, used both for therapeutic and punitive purposes.
The testimonies that punctuate the work attest to the perception by the actors themselves of this “ disciplinary continuum “, whether denying it or denouncing it. In the middle of XIXe century, the company of the Daughters of Charity reminded the directors of the seminary that “ we do not act with seminarians as with children in a school ; that we want less to punish the sister than to effectively help her to correct herself » (p. 72), while, in theEducation of our sons (1890), Doctor Jules Richard castigates a discipline which “ classifies our public education establishments between barracks and prisons » (p. 354). As for the psychiatrist Georges Daumézon, he questioned his colleagues in 1956 about the use, in the Lannemezan psychiatric hospital, of a “ isolation room » with, written on the door, “ police room » (p. 197).
Punitive frequencies
The book also analyzes the division of punitive labor between subordinates (prison guards, general supervisors, non-commissioned officers, nurses) and the authorities (hospice and prison directors, principals, officers, doctors, etc.), but also the forms of delegation, through the recruitment of intermediaries among the imprisoned populations (convict foremen, prison provosts). The study of punitive frequencies proves particularly interesting to show how much punitiveness permeates institutional routine.
In the Villers-Cotterêts retirement home, from the 1950s to the 1970s, 25 to 30 % of residents are sanctioned, while in the central house of Fontevraud, between the end of XIXe century and late 1930s, 60s to 90s % of prisoners are (p. 100). Thus Jean C., a 28-year-old laborer, sentenced to three years in prison for theft, passes 68 % of his time in the cell block (260 days out of 373). In 1937-1938, he received 17 punishments for arrogance towards supervisors, poor behavior in the workshop, canteen trafficking, etc. Simone A., sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, also for theft, and transferred to Rennes in 1920, was punished 172 times in four years, among other things for gossiping (from 1839 until 1972, prisoners sentenced to more than a year were required to remain silent). She appears before the disciplinary courtroom on average every 20 days.
Perhaps it would have been interesting to devote a presentation to each of the institutions considered, which would have reduced the work of contextualizing each article and enlightened readers on the specificities and chronology specific to each institution. Certain elements would have deserved a firmer focus. We think in particular of the role of work, the weight of which the book underlines in the prisons of the XIXe century, but whose importance is difficult to grasp in psychiatric hospitals (p. 260) or retirement homes (p. 116).
Furthermore, certain comparison choices are less convincing than others. So it is with the chapter on repression in the asylum and the convent, in which the choice (to examine convent discipline) of the company of the Daughters of Charity seems less relevant than other types of congregations. We think of the strictly cloistered orders or the Congregation of the Good Shepherd, halfway between the convent and the prison.
This pitfall, which is the reflection and the result of the current state of French research on disciplinary institutions, in no way obscures the interest of this abundant work, which opens numerous avenues. Among them, let us cite the way in which economic issues shape punishment: the chronic lack of agents explains the massive use of monetary deductions in prison and, conversely, the low use of the straitjacket in the asylum, because it places the patient in a situation of semi-immobility and makes him too dependent on caregivers. The book also invites further exploration of the influence of gender or race in the punitive economy.