France: for moral sociology in prison

Corinne Rostaing. It’s difficult to sum up in just a few sentences. The prison experience leaves a lasting impression on incarcerated people. Imprisonment is a whole experience: it subjects prisoners to bureaucratic management, leaves them reliant on staff and places them in another world, a world that is fake, suspicious, not mixed, and cut off from the Internet, without any privacy. It’s above all a specific moral ordeal that forces people to manage their deviant identity with respect to their loved ones, fellow prisoners, victims and society. It’s a question of analysing the economic, social and moral costs of incarceration. The prison institution generates degradation. Degrading people means condemning them to loss of dignity, which is a result of harsh prison conditions. The worst conditions are reserved for those held on remand or with short sentences.

There’s also the empty meaning of the sentence: prison is a form of custodianship without any real positive counterpart, and it does everything to prevent people from taking action.

In this book, I analyse three concurrent processes that lead to degradation: the process of tainting, in reference to anthropologist Mary Douglas; the process of delegating the dirty work, in reference to Everett Hughes; and the process of stigmatization, in reference to Erving Goffman. This stigmatization is long-lasting and goes well beyond incarceration. It’s also contagious and affects loved ones.

PI. You’ve been working on prisons for 30 years, and France has been condemned about 15 times by the ECHR. Is history doomed to repeat itself? Are there any reasons for hope?

CR. Cynically, we could say that these condemnations show that the law can now prevail over the prison world, which wasn’t the case prior to 1990. The law is gradually taking its place and making progress, even if there’s still lots of work to be done in terms of labour law or privacy, for instance. Claire de Galembert and I coordinated an issue of the journal Droit et société that questions whether or not prison can be changed by the law. Since you ask, I remain optimistic, otherwise I wouldn’t have written an essay that suggests introducing a new field, moral sociology in prison, which analyses prison missions and not just official ones, for example, but rather the way in which they’re embodied in practices.

These missions are so contradictory that prisons can’t fulfil them, especially with so few resources. Therefore, the so-called reintegration mission—which nevertheless legitimises prison sentences—is one of those “necessary fictions” that staff can’t renounce without their work becoming meaningless.

The staff are not fooled, they are worn out. This mission is objectively residual when there are six times more supervisors than social workers, the latter of which are also involved in the open environment.

Similarly, how can we imagine preparing inmates to reintegrate into society? Through activities that are most often occupations, which are rarely aligned with prisoners’ trajectories.

Prison organization is very defensive: security is its main mission and consists of preventing escapes. Prisons are turned inwards, and the thought of leaving becomes unthinkable. We forget that 200 people are released each day. Other countries have chosen to look at the relationship between prison and society differently, to reimagine the way in which prisoners live in prison in order to help them rebuild their lives. I also mention the case of other degrading institutions that have managed to change and have even changed their name: the asylum has become a psychiatric hospital, more similar to the general hospital and open to the city. Prisons can change, provided that the institution’s essence is transformed and its organization is profoundly changed. This will only be possible if we decide to make it possible.

CR. Just like in my book, it’s important for me to evoke how prison for punishment came about at the time of the Revolution. Prison became an institution and that took time. Today, it seems difficult for us to imagine that prison sentences could have given so much hope: prison was seen as a more fair, egalitarian sentence, and above all, it was supposed to enable the transformation of offenders. It was even seen as a temporary punishment at the time, meant to disappear when the development of education had done its job. Prison is actually the opposite of democracy. As Michelle Perrot writes, in inventing freedom, the revolution gave birth to its opposite. Prison is the deprivation of freedom, which should justify its moderate use, limited to the most serious cases. However, the prison population continues to rise: 26,000 in 1975; 56,000 in 1995; 70,000 in 2017. And above all, the overcrowding situation isn’t exceptional, it’s chronic: despite the construction of thousands more prison cells to limit overcrowding, the issue remains, inexorably linked to security policies.

The growth of the prison population isn’t linked to a sharp rise in offences or crimes, whose numbers actually tend to decrease, but to the penalization of new offences related to traffic, drugs or terrorism.

It must therefore be explained, again and again, that increasing prison capacities only worsens the situation. Other models exist in neighbouring countries, whose prison populations have decreased thanks to the decriminalization of certain offences, less recourse to short sentences, early release, etc. Luckily, in a democracy, we can demonstrate and vote to change this, to limit its use, so that prison is no longer seen as the solution. It is up to us to stay informed on what happens inside, so that we can all decide what we want to do with our prisons in the 21st century.