The key to the fields

Despite their varied backgrounds and fields, the contributors to the book share a relatively homogeneous theoretical perspective. To simplify, there are two main ways to discuss escapes. One is to describe them, count them, and measure the influence of explanatory factors. There are several ways to escape from prison: what we see in the movies (digging a tunnel, crawling through air ducts, jumping onto a lamppost from a perimeter wall) and what happens most often: taking advantage of a transfer to court, hospital, or another prison, or even more simply a permission not to return. The other way to talk about escapes is to focus on their meaning, both for prisoners and the prison system, but also for society and power. It is from this second point of view that the book approaches escape.

Can we escape?

The work gives pride of place to anthropological approaches and cultural studiesand its early chapters focus on the meanings that escapes take on in the daily lives of prisoners. For example, they show that after escape attempts, guards tighten the conditions of incarceration for all prisoners; or that escape is a project that can never really be completed, because a real escape would consist of returning to one’s life before prison (Mahuya Bandyopadhyay, Chapter 1). Prisoners build their self-esteem by planning and executing their escape, regardless of whether the escape is successful (Andrew M. Jefferson, Chapter 2). Planning escapes involves trusting fellow prisoners who will be tempted to denounce what is being plotted in order to gain personal advantage (Simone Santorso, Chapter 3).

Escapes often take place in a particular political context. For example, they allow the population to mock an incompetent and corrupt state (Atreyee Sen, Chapter 4). Similarly, mass escapes in revolutionary Tunisia are both an opportunity to celebrate the fall of the regime, and the starting point for panics linked to the increase in crime or rumors of manipulation to restore the old power (Yasmine Bouagga, Chapter 5, perhaps the most interesting in the book). Finally, the deplorable conditions of high-security wards in France in the 1970s sparked protests by prisoners that ultimately led to the closure of these facilities (Grégory Salle, Chapter 7).

The bureaucratic management of escapes occupies the following chapters. In the French open centres for juvenile delinquents, there are no walls, and the clients are not supposed to be locked up, but escaping seems the surest way to go to a real prison (Nicolas Sallée, chapter 8). Escapes are also to be understood in the complex relationships that the guards have with the prisoners of course, but also with the bureaucratic machinery that sets rules that are impossible to follow (Tomas Max Martin, chapter 9).

The final part of the book is devoted to cultural representations of escapes, in cinema, in television series and in prisons converted into museums (Matthew Ferguson et al., chapter 12). As Jamie Bennett says, punishments have largely disappeared from the public eye, so they no longer exist in the collective consciousness except in films and series, and more often with a metaphorical rather than documentary aim:

These films reveal the ‘prisons’ in which we live, constrained by the routine and rules of life in society, and our ‘attempts at escape’ to try to maintain our individuality and identity (p. 285).

What is escape the name of?

Several times in the book, the authors allude to the “deep meaning” of escapes. Gregory Salle, in the conclusion of his chapter on conflicts over high-security quarters, expresses it in an exemplary manner: it is about as illusory and futile to escape from prison as it is to pursue an abolitionist agenda in penal matters today. Critical thinkers of the 1970s had imagined that prison could be abolished, that the secular trend towards softening sentences would logically lead to the invention of penal practices less barbaric than imprisonment. The coincidence of the very significant increase in the American prison population from the 1980s onwards with the spectacular drop in crime in the 1990s gave unparalleled legitimacy to penal practices organized around the neutralization of criminals. Prison overcrowding — for example in France — does not lead to a questioning of confinement, but justifies the construction of new prisons. The idea of ​​escape, like that of abolition, plays the role of a fantasy-safety valve: the fact of thinking about it, even knowing that it is not possible, provides some relief. As AM Jefferson writes:

Escape is an illusion, but a necessary illusion. (p. 82)

We cross in Prison Breaks more “hegemonic discourses” and “subversive narratives” than framing data. For example, at least in the Western world, escapes seem to be increasingly rare: in England and Denmark, the escape rate has been divided by 10 over the last 20 years (p. 4). However, Prison Breaks does not seek to situate his contributions in this context. The result is a great evocative richness and an enlightening geographical diversity of perspectives, but also the feeling that escapes are an… elusive object. To the extent that escapes are a beautiful subject, the least we can say is that they are not hackneyed in the social sciences, we would have willingly forgiven a little more eclecticism, and the inclusion of contributions with systematic data on the subject studied. Similarly, it would have been interesting to reflect on the differences between individual escapes and mass escapes. However, we can only recognize the merit of this pioneering work in bringing out a new object in the reflection on prisons.