Éric: “It was nothing like imprisonment.”

Éric was imprisoned for 19 years. Is the lockdown a second imprisonment?

// A series of testimonials: In between walls (5/6)

Do the walls feel the same? They have spent months, years, even decades, in prison. Lack of space, restricted movement, idleness, inspections: these familiar rudiments have re-emerged during the lockdown. For some, it has felt like a return to prison with its routine and operations. They insist they were trained for this. But the lockdown was not prison, and they explain the difference. Prison Insider has brought out six narratives of former prisoners. Six perspectives on the lockdown and imprisonment.

55-year-old Éric spent 19 years in prison.

The prison was self-referential.

I AM indifferent towards the lockdown—this much I know. According to me, it has absolutely nothing to do with imprisonment. Of course, the environment matters. I was isolating in the Cévennes range where there are some outdoor possibilities. You’d much rather be in the woods, on a hiking trail, or at work than in a 20x20 room with four or five people.

But even isolating in a constricted space feels nothing like imprisonment. The lockdown only became synonymous with imprisonment when people who are unused to limitations on their mobility suddenly found themselves constrained.

Quarantining comes without the issues of sentencing, conviction, or judicial institutionalization.

Prisons are places of punishment. You are locked away, period. You have no allowances, and none of your ploys will fetch you two hours instead of one¹. You can only hope for a remission that will trim your sentence by a few months.

Then there’s the view. I remember every single one from my cells. With a couple of exceptions, they all overlooked the perimeter wall. The most striking of them all was from the array of windows in Muret Detention Centre that all afforded a view of the walkways and the buildings in the facility. I thereby discovered a new expression of confinement: the prison was self-referential. Now, prisons have slatted their windows, further obscuring the view of the outside world.

The lockdown in France allowed citizens to maximum one hour outside their homes. ↩

How do you hang in there?

Prisons within prisons

There are prisons within prisons: confinement unimaginable to those on the outside. Total isolation. One kind of isolation is sanctioned by the prison administration for the purpose of security, the operation of the facility, or the protection of a person; and the other kind is court-ordered. As for the latter, you’ll know when it begins, but never when it ends.

No books, no TV, no human contact. You’re in a cell all day with one hour of yard time, and you’re always alone.

This is typically the lot of specially managed prisoners. I was monitored for nine years. And during those nine years, I did not utter a word to anyone. I no longer knew what to say. What’s more, I realized I had served nine years in prison the day I walked out of it. My wits, my brain, and everything besides had deserted me. I didn’t remember how long I’d been in there.

How do you hang in there? You fight back with everything in you, stay fit, try to seize pencil and paper. But you aren’t entitled to send and receive mail. Day, night, nourished, famished—you lose track of these things.

At certain moments, the mind droops. It slackens its grip and everything goes hazy until the day you awaken in a yard, surrounded by people, not knowing what you’re doing there, and then, it’s over.

I was overcome by suicidal thoughts, but how was I to kill myself? When in isolation, you don’t get a knife, or even a fork. Hurling myself against the wall and shattering my skull seemed like the only alternative. I have never fully understood how, after years of loneliness and inactivity, oblivious of one’s whereabouts, one retains the wherewithal to look to the future. Little by little, life simply gained the upper hand. Human beings are capable of so much! They are way more resilient than they know.

Interview by Margot Hemmerich.Translated by Susanna Correya.