“Hearing the sounds of the city”

Olivier Milhaud. There are many consequences, and they are much more significant than you might think. For prisoners, being jailed in the city centre means hearing the sounds of the city, easier access for visitors due to the central location, increased opportunities for activities because organisations can contribute more easily, and quicker, less complicated trips to the hospital or the court - often near city centres - which require fewer guards, thus leaving a larger number of guards in the prison. For the families of prisoners, let us not forget that a central location is key, especially for working-class families with limited means, further impoverished by the incarceration of their loved one. Not only do these people lose the resources or the income support that their relative received before incarceration, but they also have to pay for postal orders to allow their relative to buy from the prison commissary and rent a television, for example.

A prison in the city centre will certainly have better transport connections than one on the outskirts: not only will there be a bus stop nearby, but more importantly, buses will pass more frequently, enabling easy access for prison visits.

For prison staff, working in town leads to higher rent costs if they wish to live nearby. Some prefer to live outside of town, in a more bucolic environment perhaps reminiscent of their youth. However, living in town, especially in a large town or city, also means access to a wider job market, making it easier for their partner to find employment, and to a population centre with more opportunities for their children. Those who live outside of town, and especially those who live far outside of town, would be wise to request a transfer as soon as possible for the well-being of their families – although, high staff turnover does lead to destabilised teams. This negatively affects both the quality of detention work for the staff, who exhaust themselves repeating instructions, and the reintegration work of prisoners, who lack consistent points of contact. Far from town, there is a greater risk of creating a self-segregated community, cut off from the world and without exposure to urban diversity. Some social workers do not take kindly to this and regularly request transfers, preventing long-term monitoring.

Lastly, symbolically, a prison in the city centre also means giving visibility to imprisonment. It is a reminder in the heart of the city that some individuals live in imprisonment on our behalf and that the justice system employs this sentence (and increasingly so, given the ever-stricter penalties these past few decades). With institutions on the urban periphery, more or less hidden in industrial estates, they disappear from view and we come to forget about their existence. On 1 July 2021, France had over 67,000 prisoners, the equivalent of towns like Inverness, Farnborough, or even Grays! Having a prison in the city centre also means catching glimpses of faces, human faces, behind the high walls. This shatters the illusion that surrounds prisons. Yes, these really are human beings, with eyes and arms and faces, that we see behind the walls and the bars. They are in no way monsters that must be removed from our shared sense of humanity.

OM. It’s an old debate, which was already taking place at the end of the 19th century, when the choice was made to move the Parisian prison of Mazas to Fresnes. Mazas was too close to the Gare de Lyon train station and Paris was preparing to welcome visitors for the Exposition Universelle of 1900. The prison’s negative reputation threatened to tarnish the image of the capital for all the visitors arriving at the Gare de Lyon. Naturally, the town of Fresnes feared for its reputation, but many strategies exist to conceal association with a prison: more often than not, the choice is made to establish the institution as far as possible from the town centre, or to give it a generic name so that it does not bear the town’s name (“South Île-de-France institution”), or to place the name of the nearest major city before the name of the town where the prison is located (Toulouse-Seysses, Bordeaux-Gradignan, Lille-Sequedin, Orléans-Saran, etc.), or to plant trees to hide the prison so it is not visible from the town centre. Everyone cites Fleury-Mérogis as a counterexample, but the largest prison in western Europe is an exceptional case due to the enormity of the institution (2,800 spaces). Conversely, Jean-Marie Renouard effectively demonstrates in his book Bathers and Convicts. Tourism and prison on the Île de Ré (Baigneurs et Bagnards. Tourisme et prison à l’île de Ré) that few people know that the primary employer on this famous holiday resort island is the prison service.

In its citadel, a UNESCO World Heritage Site designed by Vauban, Saint-Martin-de-Ré houses a high-security prison, which has not scared off the tourists.

This could also be considered an exceptional case. But it is worth saying that most people do not even know the precise location of the prison closest to their home. Other public facilities are also affected by their negative image (recycling centres and rubbish tips, rest areas for travellers, etc.) and few people know exactly where they are located.

OM. The idea of smaller prisons is the best there is. There is little point in adding on to the pile of official reports which have repeated for decades that the enormity of institutions is detrimental to the quality of detention, compromises the prisoners’ living and reintegration conditions, impairs the penitentiary staff’s working conditions and puts a strain on external contributors’ ability to operate. How can prisoner reintegration be accomplished in prisoner factories which stockpile more than five hundred anonymous humans, blended into a crowd in a correctional centre with 600 or 700 spaces? Oh, to be sure, this leads to a clear economy of scale for the prison’s day-to-day functioning, but in terms of recidivism and failed reintegration, it comes at a high cost. The only means of definitively stopping this pursuit of enormity is to opt for smaller prisons. There needs to be a maximum number of prisoners for each staff member; otherwise, it’s unmanageable. The smaller the institution is, the less tempted we are to cram in ever more prisoners within its walls and the more a personalised bond can be formed between prisoners, staff and external contributors. Everyone then feels more readily acknowledged as a unique individual.

Smaller prisons can be introduced more easily into the urban fabric, thus restoring access to city services, to more potential external contributors and to the job market.

What use is a day placement centre on the outskirts of town if potential jobs are much too far away? This returns prisoners to a symbolic role in the city. Once again, the enormity of prisons and thus their inevitable distance from the city centre constitute, to my mind, a disaster. It’s why I remain sceptical of proposals for detention “villages” that would house nearly 1,200 prisoners. This is the case for the “detention village” of Haren in Belgium, which is a forty-minute journey by public transport from Brussels Central Station (including one connection and an eight-minute walk). I fear that this will further complicate matters for the entire penitentiary community.

In short, our view of incarceration has yet to be separated from religion. We still believe in the myth that incarceration is a form of retreat that will save the world: we see prisoners as monks in their cells who find meaning in their lives within the confines of the monastery’s fences. But life in detention isn’t like that at all! On the one hand, most prisoners have not chosen to be imprisoned nor, for that matter, where they are imprisoned. On the other hand, monks make a voluntary choice to retreat from the world and join a chosen community, to rest silently in the sight of God, to pray for the planet and its inhabitants, and - we often forget this - to receive numerous visitors, whereas prisoners try first and foremost to survive this experience and to pass the time as best they can without being crushed by the mass of other convicts and ground down by this collective organisation.
Some prisons, which are open but remote (Casabianda in Corsica comes to mind) function because they accommodate a very specific population (persons convicted of sexual offences) that is less likely to attempt to escape and is not very dangerous in detention. When institutions are of a manageable size, with few prisoners, and located near cities, personalised bonds can absolutely be formed and the experience of retreat can be endured without being cut off from everything. Punta de Rieles, for example, in the suburbs of Montevideo, Uruguay, demonstrates that institutions would be well-advised to remain open to life, especially economic life, in the city.