The hardening of criminal policy, especially with regard to young people, foreigners and mental patients, maintains constant prison overcrowding which make French prisons a permanent scandal and human rights insult. They are always moving away from their displayed objective, the rehabilitation of the prisoner, to be only a place of relegation and suffering.
The reflection of Jean Bérard and Gilles Chantraine begins with an observation: the disillusionment and the concern aroused by the “ June 2008 days », Gradually fueled months, by the chance of the government calendar, of political decisions intended to reform the prison world. The appointment of a controller general of the places of deprivation of freedom (in the person of the State Councilor Jean-Marie Delarue) and some punctual advances (use of the mobile phone for prisoners, extension of the possibilities of parlor unattended, etc.) are not enough to counterbalance the bad news: government communication, focused on alternative sentences which have hardly proven themselves, the particularly disappointing reform Disciplinary district and, finally and above all, the renunciation of recognizing rights to prisoners. Thus, to cite only a few examples, the maximum duration of placement in the isolation district-the most severe in Europe-is only reduced by five days, the humiliating bodily excavation remains arbitrarily, the vagueness of the new texts preserves the discretionary omnipotence of the heads of establishments and, by a clever game of dupes, the implementation of the individual packer is ultimately abandoned. In the end, the claims of prisoners, the dispute of social workers and even unions of prisons and supervisors do nothing to do anything about the position of decision -makers.
How did we get there ? Jean Bérard and Gilles Chantraine propose to retrace the progression of contradictions between criminal policy, actually applied, and the affirmation of respect for the rights of prisoners, manifestly flouted. Their work comes from a series of recent publications in the quarterly review Dinwhich aims to be at the crossroads of political engagement, artistic experimentation and scientific research.
Do I have the right to have rights ?
The historian and the sociologist organized their study around eight chapters, each preceded by a short presentation, which correspond to the major issues which make French prisons a place of lawless people, and the penitentiary reform a desperately obsolete utopia. The first chapter is a reflection on real perpetuity and its counterpart, parole, from a moving petition of ten sentenced to long sentence dated January 2006. We are living aliveillegally out of the Cleurveaux power station, is an appeal whose signatories claim the right to the death penalty. It reveals three current trends, explained by the authors: the extension of long sentences, the release considered only in terms of risk, the depoliticization of the demands of the incarcerated.
Follows the analysis of the various problems that undermine the prison institution today. Due to the multiplication of short sentences and the consequences resulting for people (stigmatization, recurrence, etc.), prison finished, as Michel Foucault explained in Monitor and punish (1975), by being just a “ location of popular illegalisms and construction of delinquent sector (P. 44). The over -representation in prison of people with psychiatric disorders is the manifestation of a clear tendency to protect society rather than to the treatment of mental patients: it is, as the authors say, the “ Psychiatric care prison ». Disciplinary obsession characterizes the incarceration of juvenile offenders, in particular through the creation of minor establishments (EPM). The hardening of criminal policy leads to an explosion of prison demography: 48,000 prisoners in 2000, 57,000 in 2003 – and 80,000 in 2017 in 2017 ? The promulgation of the law on security retention in February 2008 aggravated prison overcrowding by introducing a sentence of confinement after the sentence.
One might think that, faced with these problems, the institution has initiated a fundamental reflection. Again, the observation is dark. As the authors show in chapter 3, entitled “ Do I have the right to have rights ? “, It is absurd to believe that the improvement of penitentiary real estate (number of places, space, modernization) would be enough, by a mechanical effect, to get French prisons and their occupants of unworthiness. The requirement of reform is all the more difficult to make heard as a lead weighs on the word of prisoners. The last chapter on the detention of minors is particularly welcome: the current policy of treatment of juvenile delinquency still seems to believe that it is possible to invent a prison without the disadvantages of the prison. The successive failures of the Petite-Roquette, prison for children of the XIXe century, closed centers of Juvisy-sur-Orge and Fresnes or the current and very controversial youth center in detainees (CJD) Fleury-Mérogis are there to invalidate this dream.
Prisoners’ law and common law
Jean Bérard and Gilles Chantraine have known, in this work, to bring together a sum of articles to make it a relevant and coherent whole, as much sociologically as historically, which finds its place between activism and erudition. 80,000 prisoners in 2017 ? is an activist because it is a cry of alarm, a support aimed at developing mentalities and putting an end to government hypocrisy which wants to make believe that the reform of a old prison system is still possible, despite two centuries of vain attempts. However, this commitment is widely supported: references to legislative texts, government and non -governmental reports, to a scientific production of researchers in the humanities, in the media, are essential to understand news and prison excesses. The commented bibliography, at the end of the work, still enriches the base of this study. To report on this permanent scandal that our prisons have become, the authors call on everything that the subject has of human (or inhuman ?), In particular by the place they give to the word of those we do not want to hear, the prisoners, and to the free and external votes which fight so that the right of prisoners is that of ordinary law.